March 7, 2022 • 49 mins
From Pong to Elden Ring, video games have dominated the interactive entertainment world for over half a century. We explore gaming's humble beginnings in arcades and trace how games became a culture defining pastime. Featuring author Steven L. Kent and journalist Eddie Adlum.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, folks, It's hard to believe, but Ephemeral has been
on the air now or whatever the podcast equivalent terms,
for almost three years. In that time, our team has
continued to grow what for me has been a dream
come true. To that end, this and next episode you'll
be hearing from our producer, Max Williams, who heretofore has
(00:27):
been working with Trevor and me behind the scenes. You
might recognize him from Christmas Special Noel or as the
on Mike producer of Ridiculous History. Fun fact, Max is
also my little brother and frankly our family's expert on
video games. So without further ado, enjoy the episode. Ephemeral
(00:52):
is production of My Heart three D audio for full
exposure listen was that phones gaming as a pastime goes
back at least to ancient Greece, from Olympic tournaments to
bouts of Aristotelian logic. For millennia, humans have been fascinating
(01:14):
by the interplay of chance and skills. As games advanced
alongside technology, The twentieth century brought with it new spaces
dedicated to gaming. When I was a youngster, I fell
in love with the arcade business when I visited a
place called the Casino in the town of Rye, New York.
(01:35):
I come from the Bronx and we bicycled up there,
and I just loved the smell of the wood on
the floor, the games, the noises they made totally unlike
what we see today when you're going in an arcade
with the electronic noises beeping and screaming and all of
the interesting electronic aspects that define today's amusement king Back then,
(01:56):
it was all mechanical stuff. It ran an electric city,
of course in most cases, but not all. And we
had machines like Chicago coins hockey table when you batted
the ball back and forth underneath the glass, and recording
studios wherefore a quarter and a dime you could get
in there with your buddies and do anything you wanted,
(02:17):
to sing a proper song or maybe use some foul
language just to hear it played back in et cetera.
My name is Eddie adlum Um, the publisher of Replay Magazine,
which is a monthly trade journal. I've been covering that
industry for approximately fifty four years right now, and I
(02:42):
have continued to work in this field my whole life.
And he grew up loving arcades, but he never thought
he'd devote himself to them professionally. As it turns out,
he fell into the game's business almost by accident. As
the years went by, I graduated college. After a period
(03:02):
of time which look magazine, shoppening pencils, and then the
US Army, I answered an ad in the New York
Times for an editorial assistant. It was with cash Box Magazine,
now a defunct trade paper which largely centered on the
recording industry, with a small section in its back page
(03:24):
is devoted to the jukebox and games business. And they
told me they were looking for somebody to do the
pages in the back on the games business, and I
said I needed a job, but I've been doing it
ever since. We reached other Eddie to talk about video
in arcade games, but he reminded us that their history
(03:44):
went back further than most people think, and arcade is
not unique. The penny arcade, as they were originally called,
go back practically since the beginning of the twentieth century.
A common name would be playland. The common machine would
be a fortune teller or restraint testing thing that you
squeezed together but basically only find them in major cities
(04:06):
like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and so on. Up until
the these arcades might have been purely analog games like
ski ball or pinball. But with technology advancements in post
World War two America, we saw the rise of electro
mechanical games, and that brought a whole new level of
popularity to gaming. In the sixties, there were no video games.
(04:31):
There were electro mechanical games. There was pinball, but I
really stunk at pinball. But you had Chicago Motor Speedway,
which was this game where there was a screen that
had sort of a cartoon of cars on it, and
then there's a little plastic car and you tried to
steer that little plastic car to avoid the cars on
the screen. There was a game called Knife Bomber that
(04:54):
was very fond of where you looked for a little
head thing and you'd pressed button and I hope that
you tie named that the bomb hit different targets. These
games were very rudimentary. They were quarter gobblers. They were fun.
My name is Steven L. Kent. I'm the author of
the Ultimate History Video Games, Volume one and two. Been
(05:15):
playing games for a long time. Although it doesn't show
in my skill level. Although Stephen loved arcade gaming, he
says back in the sixties arcade games were not as
easy to find. There were pinball machines and electro mechanical
machines in bowling alleys. Those were pretty safe places to go.
(05:36):
Then there was pinball and electro mechanical machines. For instance,
if you went to Vegas or Taho, you might see
some of those in the hotels. Other than that, you
saw them in pool halls. And pool halls were actually
pretty spooky places to go. They were associated with vagrants
and tough guys um some crime. And then there were
(05:58):
arcades which were certainly associated with vagrancy and problems. Komy
Island is the classic one that you always hear and
they might smell like somebody and urinated just outside. Somebody
might have vomited. They were places you didn't necessarily want
to send your five year own. When you see arcade,
the young folks they have a very different view changed
(06:20):
with all the redemption games the game for you get
the tickets that you've been redeemed for a game. When
you say arcade to old folks, they think of a
room where cavern, where the lights are almost all out
except for maybe some neon lights on the wall. Music
is playing, maybe a juke box. She's got Benny Davis
(06:40):
eyes by Kim karn I have the Tiger. Most of
the light in the room is the low glow coming
from the arcade machines, and you can hear all those
iconic little lips and squeaks and things that the different
machines made, And people are making little rows of quarters
to say that they're reserving the next game. Eddie says,
(07:04):
there's a reason that kids like Stephen found our kids
so wonderful despite the grudginess. It's the poor man's country club,
whereas people with money could go to the literal country
club and play golf and blah blah blah. People who
are working class people or youngsters in high school could
get into a different realm in the head with the
(07:27):
lights of the machine. The challenge of trying to beat
it so you get to repeat play or extra innings
is just a nice way to recreate. The word recreation,
if it's pronounced properly, is recreated. Although it wasn't yet
available in ourcades, the first video game was being developed
(07:47):
behind the scenes in the nineteen fifties. You would have
to say that the inception of video games was with
Willie Higgins Boffel, who was working at the Cave in Labs.
It was a nuclear power facility, but they were having
an open house. He thought nothing could be more more
(08:09):
than an open house here, so he took it in
a selescope and he built an interactive game into it
called Tennis for two. Really, truly, you have to say
that's the inception. Tennis for two was literally just a
dot of light on a screen. They were bounced back
and forth, prompted by buttons corresponding to each side of
(08:30):
the screen. From there, It's always been rumored that Ralph Bear,
who worked for Sanders Associates, which was a military contractor,
attended that open house and Ralph, while working at Sanders Associates,
came up with an idea for taking a TV and
being able to do something more than just watch television
(08:50):
shows on it. He developed an interactive game, which started
out really dismally. One of the first things they did
for it was there was a little box that would
be red and then you had a pump, and if
you really pump that pump furiously, the box turn Blue
represented a house that was on fire and you were
(09:12):
pumping water into it to put the fire out. They
came out with a little dot that would travel and
you had a little toy gun and you would shoot
at it, and that was supposed to be like shoot
at clay pigeons. And they came up with the tennis game,
Uh Sanders Associate supports itself couldn't publish it. They were
military contractor, but they eventually almost told it to our
(09:33):
c A and eventually sold it to Magnavox and it
became Odyssey, the first console. And tomorrow he's sure to
see all the holiday specialist at your Magnavox dealer. Outstanding
values and videomatic color televisions that adjust their own picture
the changing room like automatic an exceptional offer on Odyssey.
The exciting electronic game. The Magnufox Odyssey was released in
(09:58):
nineteen sevente well very rudimentary, it was also revolutionary. The
Odyssey was the first game system that you could hook
up to a TV at home. Families who are content
to let television do its things often find themselves at
its mercy for a choice of entertainment. Wild people who
want television to do their things entertain themselves with Odyssey,
(10:22):
and it caught the eye of someone else who was
also developing games at that time. Nolan Bushnell came across
it because he happened to be going to school at
the University of Utah, which was one of the great
schools and computers of the time. There was m I T,
there was Stanford, and there was the University of Utah.
(10:43):
No One. Bushnell had just released a game called computer Space,
developed with a company called Nutting Industries. The game was
only moderlly successful, but it helped bush now make a
name for himself. It's a big, tall, well animated showman.
Because it was an twenties then I also got to
see this machine, which my immediate reaction was, is nobody's
(11:05):
going to buy this? And it didn't do well at all. However,
the next year, Nolan had left nothing and gone into
business for himself with a name he picked called Atari.
Nolan hired a guy by the name of al al
Corn to design a game based upon a Magnavox game.
(11:28):
That Magnavox game was the tennis game mentioned earlier, as
released on the Odyssey in nineteen seventy two. Tori's first
product was Palm, which was of course very closely based
on Odyssey. It was battened the image of a ball
on a TV screen from left to right, left to right,
left to right, and Nolan told al make me a
(11:50):
coin machine version of this. Nolan Bush No wentl Corn
described the Odyssey game he had seen at that trade
show and said, can you make something like that? And
all Corn went to work and not only made it,
but made it a lot better than the Odyssey. I
first started about it over the telephone when I was
working at cash Box that in the West Coast. This
(12:12):
machine had been put down into locations, bars, et cetera,
and made nothing but money. They got it all done
and they thought, okay, a Torii doesn't manufacture the games.
