The Story of Rock-Ola Video Games (Part 3)

Nibbler

Nibbler flyer

            Rock-Ola's biggest hit was Nibbler, designed and programmed by Joe Ulowetz with support from John Jaugilas and Lonnie Ropp. The game put the player in control of a snake that moved through a maze eating the food strewn about the floor. Each bite caused the snake to grow in length and completing a maze required both speed (since the player couldn't stop moving) and planning.  Nibbler had its roots in a few other games. Gremlin's much-copied Blockade introduced the idea of a player controlling a snake that got longer as the game progressed. The TRS-80 game Worm added the idea of the snake growing only when it ate something. Unusually for a game of the time, Nibbler featured no opponents or enemies, and idea that appealed to designer Joe Ulowetz.

[John Jaugilas] The main reason for Nibbler was that Joe Ulowetz was primarily a pacifist and wanted to have a game where you could only hurt yourself, not anyone else. This is what made the combo of me and Joe so strange as I was a big action, shoot-'em-up game fan and he wanted a game his girlfriend Mary (initials MRS) would like. Anyway, Joe did the main game logic, I worked on the maze designs and overall gameplay (I was a good gamer and Joe could barely make it past wave 5). Strange combo the two of us, but it worked out. .

The game is probably most famous, however, for being the first game to feature a 9-digit score. To turn over Nibbler a player had to score a whopping billion points.

[John Jaugilas] The billion point thing was Uncle Larry's idea. As he said, "points are free, but quarters are hard to come by." Larry's philosophy was to give points for anything positive. You moved a joystick, great, 50 points. You ate a nuclear nugget, wonderful 1,000 pts. He noted that on pinball games the last one or two 0's were just painted on to make the score look higher, but heck bits were free, so give away points and make someone feel good about a higher score. Heck, they might even put in another quarter so they could get an even higher score.

      One humorous incident involved the game's high score board. As was common at the time the default high score board consisted of the designers' initials. By tradition initials were listed in the order in which people contributed to the game. Joe Ulowetz listed his initials first but put those of his girlfriend (now his wife) second, though she had nothing to do with designing the game. As if that weren't enough, Ulowetz added an easter egg. Get a high score and enter his initials and you receive the message "You have the same initials as my Author." Enter his girlfriend's initials and you get "You have the same initials as my Angel". The bucking of tradition and the sappiness of the message demanded a response so one of the game's programmers altered the EPROMs on some versions of the games to replace the word "Angel" with something a bit more humorous. 

Sidebar - Tom Asaki, Tim McVey and the Quest for the Billion Point Score

Soon after its introduction, gamers all over the country were playing the game in hopes of being the first to reach the magical number and win nationwide acclaim. Attention soon turned to Ottumwa, Iowa’s famed Twin Galaxies arcade where a teen named Tom Asaki had become the favorite. Asaki was already well-known in the gaming community, having been part of the three man "Bozeman Think Tank" that developed the Ms. Pac-Man grouping strategy back in 1982.

. As Asaki mounted his assault national wire services began reporting on his quest. Rock-Ola responded by offering a free Nibbler machine to the person who first reached the magic number. Asaki never made it – failing in four well-publicized attempts. In the first, he scored 838 million points in forty hours before losing his last man. The next try ended after 707 million points when Tom exceeded the “limit” of 127 free men. The machine would eliminate all of your free men if you reached 128 and knowing exactly how many men you had  was crucial. The free man limit did provide marathon players with a measure of relief since they could leave the game when they accumulated 127 men and take a break while snake after snake died (which took enough time for the player to take a crucial bio-break). Asaki's third game ended when the game’s joystick broke after 793 million points. The final attempt proved something of an anti-climax when the game broke after just 120 million points. Meanwhile, another Twin Galaxies regular was mounting a challenge of his own.

Tim McVey got interested in Nibbler when he came into Twin Galaxies one day and saw throngs of cheering spectators gathered around Tom Asaki as he made one of his world record attempts. The 17-year-old McVey had never heard of anyone getting such a high score or seen such excitement over a video game. Though he had never played the game before, McVey quickly became the best Nibbler player in town other than Tom Asaki. The two struck up a fast friendship and began sharing strategies and comparing notes about the game.  

