Replay - Walter Cavinaw

# Replay * Author: [Tristan Donovan](https://www.amazon.com/Tristan-Donovan/e/B005BKG3VE/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) * ASIN: B003VRZH2U * Pages: 517 pages * Publication: July 13, 2010 * Publisher: Yellow Ant (July 13, 2010) * Reference: [[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003VRZH2U]] * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U) --- Finally, a note on terminology. I’ve used the term ‘video game’ throughout this book with the occasional use of ‘game’ when there is no risk of confusion with other forms of game such as board games. I chose video game in preference to other terms for several reasons: it remains in every day use, unlike TV game or electronic game; it is broad enough to encompass the entire medium unlike ‘computer game’, which would exclude games, such as Atari’s Pong, that did not use microprocessors; and terms such as ‘interactive entertainment’, while more accurate, have failed to catch on despite repeated attempts over the years. — location: [73](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=73)Useful to look at the history of use cases going back a few decades on google ngram to see if there are cycles. --- Like the Chess programmers, Samuel wanted to create a Checkers game that could defeat a human player. He completed his first Checkers game in 1952 on an IBM 701; the first commercial computer created by the company, and would spend the next two decades refining it. By 1955 he had developed a version that could learn from its mistakes that caused IBM’s share price to leap 15 points when it was shown on US television and by 1961 Samuel’s programme was defeating US Checkers champions. — location: [161](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=161) --- The technological breakthroughs made during the Second World War had brought down the cost of manufacturing TV sets and US consumers now had money to burn after years of austerity. In 1946 just 0.5 per cent of households owned a television. By 1950 this proportion had soared to 9 per cent and by the end of the decade there was a television in almost 90 per cent of US homes. — location: [168](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=168) --- In 1947, the pioneering TV network Dumont became first to try and explore the idea of allowing people to play games on their TV sets. Two of the company’s employees – Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann – came up with the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. — location: [173](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=173) --- By the end of 1967 the Brown Box was nearing completion and had attracted the interest of TelePrompter Corporation, a cable TV company that saw it during a visit to Sanders. Sanders’ position as a military contractor meant it couldn’t just start making Baer’s toy, so the hope was that TelePrompter would buy the rights to produce it. But after two months of talks, cash-flow problems at TelePrompter resulted in the talks being abandoned. And since neither Baer nor Sanders had any idea who else might want to buy the rights, the Brown Box was left to gather dust. — location: [299](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=299) --- And it was during one of these Spacewar! sessions in 1966 that Tuck remarked that if only they could make a coin-operated version of the game they would get rich. With computers still hugely expensive and large, the idea was little more than a daydream. But then, in 1969, the Digital Equipment Corporation unveiled the $20,000 PDP-11. At that price, Pitts thought, a coin-op version of Spacewar! might be possible: “I called Hugh up and said we could now build one of these things.” — location: [350](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=350) --- After graduating in 1968, Bushnell became an engineer for Ampex Corporation, a company best known for its breakthroughs in audio and video recording technology. While working there he read about the Data General Nova, a computer that cost $3,995, and immediately thought again of Spacewar!. — location: [376](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=376) --- A few weeks later, in September 1971, Galaxy Game, the first coin-operated video game, made its debut at the Tresidder Union. From the moment it was switched on the machine attracted a crowd. “We had people 10-deep, packed around the machine trying to look over each other to watch the guys play the game,” said Pitts. The generous approach to charging meant Galaxy Game earned nowhere near enough to justify its cost, but the game’s popularity encouraged Pitts and Tuck to persevere. — location: [429](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=429) --- In November 1971, two months after the launch of Galaxy Game, the first Computer Space machine was installed at the Dutch Goose bar near the Stanford University campus. Its black and white TV screen sat encased in colourful and curvy fibreglass that could have come straight from the set of the 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella. Computer Space screamed the future and to Bushnell’s delight the drinkers at the Dutch Goose seemed to like it. “The Dutch Goose was the first location where we tested Computer Space and it did fantastically well. What we didn’t realise is that it had a very high percentage of college students,” said Bushnell. With the initial test having gone well, Nutting Associates pushed ahead with the production of Computer Space hoping to woo arcade operators with its revolutionary technology and lack of moving parts.