Attari creates the games then sells it to other companies,
to pinball companies like Williams, Valley, Midway, Sterns. And so
(12:35):
Nolan went off to Chicago to try and sell Palm
to one of the established manufacturers. While he's gone, alal
Corn gets a call from Andicapps Tavern, which is the
place where they had a demo unit out to see
how people would react. It's a call from the manager saying,
can you come out here? The machine's broken down. So
(12:57):
he comes out in the morning and the manager is him.
You know, it's the strangest thing. Normally we don't get
any traffic at all early in the morning, but these
days I come out to open the tavern and there's
a line and they're not here to drink. They're walking
over and playing Palm. Al opens the machine to see
what's wrong with this and Quarters poor out. It was
(13:18):
overflowing with Quarters. That's what's going wrong. So he called
Nolan and told him, and Nolan decided on the spot,
a Torii isn't going to just design the machines. A
Torii is gonna start making. Nolan, working with Ted Dabney,
figured out how to take this game that will only
play on a thirty computer and replicate it on a
(13:39):
relatively inexpensive technology that people could play in ourcades. And
the result was Ahead. You say, what is ahead? Machines
cost money. If you have a machine, let's say in
the bar, where the commission to the bar owner is
generally of the take, and you have two hundred dollars
(14:02):
in the cash game in that machine, when you come
to make collections, you net a hundred dollars. You need
a lot of plays to just pay for the machines,
and I they're paid in a respectable length of time,
and then continue to make good revenue. You've got a hit.
Pong officially launched a video game sensation, although as Eddie
(14:25):
tells us, that term was still the making. The phrase
video game was coined by myself when in the early
days of covering it for cash Box, I got tired
of calling them TV games television games. We were coming
up with all kinds of names to call this class
of amusement game. And one day I was sitting at
the typewriter writing another story about somebody's machine, and I says,
(14:50):
I remember we used to call the movie jukeboxes audio
video machines. I says, hey, video game, and I started
to do it the rest of that his history. With
(15:13):
the release of Pong, video games quickly became a burgeoning industry.
So Pong barely came out, and then all of a sudden,
everyone starts making Pongo likes because they can see the
writing on the wall. Pong is huge. Pong is also
cheaper to make than a pinball machine, much easier to
maintain than a pinball machine. Plus it's more popular. So
(15:35):
Williams and Midway and everyone else started coming out with
their own versions of Pong, and new companies came out
of nowhere to do it as well. That you are
watching the most exciting game you will ever see on
your TV set till start by Kalico with three different
games tell Star Tennis with digital scoring, variable speeds. But
the first real competition came from Key Games. Key Games
(16:00):
was a bunch of Atari ex patriots who went off
and trying to compete. Only it turns out that that
was a lie. Atari owned Key Games. Attari always owned
Key Games, but they pretended like they were arrivals, and
that's pushed the industry further. If you take a look
at what Atari did. They made Pong the first sports game,
(16:21):
They made Gotcha, the first maze chase game. They had
Grand Track and Sprint, the first racing games. As the
leader in the industry, Attari grew rapidly. In nineteen seventies six,
They're at least a video arcade game, Breakout, which was
partially designed by two famous Steves, Steve Jobs Steve Wasniac.
(16:44):
Did you try and break Out? Did you try and
break out, and it would sort of a return to
bomb and only now you're not playing horizontally. You're playing vertically.
And at the top of the screen there are bricks,
and when you're ball hits those bricks, the bricks disappear,
and you're trying to beat your way through one wall,
(17:04):
and then there's another wall, and then there's another wall.
No one bush Nell says he designed the game. Other
people have said that other people designed, and who knows
for sure, but one thing is certain. There was a
young Atari engineer who was involved in all of this.
His name was Steve Jobs. When you design a game,
every chip in that game is gonna cost you, over
(17:26):
the life of the game, tens of thousands of dollars.
Let's see you make ten thousand copies of that game,
the chip costs five bucks. That's fifty dollars. Bush Nell asked,
who can redesign this game to get some of the chipstell.
Steve Jobs was not an engineer, but he was working
on a small homebrew computer package was a good friend
(17:49):
named Steve Woznia. He was quite the engineer. I think
he was viewed pretty roundly as the most brilliant engineer
in Silicon Valley at the time. Jobs was also not
a huge video game player. Wasn'tiac was So Jobs asked
Wasniac to come over and gave him pizza, let him
play whatever game he wanted for a while, and then
(18:09):
when everyone was gone, said could you redesign this game
for us and get some of the chips out. The
story goes that his redesign worked perfectly, but it was
so brilliant and he had taken so many chips out
that they couldn't replicate. Famously, Steve Jobs told Steve Wasniac
that he was only in a portion of what he
(18:31):
really was getting, and he pocketed the rest. According to
Bushnell and according to anyone who would know, Steve Jobs
then plowed all the rest of the money directly into Apple,
but he didn't mislead Wasniac, and that was pretty much
the end of their friendship. Meanwhile, companies in Japan was
(18:53):
starting to jump on the video game bandwagon, the first
of which was Namco. You have to look in Japan
of the time to understand their success. First of all,
Japan loves technology, and Japan loves storytelling, Japan loves glitz,
and video games were all of those things right from
the start. Japan at the time was better at renovating
(19:19):
than innovating, so they took this idea of video games
that American companies would come up with, and they found
ways to change it to make it more fun. Video
games became incredibly popular in so incredibly popular that there
was no keeping up with the math. Pretty soon, Tito
(19:40):
creates a game which Midway imports and adds the changes.
They enhanced it with a computer was the first game
to have a computer processor in it. That game was Gunfight.
But that wasn't even the most impressive trick that Tito
(20:01):
had up their sleeves. In nineteen they would turn the
industry upside down by releasing Space Invaders. Where and whereas
Pond made a big hit in the USA and some
other places, Space Invaders absolutely hit the entire world. It
(20:24):
was a great game and it still is a fun
game to play. They may know, but three hundred thousand
of these machines, which is unheard of. All of a sudden,
you have a battle going, especially seventy nine. All of
a sudden, you have Space Invaders and a Tory football
exploding on the American public. And a Tory football that
(20:46):
was the one with this big old track ball. People
would be slapping until they had blisters on their hands.
Their hands are numb. Sometimes your skin got caught in
the little circle that held the track ball in place,
so people got cuts. But they loved that game. They
played that game silly until January when the Super Bowl
took place, and then they moved on because football season
(21:08):
and with Space Invaders that didn't happen. Space Invaders season
never added. Reacting to Space Invaders, nam could develops some
big hits of their own, including pac Man and Rallyatts.
(21:30):
Also around this time, a small Japanese company named Nintendo
started to make games. Nintendo did okay in Japan, it
really floundered than the United States. They had a game
called Radar Scope that was like the third biggest game
(21:51):
in Japan in the year came out and they thought
it would be big here, but it wasn't, and so
they created a conversion get to make it a new
game they thought might be able to save the company,
and that new game was Donkey Kong. And he calls
(22:11):
this period the Golden years of the games. It was
almost entirely fueled by Japanese companies. It was known and
is known to the general playing public as the pac
Man Days, Defender Days, Donkey Kan Days, Centipede, Millipede by Atari.
(22:33):
The just classics of that period captured the attention and
the devotion of kids and even some grown ups all
over the country and all over the world. During the
Golden Years, which really started with the Space Invaders, that's
the Japanese machine. Pac Man and Mrs pac Man are
Japanese machines. Donkey Kan is the Japanese machine. Now you're
(22:54):
looking to some of the classics, and they deserved everything
they got over here. The so called Golden Years of
video games change commerce across the entire entertainment industry. In
the late seventies and into the early eighties, all of
a sudden, it's not just boollyon alleys and pool halls
(23:15):
that have video games. People are seeing that you can
attract people to your business with video games. Business owners
and managers are seeing that you can even make money
with video games. The game's only lasted most of them,
so people were crowding, and all of a sudden, grocery
stores and drug stores malls are just putting up video
(23:38):
game areas and arcades are appearing everywhere. By eighty arcades
are a big thing. And the money that went into
those machines, which by the way, we're popping up everywhere,
including in the funeral home in one case, was so
(23:59):
large that it hurt the recording industry. It hurt the
movie industry. It became the number one form of entertainment,
but it didn't last. The reason it didn't last was
it again, something developed by Nolan Bushnell. It was what
we call consumer video. You could play Pong on your
(24:19):
home TV set using this little gizmo. I think it
was called the Atari twenty four D the Atari twenty
DRED because if you've got Matari you can play pac Man,
Bang Out, Spice Invitas with free with the Atari Movie
EA gmes in any other system. With Alligator clips, you
could clip it onto something in the back of your
(24:39):
TV set at home and play Pong for free. And
that was the beginning of the end of the boom days.