McVey's first 6 attempts at the world record were unsuccessful (during one he passed out). On January 15, 1984 he tried again. With Pac-Man champions Chris Ayra and Billy Mitchell cheering him on, he began the arduous journey to the mythical billion-point barrier. Then, around the time he reached 800 million points, a friend burst into Twin Galaxies holding a certified letter claiming that someone else had reached not just one billion but TWO billion points. McVey was heartbroken. Until someone notice that the two billion point game was actually accomplished by a two-man teams who switched on an off. Reinvigorated, McVey pressed on. As he approached the record, the crowds grew. The local TV station sent a camera crew over to capture the event live and the glare from their camera was blinding. When he reached 990 million points, McVey had just six men left. Finally, at 10:45 AM on January 17th (he'd started at 2:00 PM on the 15th) McVey reached his goal and walked away from the machine after almost 45 hours.
He then made the short walk to his house, sat on the edge his bed and told him mother he was hungry. While mom made him macaroni and cheese, Tim, exhausted, fell backward onto his bed and fell asleep. When he woke up and asked for his mac and cheese, his mother told him he could have it but it might be cold – though it had been warm two days ago when she made it. McVey had slept for 38 hours straight. Unfazed, he heated up his victory dinner, wolfed it down, and headed back to Twin Galaxies. For his record smashing efforts, McVey got a free Nibbler game and a key to the city of Ottumwa, which later declared January 28th Tim McVey Day. The Nibbler game did not last long. McVey soon found himself out of money and wanting to play games. As he looked for a source of ready cash, his eyes fell on his Nibbler machine. Since the last thing he wanted to do was play more Nibbler, and the machine was doing nothing more than taking up space, he sold it to a rival arcade down the street from Twin Galaxies – according to Walter Day for about $50 worth of tokens - a decision he now regrets. McVey’s record did not last long either. In September 1984, an Italian teenager named Enrico Zanetti played the game for 40 hours and 15 minutes in a bar in Legnano, Italy on the outskirts of Milan, scoring 1,001,073,840 points. Zanetti had first read about McVey’s records in the pages of VideoGiochi ("VideoGames"), the leading Italian video game magazine of the time. In April 1984, the magazine had announced the formation of the AIVA (Italian Organization of Video Athletes) and began printing national record scores for various games. The next month, the magazine printed a chart of Twin Galaxies’ scores where McVey’s billion point Nibbler marathon stood in stark contrast to the then-Italian record score of 350 million points. Fascinated, the 15-year-old Zanetti decided to try and break the Italian record. After honing his skills at Chip’s Game arcade in Legnano, he switched to a bar called Bar Grillo, where the joystick was more to his liking. By late September, Zanetti was ready for his shot at glory. After the bar owner agreed to let him play on a Monday, when the bar would be closed, Zanetti started his assault on September 27. By Tuesday morning, he had passed the Italian record, which by then stood at 577 million. Still going strong, he decided to press on and try for the world record. By Tuesday afternoon, word had begun to spread and between 8:30 and 9:30 that evening, with Zaenetti’s score at over 900 million points, the news crews began to arrive. At 12:33 on Wednesday morning, Zanetti finally called it quits with 38 lives remaining. While Zanetti’s record drew a good deal of coverage in Italy, it went largely unnoticed in the US. Twin Galaxies could not verify it and McVey claims he did not hear about it until years later – though Twin Galaxies apparently did later list Zanetti’s record for some time before taking it down. As for Zanetti, in October 1984, he participated in a Heineken-sponsored Nibbler challenge in Turin, but finished second. He then retired from competitive video gaming for good, turning instead to ping pong, karate, and kick boxing.

McVey too went on with his life, but by 2008, his interest in Nibbler had been rekindled. By then, he knew about Zanetti’s score and was ready to establish himself once and for all as the undisputed Nibbler champion of the world. With Zanetti in retirement, however, he needed another opponent. He found one in Dwayne Richard, a Canadian multigame expert whose video game career had started around 1986. At the 2009 MAGFest 7 music and games tournament, McVey and Richard squared off in an attempt to set a definitive Nibbler record. Halfway to the billion-point mark, however, Richard’s game froze up. McVey continued for several hours, but when it became apparent he did not have enough men in reserve to break the record, he walked away from his game. Then, on February 14, 2009, playing in his own home, Richard set a new record, scoring 1,004,000,000 points in just 35 hours and 4 minutes – almost ten hours fewer than McVey had taken in 1983. The speed with which Richard achieved his record seemed too good to be true. And it was. When tapes of Richard’s and McVey’s gameplay were compared, Richard’s machine was observed to redraw the board much faster between rounds, shaving precious seconds off his time. When the discrepancy was pointed out to Richard, he voluntarily withdrew his score. While some suspected foul play, the difference was eventually traced to a single balky connector on the microprocessor on Richard’s machine. On July 31, 2011, McVey and Zanetti’s record was beat for real when Rick Carter scored 1,022,222,360 points at Richie Knucklez arcade in Flemington New Jersey. Carter’s unequivocal breaking of his record breathed new life into McVey and on Christmas day 2011, he settled the matter by scoring 1,041,767,060 points in his Iowa home. Meanwhile, on that same day, Elijah Hayter of Portland, Oregon, the son of Dig Dug world champion Ken House, was setting a new marathon record on Track and Field. In the summer of 2012 Hayter, set a new Nibbler Record surpassing Mcvey’s total by just over a million points. Then in November 2012, Rick Carter scored 1.2 billion points at Logan Hardware in Chicago to set a new Nibbler record that still stands as of this writing.