[3] Nutting Associates produced more than 1,500 Computer Space units expecting a smash hit, but the reaction away from student bars proved less favourable. “When we put it in a few working man’s beer bars it did no money,” said Bushnell. “It didn’t do anything because it was too complex.” — location: [443](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=443) --- Sanders demoed the Brown Box to the television manufacturers who dominated the US market at the time: General Electric; Magnavox; Motorola; Philco; RCA; and Sylvania. “When we demonstrated to these companies in ’69 everyone of them went ‘that’s great’, but nobody would offer a dime except RCA and when we worked out the agreement we said we couldn’t live with that and walked away,” said Baer. — location: [483](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=483) --- In January 1971, Magnavox signed a preliminary deal with Sanders and began work on turning the Brown Box into a marketable product. Magnavox redesigned the casing for the machine and briefly renamed it the Skill-O-Vision before settling on the Odyssey. — location: [489](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=489) --- The Brown Box’s collection of seven games was built up to 12 titles including the maze-chase game Cat & Mouse, an educational title called States! and the Ping-Pong game developed back in 1967. The rifle game that convinced Sanders to keep the project alive became the sold-separately Shooting Gallery add-on for the Odyssey. — location: [491](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=491) --- Magnavox then decided to add paper money, playing cards and poker chips to enhance the games and plastic overlays that attached to the TV screen to make up for the Odyssey’s primitive visuals. And with so much packed in with the game console, the $19.95 price tag Baer originally hoped for became $99.95. Baer was appalled: “I saw the box and out comes 10,000 playing cards, paper money and all this crap. I just knew nobody’s ever going to use this stuff.” With the enhancements in place Magnavox set a launch date of August 1972 for the world’s first games console, — location: [495](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=495) --- Dabney and Bushnell agreed to invest $250 each in the company to incorporate it only to find that another company already had the Syzygy name. Bushnell turned to his favourite game – the Japanese board game Go – for inspiration and suggested the company’s new name should be Atari, a term from Go — location: [508](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=508) --- similar to check in Chess. Dabney agreed and on 27th June 1972 Atari Incorporated was born. — location: [510](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=510) --- The customers at Andy Capp’s had gone crazy for Pong, people had even begun queuing outside the bar waiting for it to open just so they could play the game. — location: [531](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=531) --- With options drying up, Atari decided to make the game itself. It was a big leap for the young firm: it had next-to-no money, no production line and no links with arcade machine distributors. Bushnell was nervous about the move but figured the game’s simple design meant it would be easy to build. Atari gambled everything on its first run of Pong machines. “Our first run was 11 units, which was 100 per cent of the money that we had,” said Bushnell. Each machine cost $280 to make but sold for $900. — location: [539](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=539) --- By now word about Pong had spread through the arcade business. “We had distributors all over the country who were just screaming for the units,” said Bushnell. Atari needed a proper production line fast if it was going to meet the soaring demand for Pong, but lacked the cash needed to set up a proper manufacturing facility. So Bushnell headed to the banks to ask for a credit facility. The banks were, however, disinterested – put off by Bushnell’s long hair and the dubious image of the amusements business, which had become linked in the public mind with gangsters and gambling. — location: [547](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=547) --- So when Bushnell asked banks for a loan to help build his amusements machine business, they showed him the door. Eventually Bushnell persuaded the bank Wells Fargo to lend Atari $50,000 on the back of an order for 150 Pong machines. It was less than Atari had hoped for, but enough to get a production line going. — location: [563](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=563) --- Pong soon went global. In Japan, Taito, an amusements manufacturer built off the back of jukeboxes, peanut vending machines and crane games, looked at Pong and produced Elepong – the first Japanese arcade game. French billiards table makers René Pierre jumped on the Pong bandwagon with Smatch and in Italy, Bologna-based pinball company Zaccaria entered the digital age with TV Joker, a Pong copy produced under licence from Atari. “In 1972, Pong arrived in Italy and it was a great success,” — location: [580](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=580) --- By September 1974 an estimated 100,000 coin-operated video games were in operation across the US, raking in around $250 million a year. For the amusements business, long shamed by being connected to gambling and gangsters, the video game offered a new start, attracting a new demographic to the arcades. “For years, our games – pinballs, shuffle alley, pool – appealed mainly to, you know, the labouring class. Now with the video games you have a broader patronage,” Howard Robinson, the manager of an Atlanta coin-op distributor, told The Ledger newspaper in September 1974. “A lot of lounges will take a video game that never would have let a pinball machine in the door.” — location: [598](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=598)expanding market in the 70s --- It should be noted that at this time, and throughout most of the 1970s, ‘TV games’ was the more common term. The term ‘video game’ eventually came to the fore later in the 1970s