Just like how Palm started the video games industry, it
also birthed the home video game market. The home version
of Pong was released in nineteen and although it would
be a few more years before home consoles fully grab hold,
(25:02):
people liked the convenience, so some companies started to make
more consoles. First there was the fair Child channel left
and that was as I recall was the first console
that used cartridges. I had never heard of. I think
his name was Gerald Lawson, the gentleman who invented the cartridges.
Until he came around, consoles pretty much had one or
(25:24):
two or three hardware games and the loss and changed
all that all of a sudden. Now you can play
completely different games. So ATRII sees that and picks it
up with the twenties six hundred. I'd like a system, please,
and everything that goes with everything everything. I want everything
you gotta do, low price after thirty dollars, a rebate
office and that everything. He's got everything you can do
(25:47):
nearly think on your different company. Yes, not think something,
but it's not everything will be a voice do a
track bowl, remote and rol joysticks and the commute amazing.
It's amazing, but it's not everything, not everything. They will
be educational games. Prease at everything to every thing. My
favorite home console of the eighties was actually the Collico Vision.
(26:07):
Now bring the arcade experience home because your visions vision,
especially Donkey Comb on the Callico Vision looked exactly like
Donkey Kong in the arcade. A lot of the games
look better on Collico vision. A fun fact is that
Colliko is short for the Connecticut Leather Company. They used
(26:29):
to make these little kids like wallets the cub scouts
would get. That was what Collico actually originally did. As
the arcade in the Street fell apart, Kaliko made a
really interesting investment. There was a little company making dolls
outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and they looked at that and
they said, Okay, video games are falling apart, will buy
(26:52):
This was cabbage Patch Dolls. Their Cabbage Catch kids. You
can give them all you love. Cabbage Patch kids are
each old separately. Each doll comes with him a ten
bird certificant in adoption papers from Colico. They made more
off cabbage Patch dolls in one year than they ever
(27:14):
did off video games. Eventually, Warner Brothers caught wind of
Atari and all their success. They bought the company from
Nolan Bushnell. Nolan still ran things for a while, at least.
Nolan Bushnell is a very smart guy. He's got Atari going,
and he's always going down to the research and development
(27:36):
team and he's looking over people's shoulders. He's gotta have
of giving people suggestions, you should really do this and this.
You know that would work better if you do this
and this. Then he'll come back two weeks later and
he'll say, you know, you should do it like this
and this, and he's making people undo the changes they've
just made to accommodate him before. So it became a
real problem. Al Alcorn, who was running research and development
(28:00):
at first. One he would do was the moment Nolan
came into research and development, al would rush over as
quickly as he could. No one has to sort of
a shorter attention span, so he put his hand on
no one's shoulder and said, oh, look at this one.
And by the way, let's look at this one over here.
Oh look, we're at the end of the research and development.
No one was so nice of you to stop by.
We'll see you next time. And he'd rush him through
(28:22):
before he could do too much damage. But then no
one caught onto that, and so the next thing they
came up with was al would tell people, you don't
have to do what no one tells you to do
until he's told it to you three times. No one
would come through, and he'd make suggestions and people would
ignore him. They had a company wid beating out at
Grass Valley and no one came up to speak. And
(28:45):
he stands up in front of the crowd and he says,
I hear that there's new policy going around it. When
I tell you to do something, you don't have to
do it until I told you three times. I'm telling
you right now. When I tell you to do something,
you do And somebody from the back of the audience yelled, hey,
could you see that two more times. As it turns out,
(29:09):
Warner Brothers wasn't pleased with bush Now's antics. Warner looked
at Nolan and his Shenanigans and some of his other
executives and fired them all. Retired them would be a
much more accurate way to say it, but put them
out the pasture with nice severance packages, and replaced Nolan
(29:31):
with a guy named Ray Kassar. Ray had no idea
what he was getting until he came from Burlington, the
cope manufacturer, the textile manufacturer. His first big move was
to hold a company meeting in which he tried to
ensure his game designers that he knew how to work
well with designers because he'd been working with them for years.
(29:53):
He was talking about the town manufacturers as of creating
towels was similar to creating video games that didn't not
go overwhelmed. Kastar was not well liked from within the
game's industry. A lot of people left because they didn't
like being under rak a star, and a lot of
people left because they knew there was money at the
other end of the rainbow, and that wasn't an Atari.
(30:15):
They were making dollars a year. They were making Natari
a lot of money, but they weren't making a lot money.
Raykassar told all of his designers, the guys who designed
my towels, don't tell everyone what towel they did. I
don't want you telling people what games you worked on.
But there was a silver lining to his lack of popularity.
(30:38):
We got to give credit where credit is new. The
first open world game is also the game was the
first Easter Ring. Of the original ten designers would all
last two to remain was a guy named Warren Robinette.
Warren was working on a game called Adventure. If you've
watched many player one, that's the game. At the end.
(31:02):
Was proud of Adventure. He wanted people to know who
was behind it. That's why you created the first did
you at Easterday? You could only carry one object at
a time. If you carried the ladder, you didn't have
a sword to defend yourself. But if you got that
ladder and you leaned it against the wall at the
very end of the game, at the far end, and
(31:24):
you climbed up to the top of it, even though
there was no visible door, you would pass through an
invisible hole in the wall, and then if you ran
your cursor over that wall, you'd find that there was
one hot pixel. And then if you pull that pixel
and you carried it back to the front of the game,
you opened a hidden room. And in that hidden room.
(31:45):
In Rainbow Letters by Warren Robinette, he didn't think anybody
would ever find that. I remember talking to him about it.
He told me about going out to dinner. He'd quit
Atari by this time, or was just about the levator.
He's out to dinner with his friend. And I said,
what did your friends say when you told him that?
(32:05):
And he said he didn't And I said why And
he said, well, if I couldn't keep the secret myself,
how could I ask my friends to keep. So here's
this amazing innovation he's done. There's no way in the
world anybody's ever gonna find it, right, except there's this kid.
He's in Salt Lake City. He's got nothing to do.
(32:26):
I think it's the dead of winter in Salt Lake
it gets snowy. He maybe he's a nerd like me,
trying to play pong with both hands to see how
far he could get. For some reason, he climbs up
the ladder. For some reason, he walks through the hole.
For some reason, he finds the pixel and terries it
all the way back, and he calls it try and says,
(32:46):
there's a glitch in your game. They had no idea.
They thought he was crazy. Unfortunately, for a tory, stories
like this for a few and far between and left
them unprepared for what came next in the video games
industry break. His Stars run as head of Atari did
(33:15):
not go well. It didn't take long for Rade to
alienate and in some ways ruin Atari. I was lucky.
I think post Atory I may have been the only
interview he ever grabbed. He was touching the first point. Now.
It was his idea to bring space invaders to the
(33:36):
Attori twenties and unt out here we entertain ourselves at home,
so we got an Atari video game. There's so many
different games to play. We especially like Space Invaders, Stafano's
Little Devils from Outer Space. It's fun, but personally I
think the whole idea of creatures from outer space is
a little far fetched. And that was a big thing.
But they made some huge mistakes. There were two almost
(33:59):
concurrent as a Master's. The first one was ET. The
movie ET had come around was a huge success. Warner
want to lure Steven Spielberg away from Universal where he
was making ET and movies like E T and Jaws,
and so part of what they did was they said, look, Steve,
here's twenty five million dollars licensing fee for ET. Twenty
(34:22):
five million was unheard of. So they promised him all
that money, and they promised him the game would be
ready for Christmas, and he was gonna hold them to that.
They didn't realize it takes a year to make a game,
and this is July. They're leaving three or four months
to make a game. And they brought him this one guy,
(34:45):
Howard Scott Warshaw, to make the game Warshaw was a
good choice. He was a bright guy. He was a
good game designer. He had made the Raiders and lost
our game. They assigned him to make the e T game.
They gave him no time to do it. They gave
him really truly no budget because the million had been
(35:06):
spent on it. Games at that time were made by
one person. There's gonna be music in the game. You
came up with the music. There's art. You came up
with the art, and you did the program in the game.
Howard an unreasonable task, and he went after it and
came out with a virtually unplayable game. I mean, everyone
(35:28):
in the world hates that game. I'm not sure you
can fully blame Howard for it. According to Eddie, this
sort of tie in movie and game deal it's a
pretty common thing in the nineties. We call that a
license game. It's good marketing tool. It draws you, but
they're only good for the first quarter. We used to say,
(35:50):
and you say, what does that mean. The rule is,
if the license is basically a marketing draw, it's an
eye attractor and into detractor, but basically the game itself,
regardless of what it's called, it's gonna have to happen
in the legs. Let's say the Roaming Stones Pinball. Ooh,
I wonder what that's like. You're going when you're playing
(36:12):
a couple of times. If the game isn't any fun
and don't care if it George Washington or your teacher
at school face on the game, You're not gonna play.