and the term ‘TV game’ faded away in the early 1980s. ‘Computer games’ were also sometimes talked about but, since most video games did not use microprocessors before the late 1970s, it’s a misleading term. As Ralph Baer put it: “People began calling them computer games. They weren’t. There were no computers!” — location: [615](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=615)worth checking for these terms on google ngram viewer --- firms. In the early 1960s, Ikeda Hayato, the Japanese prime minister who played a crucial role in the nation’s post-Second World War economic success, had introduced laws that restricted the activities of foreign companies in a bid to protect Japanese businesses. On top of this, Japanese coin-op distributors refused to work with the cocky American business. — location: [694](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=694)Comparable to china today? --- Atari Japan was sold to Nakamura Manufacturing, a Japanese coin-op manufacturer and distributor formed in 1955 by Masaya Nakamura that would rename itself Namco in 1977. — location: [715](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=715) --- But the implications of the microchip for video games did not end there. As the mid-1970s turned in the late 1970s, the arrival of a new type of microchip – the microprocessor – would reshape not just the video game business but also the very nature of what and how people played.[4] — location: [819](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=819) --- [3]. Invented in the late 1950s, integrated circuits – also called microchips – allowed the discrete components that used to form electronic circuits to be shrunk and flattened onto a silicon chip. The result was a massive breakthrough in electronics. Integrated circuits were not only much smaller but were easy to mass produce (the chips could essentially be printed en masse), used less electricity and were more reliable. — location: [832](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=832) --- a result. Bally asked Dave Nutting Associates to redesign the game using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. Using a microprocessor turned the video game development process on its head. No longer would engineers armed with soldering irons build games out of hardware. Instead computer programmers would write the game in software that told the flexible hardware of microprocessors how the hardware should work. "TTL logic was a hard-wired system, to make a change in game play meant redoing the circuit. Once we established the microprocessor hardware system all game logic was done in software,” said Nutting. — location: [900](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=900) --- Bally’s RAM order was a major purchase. Nutting estimated it swallowed up around 60 per cent of the memory chips available in the world at the time. Wolverton needn’t have worried though. Gun Fight became a popular arcade game and soon every video game manufacturer was looking at how they could use microprocessors in their products, Nishikado included: “Quite frankly I thought the play of Gun Fight was not really good and in Japan my version of Western Gun was better received. But I was very impressed with the use of the microprocessor technology and couldn’t wait to learn this skill. I started analysing the game as soon as I could.” The days of TTL video games were finished. — location: [916](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=916) --- There was no underlying motivation or thoughts in creating the first controversial video game. It was created out of necessity and defence of our own product licensing.” The media and public, however, didn’t agree and Death Race provoked the first major moral panic over the content of a video game. — location: [935](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=935) --- With Bushnell keen to see Breakout put into production, Bristow handed the job of developing the game to Steve Jobs, a young hippy who had taken a technician’s job at Atari so he could earn enough money to — location: [967](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=967) --- Jobs asked his friend Steve Wozniak for help, offering to give him half of the bonus payment. Wozniak, a technical genius who worked for the business technology firm Hewlett Packard, agreed. “Wozniak spent his evenings working on a prototype for Breakout and he delivered a very compact design,” said Bristow. Wozniak slashed the number of integrated circuits in half and netted Jobs a bonus worth several thousand dollars. — location: [973](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=973) --- Despite its user-unfriendliness, thousands of computer hobbyists bought an Altair and set about building hardware and writing software for the system, which was powered by the same microprocessor used in Gun Fight. Among them were Paul Allen and Bill Gates who wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair and formed Microsoft to sell it. — location: [998](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=998) --- Shepperd, meanwhile, was making games for the system. “I designed and built a new video subsystem integrated into the Altair,” he said. “I got it working and coded up a few very simple games. — location: [1000](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1000) --- “We had a terminal that printed at 30 characters per second on paper 80 characters wide. It would print a new line every two seconds. It was so fast it took our breath away. When you’ve never seen it before it’s like magic – speed doesn’t enter into it.” This lack of speed, however, ruled out the creation of action games similar to those in the arcades. Instead, computer programmers had little choice but to make turn-based games. The vast majority of these games were incredibly crude. — location: [1078](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1078)Similar to todays blockchain gaming world where games are crude because pf tech --- Soon players could take part in Wild West shoot outs in Highnoon, take command of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek, manage virtual cities in The Sumer Game, search for monsters that lurked within digital caves in Hunt the Wumpus and try to land an Apollo Lunar Module on the moon in Lunar. The action in all these games took place turn by turn, with the text describing the outcomes of each player decision pecked out slowly on teleprinters. — location: [1085](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1085) --- To make the game easy for his children to play he decided that, like Eliza, it should let players use everyday English and got the game to recognise a small number of two-word verb-noun commands such as ‘go north’ or ‘get treasure’. Crowther hoped this ‘natural language’ approach would make the game less intimidating to non-computer users. — location: [1111](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1111) --- The result, Adventure, was a giant leap forward for text games. While Hunt the Wumpus let people explore a virtual cave and Highnoon had described in-game events in text, none had used writing to try and create a world in the mind of players or let them interact with it using plain English. Yet while his daughters loved the game, Crowther thought it was nothing special. After completing Adventure in 1976, he left it on the computer system at work and headed to Alaska for a holiday. — location: [1115](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1115) --- When Thompson ended up leaving NASA Ames to join MIT’s Dynamic Modelling team in early 1974, he brought Maze with him. “Maze was based on a graphical maze-running game, Greg had brought from NASA Ames. We decided it would be much more fun if multiple people could play it and shoot each other,” Lebling said. The pair reworked Maze again so that up to eight people could play it at once. They created computer-controlled ‘robot’ players to make up the numbers when there weren’t enough real players and let players send each other text messages during while playing. — location: [1162](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1162) --- “We actually played it a few times with colleagues on the West Coast, though ARPAnet was rather slow and the lag was horrible. Maze became so popular that the management of our group tried to suppress it,” said Lebling. — location: [1170](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1170) --- He showed the prototype to his friend Steve Jobs, who had just returned from his trip to India. Jobs suggested they form a company to sell it to other computer enthusiasts and on 1st April 1976 they formed Apple Computer. The company produced more than 150 hand-made Apple Is but, by the time it went on sale in the summer of 1976, Wozniak was already close to completing work on a better computer that could appeal to a wider audience: the Apple II. — location: [1219](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1219) --- Being the canny businessman he was, Jobs saw that the Apple II was a machine that would appeal to more than just technically minded computer geeks and started searching for an investor who could help put it on the shop shelves throughout the US. — location: [1230](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1230) --- By the time the Apple II finally started rolling off the production line, however, Commodore had already got its home computer on the market. The $599 Commodore PET was an all-in-one system that fused keyboard, monitor, tape cassette player and computer together in curvy beige plastic. Despite its monochrome visuals, the PET attracted $3 million of pre-orders - enough to make it an instant success. — location: [1243](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1243) --- By 1981 the Apple II had claimed 23 per cent of the US home computer market compared to Tandy’s 16 per cent and Commodore’s 10 per cent. — location: [1248](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1248) --- But while most people agreed computers were the future, few had any idea what households would do with them. — location: [1250](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1250)Similr to the blockchain space today --- It turned out that early home computers would be used almost exclusively for one purpose alone: playing video games. — location: [1254](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1254)Again same as blockchain today --- Adams was not alone. Across the US, business-naive computer enthusiasts were beginning to write games they hoped to sell to the growing ranks of home computer owners. Few had any idea they were building an industry. They copied their games onto cassette tapes or 5.25-inch floppy disks on their own computers. — location: [1285](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1285) --- Unlike Adams and Infocom, Roberta decided that text alone would not do her game justice and insisted Ken allowed her to include black and white line drawings that illustrated each location alongside the text, despite the memory limitations of the Apple II. This refusal to bend to the technology at a time when most game makers built their creations around their programming skills would come to define Roberta’s approach to game design. — location: [1318](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1318) --- Text adventures, however, were not the only games making a splash with home computer users. Flight simulators also made the transition. Flight simulations had always lived a double life somewhere between training and entertainment. — location: [1334](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1334) --- One of these users was Bruce Artwick, a physics student and pilot. When the