It's only good for the first few players, until the
game itself is the attraction rather than the license. The
other game was a pac Man. Bear in mind that
(36:34):
at the time, pac Man was the most popular game
in the world. Pac Man has been on the cover
of Time magazine and Mad Magazine. Pac Man was the
best selling our Ka game of all times all by Time.
Pac Man into or a Tirey video computer system and
you're playing the hottest games and Spice Invitus time pac Man.
(36:56):
They released the Detroy twenty version of it, and it's
don't It was terrible. It didn't play or look even
vaguely like the game in the arcade. People didn't like it,
and concurrently, America had lost its focus on video games.
(37:18):
Arcades started closing. First. It was the big words. You
had these huge arcades, and arcades are like blue whales,
the biggest animal that's ever lived, but it only eats krill.
And it's the same thing. And these huge arcades that
were living on quarters, and as long as you have
quarters lined up on the machines, you can live on
(37:39):
those quarters. But when a few less people show up
and a few less people are playing, and the people
who did show up again again were the people who
were better at games. They were the people who could
make a quarter less a minute, and thus arcades started
(37:59):
to fall out of popularity. Meanwhile, Nintendo was hard at
work at developing their own home council, The nes released
in over in Japan, Nintendo is just preparing to release
their fammycom which is short for Family Computer, which would
be repackaged as the Nintendo Entertainment Center in the United States.
(38:23):
It played games that looked closer to the arcade games,
and interestingly, it had basically the same processing chip in
it as the Autori twenty, and if you played Mario
on it, it looked just like the arcade game. And
I remember looking at that and thinking this is high art.
There were other companies that tried to compete, but the
(38:44):
only one that even made a dent on the market
was Sega with the Sega master System. The Sega master
System actually had slightly better graphic's, a little more memory
and everything. But there was this thing called packing game.
If you bought consoles back then, and if you bought
a Sega master System, it came with Super hang On,
(39:05):
which was a pretty good game. It was a motorcycle
writing game. But the basic packet on the nes was
Super Mario Brothers. That was all the technology Nintendo needed
to be anybody. Stephen says Nintendo was successful because they
were smart about design. They created iconic characters that would
(39:28):
stick in the minds of players everywhere. Giant trap you.
In a lot of ways, the growth of video games
is like the growth of Hollywood. In some ways, the
(39:49):
death of arcades is like the death of movie theaters.
There was a time when Charlie Chaplin was very big,
and then people kind of looked at Charlie Chaplin and
you know, it was cool. He was old school. But
we like Hattie Murphy, Addie, Welcome to the Army, Our
thanks themis nice to see you again, where we like
John Wayne, I got no interest in you today, Stan Claire,
(40:11):
and you won't get hurt or eventually we like Arnold
schwarzenegg Asta le Vista Baby. Originally, pac Man and the
Aliens from Space Invader were cool things, but they had
a very long ways. Donkey Kong somehow became far more iconic,
(40:32):
even though pac Man outsold Donkey Kong. But Mario had
an advantage and that Mario got the nes. There was
never a Capcom consult right. The people at Nintendo were
very intelligent and that they realized as Mario goes, so
goes are consult they started looking for other icons they
(40:55):
could create. What will the future bring from nintend Dome
more hits like Super Mario Brothers, arcade hits like Cotton Food.
Nintendo has the most video game hits Halkin's Alley, Duck Utters,
and more like Baseball and Excite Bike, and you can
(41:18):
play them only on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Now you're
playing with power. For a little while, it looked like
it might be Excited Bike. Certainly, Duck Hunt is still remembered,
but they came out with this game that was so
(41:39):
dicey called the Legend of Zelda. Did you see the
latest Nintendo newsletter? Whoa nice graphics? I'd like to get
my hands on that game. You mean you haven't played
it yet? We can play on my Nintendo Entertainment system.
It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad. Those
creatures from Ghana are pretty bad rock tech tanks leaders too.
But when you'll help a harrow polster, Yeah, awesome, intense
(42:06):
Nintendo Entertainment System, your parents help you look get up?
Did people really want to invest this much time in
the game. There was a nicy thing for Nintendo to do,
but they really threw their weight behind him. Um it
caught on. It rivaled Mario in popularity. Nintendo released their
(42:26):
first handheld counsel in They called it the Game Boy.
This effort was led by a man named gun Pay
your COI. That's a very sacred name to me because
Goompey was one of my first friends in the industry.
He affected Nintendo culture almost as much as Shaguiro Miamoto,
(42:47):
the creator of Zelda and Mario and Donkey K. Miamoto
created the personality of the games. Nintendo to this day
makes family friendly games because Miamoto likes the smile when
he creates games. Goompeo KOI. He was nice, he was quiet,
and he was miserly. His whole view was that you
(43:10):
could do things using old technology very cheaply. Even though
he wasn't the greater the ne s, the people who
did create it were trained by him and the nes.
If you take a look as basically the same chip
as the attar he created the arcade hardware that Miamoto
(43:31):
used for Donkey Kong, and in the case of game Boy,
he takes just this very very old chip and monochrome
technology and he puts it all together. What he sees
is everyone knows this chip. This is an ancient chip.
Anyone in the world can program on. It doesn't need
to be color. And he makes an assumption that nobody
(43:54):
else would make. He assumes that when people play portable
game games, they want portability. They're not looking to play
the exact same game on their game Boy that they
would play on their console. So a lot of the
games are built around the idea that they're small, you
can pick them up, you can play them very quickly,
you can put them down, you can play them while
(44:15):
you're on the bus. You don't have to concentrate the
same way you would concentrate for other games. The technology
is cheap. Heads Game Boy sells for nine bucks. When
it came out, they said it wasn't humanly possible. All
the power and excitement of Nintendo right in the palm
of your hand. Introducing Game Boy. It's portable, it's in stereo,
(44:39):
and its games are interchangeable. Game Boy comes complete with
batteries and the outrageous new game Tetris and for head
to head competition, use video link and blow your opponent away.
Game Board only from Nintendo. Now you're playing with power.
Power Atari coming out with the Links was color and
(45:01):
had a better processor and eight batteries. Live introducing Links
from a Torii, the color video game He Can get
away with Sometimes never knew what hit it. The first
three thousand units of a game Boy were sold out
within two weeks of release. By the game Boy had
(45:23):
sold sixteen million units. The Autari Links sold fewer than
seven million units. By that same time, goon Pay was
a bona fide hero. His next big project would be
the Virtual Boy, which everyone looks at as a disaster,
but it was brilliant. Again. He simply took monochrome technology
(45:44):
and he put it on a view Master. It was
a failure, so he was in the doghouse for about
a year. About the same time that the N sixty
four came out, they had a Space World that's the
Nintendo proposed dietary game show. And last time I saw
my friend Gumpey was at that Space World in Maco Hare.
(46:08):
It's in this big warehouse and if you went off
to the far right corner, that's where they at the
N sixty four. So everyone went there, and then there
were nests. The Soprannias was still pretty popular at that point,
and Game Boy games out, and then in a small
corner near the exit was what was left of Virtual Boy,
(46:31):
and Gunpay was there holding down the fort trying to
show anybody who would come by what Virtual Boy would do.
And when I walked by, he said, please, please come,
let's talk. He didn't speak English and my Japanese is
completely non existent, but he showed me as games and
then we sat down and talked for about an hour,
and then I left, and that was the last time
(46:52):
I saw gun Pay. Then left Nintendo and went on
to develop the Bandai wonder Swad, a short lived handheld
gaming device, but it was the last project he would
work on. In October four, Goom pay tragically died in
a car accident. The world gave him a nice tribute
(47:16):
when he died. I was very surprised and very pleased.
I think he got more attention when he passed, maybe
the Hiroshi Yamochi, the guy who took Nintendo into video games.
There was a lot of attention about the father of
game Boy dying. Game Boy was amazing because to that
point in time, the biggest electronics family of product was
(47:40):
Walkman family and products. Game Boy was a close second.
Then the PlayStation brand name came and that was that
Sony Entertainment entered the video game market or with the
(48:00):
release of PlayStation. We'll talk about Sony, Nintendo, and the
Microsoft Xbox in Part two. All that on the next
episode of Ephemeral. This episode of Ephemeral was co written
by Max Williams and Trevor Young, with editing and sound
(48:21):
design by Max Williams. Stephen Kent is the author of
The Ultimate History of Video Games Volumes one and two,
and Eddie Adlam is the publisher for Replay magazine. Some
of the great music this episode, like the piece you're
hearing now, comes courtesy of the artist mon Plasier. If
you've listened to Ephemeral for a while, you've heard a
(48:42):
lot of their work, and we're happy to announce we'll
have an upcoming episode interviewing the artists for now here
more at Loyalty Freak music dot com. Tune in next
episode for video Games Part two. In the meantime, find
us on social media. We're at Ephemeral Show and for
more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart
(49:04):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Hey, folks, It's hard to believe, but Ephemeral has been
on the air now or whatever the podcast equivalent terms,
for almost three years. In that time, our team has
continued to grow what for me has been a dream
come true. To that end, this and next episode you'll
be hearing from our producer, Max Williams, who heretofore has
(00:27):
been working with Trevor and me behind the scenes. You
might recognize him from Christmas Special Noel or as the
on Mike producer of Ridiculous History. Fun fact, Max is
also my little brother and frankly our family's expert on
video games. So without further ado, enjoy the episode. Ephemeral
(00:52):
is production of My Heart three D audio for full
exposure listen was that phones gaming as a pastime goes
back at least to ancient Greece, from Olympic tournaments to
bouts of Aristotelian logic. For millennia, humans have been fascinating
(01:14):
by the interplay of chance and skills. As games advanced
alongside technology, The twentieth century brought with it new spaces
dedicated to gaming. When I was a youngster, I fell
in love with the arcade business when I visited a
place called the Casino in the town of Rye, New York.
(01:35):
I come from the Bronx and we bicycled up there,
and I just loved the smell of the wood on
the floor, the games, the noises they made totally unlike
what we see today when you're going in an arcade
with the electronic noises beeping and screaming and all of
the interesting electronic aspects that define today's amusement king Back then,
(01:56):
it was all mechanical stuff. It ran an electric city,
of course in most cases, but not all. And we
had machines like Chicago coins hockey table when you batted
the ball back and forth underneath the glass, and recording
studios wherefore a quarter and a dime you could get
in there with your buddies and do anything you wanted,
(02:17):
to sing a proper song or maybe use some foul
language just to hear it played back in et cetera.
My name is Eddie adlum Um, the publisher of Replay Magazine,
which is a monthly trade journal. I've been covering that
industry for approximately fifty four years right now, and I
(02:42):
have continued to work in this field my whole life.
And he grew up loving arcades, but he never thought
he'd devote himself to them professionally. As it turns out,
he fell into the game's business almost by accident. As
the years went by, I graduated college. After a period
(03:02):
of time which look magazine, shoppening pencils, and then the
US Army, I answered an ad in the New York
Times for an editorial assistant. It was with cash Box Magazine,
now a defunct trade paper which largely centered on the
recording industry, with a small section in its back page
(03:24):
is devoted to the jukebox and games business. And they
told me they were looking for somebody to do the
pages in the back on the games business, and I
said I needed a job, but I've been doing it
ever since. We reached other Eddie to talk about video
in arcade games, but he reminded us that their history
(03:44):
went back further than most people think, and arcade is
not unique. The penny arcade, as they were originally called,
go back practically since the beginning of the twentieth century.
A common name would be playland. The common machine would
be a fortune teller or restraint testing thing that you
squeezed together but basically only find them in major cities
(04:06):
like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and so on. Up until
the these arcades might have been purely analog games like
ski ball or pinball. But with technology advancements in post
World War two America, we saw the rise of electro
mechanical games, and that brought a whole new level of
popularity to gaming. In the sixties, there were no video games.
(04:31):
There were electro mechanical games. There was pinball, but I
really stunk at pinball. But you had Chicago Motor Speedway,
which was this game where there was a screen that
had sort of a cartoon of cars on it, and
then there's a little plastic car and you tried to
steer that little plastic car to avoid the cars on
the screen. There was a game called Knife Bomber that
(04:54):
was very fond of where you looked for a little
head thing and you'd pressed button and I hope that
you tie named that the bomb hit different targets. These
games were very rudimentary. They were quarter gobblers. They were fun.
My name is Steven L. Kent. I'm the author of
the Ultimate History Video Games, Volume one and two. Been
(05:15):
playing games for a long time. Although it doesn't show
in my skill level. Although Stephen loved arcade gaming, he
says back in the sixties arcade games were not as
easy to find. There were pinball machines and electro mechanical
machines in bowling alleys. Those were pretty safe places to go.
(05:36):
Then there was pinball and electro mechanical machines. For instance,
if you went to Vegas or Taho, you might see
some of those in the hotels. Other than that, you
saw them in pool halls. And pool halls were actually
pretty spooky places to go. They were associated with vagrants
and tough guys um some crime. And then there were
(05:58):
arcades which were certainly associated with vagrancy and problems. Komy
Island is the classic one that you always hear and
they might smell like somebody and urinated just outside. Somebody
might have vomited. They were places you didn't necessarily want
to send your five year own. When you see arcade,
the young folks they have a very different view changed
(06:20):
with all the redemption games the game for you get
the tickets that you've been redeemed for a game. When
you say arcade to old folks, they think of a
room where cavern, where the lights are almost all out
except for maybe some neon lights on the wall. Music
is playing, maybe a juke box. She's got Benny Davis
(06:40):
eyes by Kim karn I have the Tiger. Most of
the light in the room is the low glow coming
from the arcade machines, and you can hear all those
iconic little lips and squeaks and things that the different
machines made, And people are making little rows of quarters
to say that they're reserving the next game. Eddie says,
(07:04):
there's a reason that kids like Stephen found our kids
so wonderful despite the grudginess. It's the poor man's country club,
whereas people with money could go to the literal country
club and play golf and blah blah blah. People who
are working class people or youngsters in high school could
get into a different realm in the head with the
(07:27):
lights of the machine. The challenge of trying to beat
it so you get to repeat play or extra innings
is just a nice way to recreate. The word recreation,
if it's pronounced properly, is recreated. Although it wasn't yet
available in ourcades, the first video game was being developed
(07:47):
behind the scenes in the nineteen fifties. You would have
to say that the inception of video games was with
Willie Higgins Boffel, who was working at the Cave in Labs.
It was a nuclear power facility, but they were having
an open house. He thought nothing could be more more
(08:09):
than an open house here, so he took it in
a selescope and he built an interactive game into it
called Tennis for two. Really, truly, you have to say
that's the inception. Tennis for two was literally just a
dot of light on a screen. They were bounced back
and forth, prompted by buttons corresponding to each side of
(08:30):
the screen. From there, It's always been rumored that Ralph Bear,
who worked for Sanders Associates, which was a military contractor,
attended that open house and Ralph, while working at Sanders Associates,
came up with an idea for taking a TV and
being able to do something more than just watch television
(08:50):
shows on it. He developed an interactive game, which started
out really dismally. One of the first things they did
for it was there was a little box that would
be red and then you had a pump, and if
you really pump that pump furiously, the box turn Blue
represented a house that was on fire and you were
(09:12):
pumping water into it to put the fire out. They
came out with a little dot that would travel and
you had a little toy gun and you would shoot
at it, and that was supposed to be like shoot
at clay pigeons. And they came up with the tennis game,
Uh Sanders Associate supports itself couldn't publish it. They were
military contractor, but they eventually almost told it to our
(09:33):
c A and eventually sold it to Magnavox and it
became Odyssey, the first console. And tomorrow he's sure to
see all the holiday specialist at your Magnavox dealer. Outstanding
values and videomatic color televisions that adjust their own picture
the changing room like automatic an exceptional offer on Odyssey.
The exciting electronic game. The Magnufox Odyssey was released in
(09:58):
nineteen sevente well very rudimentary, it was also revolutionary. The
Odyssey was the first game system that you could hook
up to a TV at home. Families who are content
to let television do its things often find themselves at
its mercy for a choice of entertainment. Wild people who
want television to do their things entertain themselves with Odyssey,
(10:22):
and it caught the eye of someone else who was
also developing games at that time. Nolan Bushnell came across
it because he happened to be going to school at
the University of Utah, which was one of the great
schools and computers of the time. There was m I T,
there was Stanford, and there was the University of Utah.
(10:43):
No One. Bushnell had just released a game called computer Space,
developed with a company called Nutting Industries. The game was
only moderlly successful, but it helped bush now make a
name for himself. It's a big, tall, well animated showman.
Because it was an twenties then I also got to
see this machine, which my immediate reaction was, is nobody's
(11:05):
going to buy this? And it didn't do well at all. However,
the next year, Nolan had left nothing and gone into
business for himself with a name he picked called Atari.
Nolan hired a guy by the name of al al
Corn to design a game based upon a Magnavox game.
(11:28):
That Magnavox game was the tennis game mentioned earlier, as
released on the Odyssey in nineteen seventy two. Tori's first
product was Palm, which was of course very closely based
on Odyssey. It was battened the image of a ball
on a TV screen from left to right, left to right,
left to right, and Nolan told al make me a
(11:50):
coin machine version of this. Nolan Bush No wentl Corn
described the Odyssey game he had seen at that trade
show and said, can you make something like that? And
all Corn went to work and not only made it,
but made it a lot better than the Odyssey. I
first started about it over the telephone when I was
working at cash Box that in the West Coast. This
(12:12):
machine had been put down into locations, bars, et cetera,
and made nothing but money. They got it all done
and they thought, okay, a Torii doesn't manufacture the games.