first home computers arrived Artwick believed other amateur pilots would jump at the chance to have a flight sim in their own home. He formed his own software company SubLogic and wrote Flight Simulator, the first home computer flight sim, which debuted on the Apple II in early 1978. Flight Simulator sought to replicate reality as closely as the Apple II could, using real-life physics and offering a wide range of planes, from crop dusters through to fighter jets, to fly. — location: [1347](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1347) --- Recreations of tabletop war games were another regular sight in the early days of home computers. As with Dungeons & Dragons, the motivation behind transferring these to computers was mathematical. Tabletop war games had evolved out of Kriegsspiel, a game created for the Prussian army in the 18th century as a military training aid for its officers. Kriegsspiel became a national obsession. Sets with detailed figurines of soldiers were sent to every military division, the Kaiser attended tournaments and the original 60-page rulebook was later enhanced with data from real conflicts. When Prussia won the Six Weeks War against Austria in 1866 and defeated France in 1870’s Franco-Prussian War, the country thanked Kriegsspiel for its victories. Impressed, rival nations quickly adopted the game including Japan, which credited its success in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 to Kriegsspiel. — location: [1354](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1354) --- Crawford’s answer to the lack of vision exercised by the early war game creators was Tanktics, a tank versus tank war game he created in 1977 on a IBM 1130 computer at his workplace - the University of California. “I was playing board war games and I was acutely aware of the absence of the fog of war, which I consider to be crucial to simulation of warfare,” he said.[4] “I considered that computers could solve the problem. I don’t think people fully appreciated just how big a leap this was. Most had become accustomed to the absence of fog of war and took full knowledge for granted. They didn’t like the idea of fog of war.” — location: [1372](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1372) --- Eastern Front 1941 introduced the idea of real-time conflict into the war game. Tabletop war games were turn based and most computer war games had blindly followed suit. — location: [1381](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1381) --- His 1980 follow-up to Alakabeth, Ultima: The First Age of Darkness became an even bigger success, selling around 50,000 copies, but Garriott soon had competition. In 1981 a company called Sir Tech released a rival role-playing game called Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord that offered better graphics and had players leading a party of adventurers — location: [1440](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1440) --- rather than the lone hero of Garriott’s games. It outsold Garriott’s game by more than two to one, and soon the competition between role-playing game makers became intense as they tried to outdo each other with new features. — location: [1444](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1444) --- By the time Ultima III: Exodus arrived in 1983, home computer game publishing was starting to look like a proper business. The number of computer owners had grown massively and so had the number of games being released. — location: [1452](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1452) --- Yet as the 1980s dawned, no-one was paying much attention to the games packaged in Ziploc bags on computer store shelves as they were too busy looking at the arcades and the new generation of game consoles that were about to send the US video game crazy. — location: [1455](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1455) --- Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was well aware of the problem: “We were getting ready to do the 2600, which required a lot of cash and we just didn’t have a lot of cash.” — location: [1498](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1498) --- Then, as it started examining alternatives, Atari received the news it feared most: another company had come up with exactly the same idea and was close to launching its system. That company was Fairchild Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley electronics component manufacturer had intended to use its new F8 microprocessor as the basis of its console: the Fairchild Channel F. — location: [1500](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1500) --- Lawson sold his game to a company called Major Manufacturing who tested it out on the customers of a pizza parlour in Campbell, California.[1] “Fairchild heard I was doing it and said ‘look we have a concept: we’d like to go into games ourselves’,” said Lawson. Like many other microchip manufacturers in the 1970s, Fairchild had decided to move into the consumer electronics market. “The semiconductor industry would put more and more into an integrated circuit and, when you do that, you get to a point where the only thing that’s left to do is put power into it,” said Lawson. “They finally went ‘to heck with this’. Why should they do all this engineering, all this development, so someone else can turn around and put it in a case?” — location: [1513](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1513)Semiconductor companies getting into gaming. Similar to Nvidia today? --- Fairchild did not have the market to itself for long, however. Shortly after the Channel F reached the shops, TV set manufacturer RCA announced it was going to release its own cartridge-based console in early 1977: the RCA Studio II. — location: [1539](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1539) --- Warner decided to buy Atari and in October 1976 paid $28 million for the company, turning Bushnell into a multi-millionaire in the process. — location: [1550](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1550) --- But even though the opposition crumbled, sales of the 2600 in Christmas 1977 were a disappointment. Manufacturing delays meant few of the consoles reached the shelves in time for Christmas and only a few hundred thousand 2600s had been sold by early 1978 — location: [1569](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1569) --- Matters were not helped by the excitement surrounding a new type of video game: the handheld electronic game. — location: [1573](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1573) --- In 1977 it was these, not the new generation of video game consoles, that were topping Christmas lists across the US. Toy company Mattel kickstarted the handheld games craze in 1976 when one of its marketing directors – Michael Katz – came up with the idea for a portable electronic game. “It was the mid-’70s – a time when pocket calculators were a new product and were getting smaller and smaller and less expensive,” said Katz. "Everyone had to have a little handheld calculator. I said to Richard Channing, Mattel’s director of preliminary design: ‘Can you design a new type of game that uses LED technology similar to that in a calculator but that could be portable, battery powered and the size of a handheld calculator?’ He went away and came back with the prototype of what was the first handheld game – an obstacle avoidance game where LEDs were coming down at you. You were at the bottom of the screen and had to try and avoid them and make your way to the top.” — location: [1574](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1574) --- Annoyed and angry at what he saw as stupidity on Warner’s part, Bushnell went into the meeting with fire in his belly. “The Warner board, and Manny particularly, just didn’t want to hear the fact that the 2600 was obsolete and I didn’t choose my words very well. I said: ‘The 2600 is obsolete. It’s a piece of shit’.” — location: [1658](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1658)Warner comms taking over the strategic direction of Atari was probably a factor in its inability to keep up with the fast changing industry. --- The change from Bushnell to Kassar was dramatic, said Atari coin-op engineer Howard Delman: “Nolan understood the value of his engineers. He knew that we were the engine propelling the company. We were like kids in a candy store playing with fabulous technologies and doing things that no-one had ever done before. Under Warner and Kassar, the attitude changed significantly. The new engine propelling Atari was the marketing department and profit became the most important goal.” Not that this stopped the coin-op division from carrying the torch for Bushnell’s vision of Atari as a company of fun. “Apple were next door to us and one night some of our guys went over and painted worms on the big Apple sign. The next day Steve Jobs and all them were all upset about it,” said Anglin. “It was like ‘hey come on guys, have a sense of humor’.” — location: [1688](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1688) --- Like the invaders within its virtual world, Space Invaders conquered Japan within weeks of its launch in July 1978. Children, teenagers and adults alike flocked to the arcades to join the battle against the alien threat. Pachinko parlours, bowling alleys and even grocery stores reinvented themselves as dedicated Space Invaders arcades. Cafés swapped their tables for Space Invaders cocktail cabinets. Novelty pop act Funny Stuff took the invasion onto the airwaves with Disco Space Invaders, a hit single backed with dance moves inspired by the jerky movements of Nishikado’s aliens. Within three months of its launch, Space Invaders had gobbled up so many ¥100 coins it brought Japan to a standstill, preventing people from buying subway tickets or using public telephone boxes. A panicked Bank of Japan responded by ordering an investigation of Taito, which would sell more than 100,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan alone. Nishikado, however, paid little attention to the fuss his game was causing: “I don’t remember being particularly happy or pleased at the time. I was more concerned with the low quality of the hardware for this game and was concentrating my efforts on creating better hardware.” — location: [1759](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1759) --- The impact of Space Invaders could also be seen in the US sales figures for coin-op games. In 1978 the business generated revenues of $472 million, slightly down on the previous year’s $551 million. In 1979 the figure had more than tripled to $1,333 million – with Space Invaders accounting for a large proportion of that total. — location: [1778](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1778) --- Bally was determined to make a profit on every console sold. “What really killed us was being more expensive – like double what the VCS went for,” said Fenton. The citizens of New Jersey also delivered the console an unintentional blow, said Dave Nutting. In 1978 the state’s voters backed a law allowing casino gambling in Atlantic City. The vote turned the East Coast city into a new Las Vegas and for Bally, which also made fruit machines, it was a major business opportunity. “Bill O’Donnell was the president of Bally and his dream was for Bally to get into owning and operating casinos,” said Nutting. “He now had the financial resources, from Bally’s incredible success in the commercial video game market, and now had the place. Bally lost interest in pursuing the consumer market and decided to abandon the project.” The Professional Arcade was sold off to a group of small businessmen who relaunched it as the Astrocade only to watch it fade into oblivion. — location: [1788](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1788) --- The only support Averett got was technical help from his wife and criticism from the kids in his neighbourhood, who he used as play testers. “It was as brutal as you might imagine – kids don’t mince words,” he said. The Odyssey2 would eventually crawl past the million sales mark and did well in Europe where Philips released it as the Videopac G7000, but the lack of corporate support ensured the console never came close to matching the sales of the VCS. — location: [1824](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1824) --- But just as Mattel was gearing up for its assault on Atari, Manny Gerard had a brainwave. “The single best thing I ever did at Atari was go over to the coin-op building one day in 1979,” said Gerard. “They had a coin-op version of Space Invaders and they’re all playing it. I walked back across the street to Kassar’s office and I said ‘I’ll tell you what I want Ray – take the fucking Space Invaders, send it up to consumer engineering, engineer it for the 2600 and licence the name, and if you can’t licence the name steal the game play’. He looked at me and said ‘oh my god, why didn’t I think of that?’. I said ‘Because you’re too busy running the company’.” Atari moved quickly, bought the rights off Taito and, in January 1980, released Space Invaders on the 2600. Any question marks about Atari’s hold on the console market melted away. “It was the Space Invaders cart that blew the 2600 to the Moon,” said Gerard. — location: [1837](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1837) --- They interviewed fresh-faced game designers who boasted about how they had spent royalty cheques and bonus payments worth tens of thousands of dollars on a celebrity lifestyle of fast cars and flash pads. And they wrote about the new ‘pinball wizards’ – the hot-shot players who were the masters of the arcades. — location: [1879](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1879) --- Everyone wanted a piece of video games, from the movers and shakers of Washington D.C. to the studio bosses of Hollywood. Star Wars director George Lucas set about forming a games division at his company Lucasfilm. Walt Disney Pictures sought to cash in with Tron, a film about a man trapped inside a video game that was touted as a summer blockbuster. — location: [1884](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1884) --- Quaker Oats, Parker Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Thorn EMI formed video game divisions. McDonald’s started serving Atari-themed burger meals where “thanks to McDonald’s and Atari, the old-fashioned TV dinner is being replaced by an exciting video-dinner that could make you a winner”. And if a burger, fries and shake were too much, you could snack on a packet of Universal Foods’ Pretzel Invaders. In Washington D.C., a group of young Democrats – including future presidential candidate Al Gore – became known as the Atari Democrats for their support for giving tax breaks to high-tech industries rather than older manufacturing industries such as steel and cars. — location: [1888](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=1888) --- CBS pushed Buckner & Garcia to make a whole album of songs about video games as quickly as possible to capitalise the success of their novelty single. — location: [2076](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2076) --- The album sold nearly a million copies and made Buckner & Garcia stars of the video game boom. They appeared on TV shows such as the Dick Clark-presented chart show American Bandstand and a special Pac-Man Fever day on MTV, an exciting new TV channel dedicated to music videos that had started broadcasting in August 1981. — location: [2088](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2088) --- Atari, more by fluke than design, had found itself the holder of the exclusive rights to make Pac-Man on home consoles and computers thanks to a $1 million deal signed in 1978 when Namco had no hit games to its name. Atari couldn’t believe its luck. For a relative pittance the company had gained control of the biggest game of the past decade. In April 1982, Pac-Man arrived on the VCS 2600 sending sales of the console through the roof. — location: [2092](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2092) --- The Pac-Man cartridge confirmed the 2600’s utter dominance of the home games market. The 2600’s lead over its nearest rival, the Mattel Intellivision, was now approaching 20 million units. — location: [2099](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2099) --- Atari had pretty much stopped worrying about rival consoles, it was now more concerned about the video game companies that had started releasing 2600 games to cash in on the captive audience Atari had built up with its console. — location: [2101](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2101) --- We noticed that four of the designers in a department of 30 were responsible for over 60 per cent of sales. — location: [2113](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2113) --- Furious at Kassar’s dismissal of their arguments, the four quit Atari a few days later. With help from former music industry executive Jim Levy and $750,000 of venture capital investment the four rebels formed Activision, a company that would create and publish games for the 2600. — location: [2121](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2121) --- Adventure’s concealed message was one of the earliest ‘easter eggs’ – a hidden secret within a video game for players who search carefully enough to discover them. — location: [2155](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2155) --- In 1981 Activision had achieved sales of $6.3 million, in 1982 this soared to $66 million. — location: [2175](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VRZH2U&location=2175)