Attari creates the games then sells it to other companies,
to pinball companies like Williams, Valley, Midway, Sterns. And so
(12:35):
Nolan went off to Chicago to try and sell Palm
to one of the established manufacturers. While he's gone, alal
Corn gets a call from Andicapps Tavern, which is the
place where they had a demo unit out to see
how people would react. It's a call from the manager saying,
can you come out here? The machine's broken down. So
(12:57):
he comes out in the morning and the manager is him.
You know, it's the strangest thing. Normally we don't get
any traffic at all early in the morning, but these
days I come out to open the tavern and there's
a line and they're not here to drink. They're walking
over and playing Palm. Al opens the machine to see
what's wrong with this and Quarters poor out. It was
(13:18):
overflowing with Quarters. That's what's going wrong. So he called
Nolan and told him, and Nolan decided on the spot,
a Torii isn't going to just design the machines. A
Torii is gonna start making. Nolan, working with Ted Dabney,
figured out how to take this game that will only
play on a thirty computer and replicate it on a
(13:39):
relatively inexpensive technology that people could play in ourcades. And
the result was Ahead. You say, what is ahead? Machines
cost money. If you have a machine, let's say in
the bar, where the commission to the bar owner is
generally of the take, and you have two hundred dollars
(14:02):
in the cash game in that machine, when you come
to make collections, you net a hundred dollars. You need
a lot of plays to just pay for the machines,
and I they're paid in a respectable length of time,
and then continue to make good revenue. You've got a hit.
Pong officially launched a video game sensation, although as Eddie
(14:25):
tells us, that term was still the making. The phrase
video game was coined by myself when in the early
days of covering it for cash Box, I got tired
of calling them TV games television games. We were coming
up with all kinds of names to call this class
of amusement game. And one day I was sitting at
the typewriter writing another story about somebody's machine, and I says,
(14:50):
I remember we used to call the movie jukeboxes audio
video machines. I says, hey, video game, and I started
to do it the rest of that his history. With
(15:13):
the release of Pong, video games quickly became a burgeoning industry.
So Pong barely came out, and then all of a sudden,
everyone starts making Pongo likes because they can see the
writing on the wall. Pong is huge. Pong is also
cheaper to make than a pinball machine, much easier to
maintain than a pinball machine. Plus it's more popular. So
(15:35):
Williams and Midway and everyone else started coming out with
their own versions of Pong, and new companies came out
of nowhere to do it as well. That you are
watching the most exciting game you will ever see on
your TV set till start by Kalico with three different
games tell Star Tennis with digital scoring, variable speeds. But
the first real competition came from Key Games. Key Games
(16:00):
was a bunch of Atari ex patriots who went off
and trying to compete. Only it turns out that that
was a lie. Atari owned Key Games. Attari always owned
Key Games, but they pretended like they were arrivals, and
that's pushed the industry further. If you take a look
at what Atari did. They made Pong the first sports game,
(16:21):
They made Gotcha, the first maze chase game. They had
Grand Track and Sprint, the first racing games. As the
leader in the industry, Attari grew rapidly. In nineteen seventies six,
They're at least a video arcade game, Breakout, which was
partially designed by two famous Steves, Steve Jobs Steve Wasniac.
(16:44):
Did you try and break Out? Did you try and
break out, and it would sort of a return to
bomb and only now you're not playing horizontally. You're playing vertically.
And at the top of the screen there are bricks,
and when you're ball hits those bricks, the bricks disappear,
and you're trying to beat your way through one wall,
(17:04):
and then there's another wall, and then there's another wall.
No one bush Nell says he designed the game. Other
people have said that other people designed, and who knows
for sure, but one thing is certain. There was a
young Atari engineer who was involved in all of this.
His name was Steve Jobs. When you design a game,
every chip in that game is gonna cost you, over
(17:26):
the life of the game, tens of thousands of dollars.
Let's see you make ten thousand copies of that game,
the chip costs five bucks. That's fifty dollars. Bush Nell asked,
who can redesign this game to get some of the chipstell.
Steve Jobs was not an engineer, but he was working
on a small homebrew computer package was a good friend
(17:49):
named Steve Woznia. He was quite the engineer. I think
he was viewed pretty roundly as the most brilliant engineer
in Silicon Valley at the time. Jobs was also not
a huge video game player. Wasn'tiac was So Jobs asked
Wasniac to come over and gave him pizza, let him
play whatever game he wanted for a while, and then
(18:09):
when everyone was gone, said could you redesign this game
for us and get some of the chips out. The
story goes that his redesign worked perfectly, but it was
so brilliant and he had taken so many chips out
that they couldn't replicate. Famously, Steve Jobs told Steve Wasniac
that he was only in a portion of what he
(18:31):
really was getting, and he pocketed the rest. According to
Bushnell and according to anyone who would know, Steve Jobs
then plowed all the rest of the money directly into Apple,
but he didn't mislead Wasniac, and that was pretty much
the end of their friendship. Meanwhile, companies in Japan was
(18:53):
starting to jump on the video game bandwagon, the first
of which was Namco. You have to look in Japan
of the time to understand their success. First of all,
Japan loves technology, and Japan loves storytelling, Japan loves glitz,
and video games were all of those things right from
the start. Japan at the time was better at renovating
(19:19):
than innovating, so they took this idea of video games
that American companies would come up with, and they found
ways to change it to make it more fun. Video
games became incredibly popular in so incredibly popular that there
was no keeping up with the math. Pretty soon, Tito
(19:40):
creates a game which Midway imports and adds the changes.
They enhanced it with a computer was the first game
to have a computer processor in it. That game was Gunfight.
But that wasn't even the most impressive trick that Tito
(20:01):
had up their sleeves. In nineteen they would turn the
industry upside down by releasing Space Invaders. Where and whereas
Pond made a big hit in the USA and some
other places, Space Invaders absolutely hit the entire world. It
(20:24):
was a great game and it still is a fun
game to play. They may know, but three hundred thousand
of these machines, which is unheard of. All of a sudden,
you have a battle going, especially seventy nine. All of
a sudden, you have Space Invaders and a Tory football
exploding on the American public. And a Tory football that
(20:46):
was the one with this big old track ball. People
would be slapping until they had blisters on their hands.
Their hands are numb. Sometimes your skin got caught in
the little circle that held the track ball in place,
so people got cuts. But they loved that game. They
played that game silly until January when the Super Bowl
took place, and then they moved on because football season
(21:08):
and with Space Invaders that didn't happen. Space Invaders season
never added. Reacting to Space Invaders, nam could develops some
big hits of their own, including pac Man and Rallyatts.
(21:30):
Also around this time, a small Japanese company named Nintendo
started to make games. Nintendo did okay in Japan, it
really floundered than the United States. They had a game
called Radar Scope that was like the third biggest game
(21:51):
in Japan in the year came out and they thought
it would be big here, but it wasn't, and so
they created a conversion get to make it a new
game they thought might be able to save the company,
and that new game was Donkey Kong. And he calls
(22:11):
this period the Golden years of the games. It was
almost entirely fueled by Japanese companies. It was known and
is known to the general playing public as the pac
Man Days, Defender Days, Donkey Kan Days, Centipede, Millipede by Atari.
(22:33):
The just classics of that period captured the attention and
the devotion of kids and even some grown ups all
over the country and all over the world. During the
Golden Years, which really started with the Space Invaders, that's
the Japanese machine. Pac Man and Mrs pac Man are
Japanese machines. Donkey Kan is the Japanese machine. Now you're
(22:54):
looking to some of the classics, and they deserved everything
they got over here. The so called Golden Years of
video games change commerce across the entire entertainment industry. In
the late seventies and into the early eighties, all of
a sudden, it's not just boollyon alleys and pool halls
(23:15):
that have video games. People are seeing that you can
attract people to your business with video games. Business owners
and managers are seeing that you can even make money
with video games. The game's only lasted most of them,
so people were crowding, and all of a sudden, grocery
stores and drug stores malls are just putting up video
(23:38):
game areas and arcades are appearing everywhere. By eighty arcades
are a big thing. And the money that went into
those machines, which by the way, we're popping up everywhere,
including in the funeral home in one case, was so
(23:59):
large that it hurt the recording industry. It hurt the
movie industry. It became the number one form of entertainment,
but it didn't last. The reason it didn't last was
it again, something developed by Nolan Bushnell. It was what
we call consumer video. You could play Pong on your
(24:19):
home TV set using this little gizmo. I think it
was called the Atari twenty four D the Atari twenty
DRED because if you've got Matari you can play pac Man,
Bang Out, Spice Invitas with free with the Atari Movie
EA gmes in any other system. With Alligator clips, you
could clip it onto something in the back of your
(24:39):
TV set at home and play Pong for free. And
that was the beginning of the end of the boom days.
Just like how Palm started the video games industry, it
also birthed the home video game market. The home version
of Pong was released in nineteen and although it would
be a few more years before home consoles fully grab hold,
(25:02):
people liked the convenience, so some companies started to make
more consoles. First there was the fair Child channel left
and that was as I recall was the first console
that used cartridges. I had never heard of. I think
his name was Gerald Lawson, the gentleman who invented the cartridges.
Until he came around, consoles pretty much had one or
(25:24):
two or three hardware games and the loss and changed
all that all of a sudden. Now you can play
completely different games. So ATRII sees that and picks it
up with the twenties six hundred. I'd like a system, please,
and everything that goes with everything everything. I want everything
you gotta do, low price after thirty dollars, a rebate
office and that everything. He's got everything you can do
(25:47):
nearly think on your different company. Yes, not think something,
but it's not everything will be a voice do a
track bowl, remote and rol joysticks and the commute amazing.
It's amazing, but it's not everything, not everything. They will
be educational games. Prease at everything to every thing. My
favorite home console of the eighties was actually the Collico Vision.
(26:07):
Now bring the arcade experience home because your visions vision,
especially Donkey Comb on the Callico Vision looked exactly like
Donkey Kong in the arcade. A lot of the games
look better on Collico vision. A fun fact is that
Colliko is short for the Connecticut Leather Company. They used
(26:29):
to make these little kids like wallets the cub scouts
would get. That was what Collico actually originally did. As
the arcade in the Street fell apart, Kaliko made a
really interesting investment. There was a little company making dolls
outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and they looked at that and
they said, Okay, video games are falling apart, will buy
(26:52):
This was cabbage Patch Dolls. Their Cabbage Catch kids. You
can give them all you love. Cabbage Patch kids are
each old separately. Each doll comes with him a ten
bird certificant in adoption papers from Colico. They made more
off cabbage Patch dolls in one year than they ever
(27:14):
did off video games. Eventually, Warner Brothers caught wind of
Atari and all their success. They bought the company from
Nolan Bushnell. Nolan still ran things for a while, at least.
Nolan Bushnell is a very smart guy. He's got Atari going,
and he's always going down to the research and development
(27:36):
team and he's looking over people's shoulders. He's gotta have
of giving people suggestions, you should really do this and this.
You know that would work better if you do this
and this. Then he'll come back two weeks later and
he'll say, you know, you should do it like this
and this, and he's making people undo the changes they've
just made to accommodate him before. So it became a
real problem. Al Alcorn, who was running research and development
(28:00):
at first. One he would do was the moment Nolan
came into research and development, al would rush over as
quickly as he could. No one has to sort of
a shorter attention span, so he put his hand on
no one's shoulder and said, oh, look at this one.
And by the way, let's look at this one over here.
Oh look, we're at the end of the research and development.
No one was so nice of you to stop by.
We'll see you next time. And he'd rush him through
(28:22):
before he could do too much damage. But then no
one caught onto that, and so the next thing they
came up with was al would tell people, you don't
have to do what no one tells you to do
until he's told it to you three times. No one
would come through, and he'd make suggestions and people would
ignore him. They had a company wid beating out at
Grass Valley and no one came up to speak. And
(28:45):
he stands up in front of the crowd and he says,
I hear that there's new policy going around it. When
I tell you to do something, you don't have to
do it until I told you three times. I'm telling
you right now. When I tell you to do something,
you do And somebody from the back of the audience yelled, hey,
could you see that two more times. As it turns out,
(29:09):
Warner Brothers wasn't pleased with bush Now's antics. Warner looked
at Nolan and his Shenanigans and some of his other
executives and fired them all. Retired them would be a
much more accurate way to say it, but put them
out the pasture with nice severance packages, and replaced Nolan
(29:31):
with a guy named Ray Kassar. Ray had no idea
what he was getting until he came from Burlington, the
cope manufacturer, the textile manufacturer. His first big move was
to hold a company meeting in which he tried to
ensure his game designers that he knew how to work
well with designers because he'd been working with them for years.
(29:53):
He was talking about the town manufacturers as of creating
towels was similar to creating video games that didn't not
go overwhelmed. Kastar was not well liked from within the
game's industry. A lot of people left because they didn't
like being under rak a star, and a lot of
people left because they knew there was money at the
other end of the rainbow, and that wasn't an Atari.
(30:15):
They were making dollars a year. They were making Natari
a lot of money, but they weren't making a lot money.
Raykassar told all of his designers, the guys who designed
my towels, don't tell everyone what towel they did. I
don't want you telling people what games you worked on.
But there was a silver lining to his lack of popularity.
(30:38):
We got to give credit where credit is new. The
first open world game is also the game was the
first Easter Ring. Of the original ten designers would all
last two to remain was a guy named Warren Robinette.
Warren was working on a game called Adventure. If you've
watched many player one, that's the game. At the end.
(31:02):
Was proud of Adventure. He wanted people to know who
was behind it. That's why you created the first did
you at Easterday? You could only carry one object at
a time. If you carried the ladder, you didn't have
a sword to defend yourself. But if you got that
ladder and you leaned it against the wall at the
very end of the game, at the far end, and
(31:24):
you climbed up to the top of it, even though
there was no visible door, you would pass through an
invisible hole in the wall, and then if you ran
your cursor over that wall, you'd find that there was
one hot pixel. And then if you pull that pixel
and you carried it back to the front of the game,
you opened a hidden room. And in that hidden room.
(31:45):
In Rainbow Letters by Warren Robinette, he didn't think anybody
would ever find that. I remember talking to him about it.
He told me about going out to dinner. He'd quit
Atari by this time, or was just about the levator.
He's out to dinner with his friend. And I said,
what did your friends say when you told him that?
(32:05):
And he said he didn't And I said why And
he said, well, if I couldn't keep the secret myself,
how could I ask my friends to keep. So here's
this amazing innovation he's done. There's no way in the
world anybody's ever gonna find it, right, except there's this kid.
He's in Salt Lake City. He's got nothing to do.
(32:26):
I think it's the dead of winter in Salt Lake
it gets snowy. He maybe he's a nerd like me,
trying to play pong with both hands to see how
far he could get. For some reason, he climbs up
the ladder. For some reason, he walks through the hole.
For some reason, he finds the pixel and terries it
all the way back, and he calls it try and says,
(32:46):
there's a glitch in your game. They had no idea.
They thought he was crazy. Unfortunately, for a tory, stories
like this for a few and far between and left
them unprepared for what came next in the video games
industry break. His Stars run as head of Atari did
(33:15):
not go well. It didn't take long for Rade to
alienate and in some ways ruin Atari. I was lucky.
I think post Atory I may have been the only
interview he ever grabbed. He was touching the first point. Now.
It was his idea to bring space invaders to the
(33:36):
Attori twenties and unt out here we entertain ourselves at home,
so we got an Atari video game. There's so many
different games to play. We especially like Space Invaders, Stafano's
Little Devils from Outer Space. It's fun, but personally I
think the whole idea of creatures from outer space is
a little far fetched. And that was a big thing.
But they made some huge mistakes. There were two almost
(33:59):
concurrent as a Master's. The first one was ET. The
movie ET had come around was a huge success. Warner
want to lure Steven Spielberg away from Universal where he
was making ET and movies like E T and Jaws,
and so part of what they did was they said, look, Steve,
here's twenty five million dollars licensing fee for ET. Twenty
(34:22):
five million was unheard of. So they promised him all
that money, and they promised him the game would be
ready for Christmas, and he was gonna hold them to that.
They didn't realize it takes a year to make a game,
and this is July. They're leaving three or four months
to make a game. And they brought him this one guy,
(34:45):
Howard Scott Warshaw, to make the game Warshaw was a
good choice. He was a bright guy. He was a
good game designer. He had made the Raiders and lost
our game. They assigned him to make the e T game.
They gave him no time to do it. They gave
him really truly no budget because the million had been
(35:06):
spent on it. Games at that time were made by
one person. There's gonna be music in the game. You
came up with the music. There's art. You came up
with the art, and you did the program in the game.
Howard an unreasonable task, and he went after it and
came out with a virtually unplayable game. I mean, everyone
(35:28):
in the world hates that game. I'm not sure you
can fully blame Howard for it. According to Eddie, this
sort of tie in movie and game deal it's a
pretty common thing in the nineties. We call that a
license game. It's good marketing tool. It draws you, but
they're only good for the first quarter. We used to say,
(35:50):
and you say, what does that mean. The rule is,
if the license is basically a marketing draw, it's an
eye attractor and into detractor, but basically the game itself,
regardless of what it's called, it's gonna have to happen
in the legs. Let's say the Roaming Stones Pinball. Ooh,
I wonder what that's like. You're going when you're playing
(36:12):
a couple of times. If the game isn't any fun
and don't care if it George Washington or your teacher
at school face on the game, You're not gonna play.
It's only good for the first few players, until the
game itself is the attraction rather than the license. The
other game was a pac Man. Bear in mind that
(36:34):
at the time, pac Man was the most popular game
in the world. Pac Man has been on the cover
of Time magazine and Mad Magazine. Pac Man was the
best selling our Ka game of all times all by Time.
Pac Man into or a Tirey video computer system and
you're playing the hottest games and Spice Invitus time pac Man.
(36:56):
They released the Detroy twenty version of it, and it's
don't It was terrible. It didn't play or look even
vaguely like the game in the arcade. People didn't like it,
and concurrently, America had lost its focus on video games.
(37:18):
Arcades started closing. First. It was the big words. You
had these huge arcades, and arcades are like blue whales,
the biggest animal that's ever lived, but it only eats krill.
And it's the same thing. And these huge arcades that
were living on quarters, and as long as you have
quarters lined up on the machines, you can live on
(37:39):
those quarters. But when a few less people show up
and a few less people are playing, and the people
who did show up again again were the people who
were better at games. They were the people who could
make a quarter less a minute, and thus arcades started
(37:59):
to fall out of popularity. Meanwhile, Nintendo was hard at
work at developing their own home council, The nes released
in over in Japan, Nintendo is just preparing to release
their fammycom which is short for Family Computer, which would
be repackaged as the Nintendo Entertainment Center in the United States.
(38:23):
It played games that looked closer to the arcade games,
and interestingly, it had basically the same processing chip in
it as the Autori twenty, and if you played Mario
on it, it looked just like the arcade game. And
I remember looking at that and thinking this is high art.
There were other companies that tried to compete, but the
(38:44):
only one that even made a dent on the market
was Sega with the Sega master System. The Sega master
System actually had slightly better graphic's, a little more memory
and everything. But there was this thing called packing game.
If you bought consoles back then, and if you bought
a Sega master System, it came with Super hang On,
(39:05):
which was a pretty good game. It was a motorcycle
writing game. But the basic packet on the nes was
Super Mario Brothers. That was all the technology Nintendo needed
to be anybody. Stephen says Nintendo was successful because they
were smart about design. They created iconic characters that would
(39:28):
stick in the minds of players everywhere. Giant trap you.
In a lot of ways, the growth of video games
is like the growth of Hollywood. In some ways, the
(39:49):
death of arcades is like the death of movie theaters.
There was a time when Charlie Chaplin was very big,
and then people kind of looked at Charlie Chaplin and
you know, it was cool. He was old school. But
we like Hattie Murphy, Addie, Welcome to the Army, Our
thanks themis nice to see you again, where we like
John Wayne, I got no interest in you today, Stan Claire,
(40:11):
and you won't get hurt or eventually we like Arnold
schwarzenegg Asta le Vista Baby. Originally, pac Man and the
Aliens from Space Invader were cool things, but they had
a very long ways. Donkey Kong somehow became far more iconic,
(40:32):
even though pac Man outsold Donkey Kong. But Mario had
an advantage and that Mario got the nes. There was
never a Capcom consult right. The people at Nintendo were
very intelligent and that they realized as Mario goes, so
goes are consult they started looking for other icons they
(40:55):
could create. What will the future bring from nintend Dome
more hits like Super Mario Brothers, arcade hits like Cotton Food.
Nintendo has the most video game hits Halkin's Alley, Duck Utters,
and more like Baseball and Excite Bike, and you can
(41:18):
play them only on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Now you're
playing with power. For a little while, it looked like
it might be Excited Bike. Certainly, Duck Hunt is still remembered,
but they came out with this game that was so
(41:39):
dicey called the Legend of Zelda. Did you see the
latest Nintendo newsletter? Whoa nice graphics? I'd like to get
my hands on that game. You mean you haven't played
it yet? We can play on my Nintendo Entertainment system.
It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad. Those
creatures from Ghana are pretty bad rock tech tanks leaders too.
But when you'll help a harrow polster, Yeah, awesome, intense
(42:06):
Nintendo Entertainment System, your parents help you look get up?
Did people really want to invest this much time in
the game. There was a nicy thing for Nintendo to do,
but they really threw their weight behind him. Um it
caught on. It rivaled Mario in popularity. Nintendo released their
(42:26):
first handheld counsel in They called it the Game Boy.
This effort was led by a man named gun Pay
your COI. That's a very sacred name to me because
Goompey was one of my first friends in the industry.
He affected Nintendo culture almost as much as Shaguiro Miamoto,
(42:47):
the creator of Zelda and Mario and Donkey K. Miamoto
created the personality of the games. Nintendo to this day
makes family friendly games because Miamoto likes the smile when
he creates games. Goompeo KOI. He was nice, he was quiet,
and he was miserly. His whole view was that you
(43:10):
could do things using old technology very cheaply. Even though
he wasn't the greater the ne s, the people who
did create it were trained by him and the nes.
If you take a look as basically the same chip
as the attar he created the arcade hardware that Miamoto
(43:31):
used for Donkey Kong, and in the case of game Boy,
he takes just this very very old chip and monochrome
technology and he puts it all together. What he sees
is everyone knows this chip. This is an ancient chip.
Anyone in the world can program on. It doesn't need
to be color. And he makes an assumption that nobody
(43:54):
else would make. He assumes that when people play portable
game games, they want portability. They're not looking to play
the exact same game on their game Boy that they
would play on their console. So a lot of the
games are built around the idea that they're small, you
can pick them up, you can play them very quickly,
you can put them down, you can play them while
(44:15):
you're on the bus. You don't have to concentrate the
same way you would concentrate for other games. The technology
is cheap. Heads Game Boy sells for nine bucks. When
it came out, they said it wasn't humanly possible. All
the power and excitement of Nintendo right in the palm
of your hand. Introducing Game Boy. It's portable, it's in stereo,
(44:39):
and its games are interchangeable. Game Boy comes complete with
batteries and the outrageous new game Tetris and for head
to head competition, use video link and blow your opponent away.
Game Board only from Nintendo. Now you're playing with power.
Power Atari coming out with the Links was color and
(45:01):
had a better processor and eight batteries. Live introducing Links
from a Torii, the color video game He Can get
away with Sometimes never knew what hit it. The first
three thousand units of a game Boy were sold out
within two weeks of release. By the game Boy had
(45:23):
sold sixteen million units. The Autari Links sold fewer than
seven million units. By that same time, goon Pay was
a bona fide hero. His next big project would be
the Virtual Boy, which everyone looks at as a disaster,
but it was brilliant. Again. He simply took monochrome technology
(45:44):
and he put it on a view Master. It was
a failure, so he was in the doghouse for about
a year. About the same time that the N sixty
four came out, they had a Space World that's the
Nintendo proposed dietary game show. And last time I saw
my friend Gumpey was at that Space World in Maco Hare.
(46:08):
It's in this big warehouse and if you went off
to the far right corner, that's where they at the
N sixty four. So everyone went there, and then there
were nests. The Soprannias was still pretty popular at that point,
and Game Boy games out, and then in a small
corner near the exit was what was left of Virtual Boy,
(46:31):
and Gunpay was there holding down the fort trying to
show anybody who would come by what Virtual Boy would do.
And when I walked by, he said, please, please come,
let's talk. He didn't speak English and my Japanese is
completely non existent, but he showed me as games and
then we sat down and talked for about an hour,
and then I left, and that was the last time
(46:52):
I saw gun Pay. Then left Nintendo and went on
to develop the Bandai wonder Swad, a short lived handheld
gaming device, but it was the last project he would
work on. In October four, Goom pay tragically died in
a car accident. The world gave him a nice tribute
(47:16):
when he died. I was very surprised and very pleased.
I think he got more attention when he passed, maybe
the Hiroshi Yamochi, the guy who took Nintendo into video games.
There was a lot of attention about the father of
game Boy dying. Game Boy was amazing because to that
point in time, the biggest electronics family of product was
(47:40):
Walkman family and products. Game Boy was a close second.
Then the PlayStation brand name came and that was that
Sony Entertainment entered the video game market or with the
(48:00):
release of PlayStation. We'll talk about Sony, Nintendo, and the
Microsoft Xbox in Part two. All that on the next
episode of Ephemeral. This episode of Ephemeral was co written
by Max Williams and Trevor Young, with editing and sound
(48:21):
design by Max Williams. Stephen Kent is the author of
The Ultimate History of Video Games Volumes one and two,
and Eddie Adlam is the publisher for Replay magazine. Some
of the great music this episode, like the piece you're
hearing now, comes courtesy of the artist mon Plasier. If
you've listened to Ephemeral for a while, you've heard a
(48:42):
lot of their work, and we're happy to announce we'll
have an upcoming episode interviewing the artists for now here
more at Loyalty Freak music dot com. Tune in next
episode for video Games Part two. In the meantime, find
us on social media. We're at Ephemeral Show and for
more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart
(49:04):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Ephemeral News
Host
Alex Williams
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