(for more on the  Nibbler high score, see the following links:
http://www.retrouprising.com/index.php?pid=enrico_zanetti; http://www.retrouprising.com/index.php?pid=elijah-hayter
and the recently-released documentary Man Vs. Snake - from which much of the above information was taken)

Back to Rock-Ola

Rock-Ola itself didn't find out about the Asaki and McVey's quest until after Asaki's second failed attempt.

[Mike Perkins] One day I got a telephone call from someone at an arcade in some obscure place. The person was jabbering about an marathon session that ended unexpectedly and I suspected a hardware problem. The person said the number of lives when the game reset was 126 or 127, they weren’t sure which. I was always hearing about VectorBeam games that reset due to a particular way the game processor was designed (called a frame-out), and so my mind was reeling at the number of various possibilities for the reset. But the number of Nibbler lives at which the game reset had an auspicious, technical sound to it: 127 is the modulo of 7 bits, minus one. I had no idea how the code was written, but modulo numbers like that strike terror (or strike gold) in the heart of anyone who is left to debug code when everyone else is gone.

[Asaki] had just gained another life when the game reset, so I started looking at the life calculation and end-of-game logic. It turned out that Joe’s code was written such that the upper bit of the byte containing the number of lives was a carry bit (or borrow bit for subtractions). Thus, only seven bits were available for the number of lives, so 127 was the max. I changed the code to limit the max lives to 127. I burned new EPROMs, tested it, and sent them Fed-Ex to wherever the arcade was located. I never heard anything else, except years later when someone told me about Nibbler and McVey’s marathon session.  

 Life at Rock-Ola

The Rock-Ola factory at 800 North Kedzie, Chicago

            The video game designers at Rock-Ola a lot of ways to blow off steam. The Rock-Ola factory was huge and ancient, with piles of unused equipment lying around. Running underneath the parking lot was a rat-infested rifle range (a relic of the days making the M1 Carbine).

[Mike Perkins] There were three other buildings in the compound, smaller, and mostly unoccupied at the time. One of them was remote building across the parking lot that used to generate power before during World War II and at night when the plant was mostly shut down, they would sell power back to the power company.
…The plant also used to make, among other things, rocker arms for aircraft and tank engines. Some of the punch presses, still in use in 1982 for making vending machines, were 25 feet tall and had flywheels weighing probably 10 tons.
            In that whole big building, there were only three elevators; one for office personnel, and two for the factory. Even though waiting for elevators was a major occupation of many factory people, anyone in a blue shirt or with grease on their pants knew better than to get on the office elevator.
            One of the factory elevators was just large enough for a couple of can vending machines on it. The other was a personnel elevator for sending small parts between floors. The problem was that production of can vendors was done on two different floors. If you can imagine the elevator bottleneck trying to move 300 vending machines from the second floor to the fourth and then from the fourth to the first for crating and storage, well, it was a logistical mess.
            The interesting spot in the whole place was the jukebox demo room, very well set up to resemble a darkly-lit, black-carpeted, leather couched cocktail lounge. I spent a lot of time in there.

Other floors were littered with 45s that were used to test the jukeboxes' loading mechanism. The designers would play kick Frisbee with a goalie at each end of the hallway.

[John Jaugilas] They had the huge steel crates of test scratched up 45s. They also had these crates of old transformers. Rock-Ola was a huge, primarily empty factory. Only about 10 % of the place was occupied. So when we'd come back from the cafeteria after lunch we'd find some transformers and see how far we could shot-put them down the hallways. That got boring after a while so we found that you could hurl a 45 a long way if you flung it just right. Well our offices had a railroad track outside the big factory windows and on the other side of the tracks was some warehouse with one of those big curved tarpaper roofs. So after lunch we would open up a window wide and see if we could fling a 45 out the window, across the train tracks and get it to turn vertical and stick into the tar roof across the way. It wasn't easy. That was at least 100 to 200 feet. Often with the wind up you'd fling a 45 into the window frame and it would shatter. There was a 10 ft. pile of broken 45s under one or two of the prime flinging windows.

Antics like this may be why other employees dubbed the video game section the "rubber rooms" (because, as Jaugilas says "they thought we were bouncing-off-the-walls crazy").

[Mike Perkins] At one point I got Connie [the company nurse] to come measure our blood pressure and heart rate as a “scientific” data point of game excitement. I did it mostly as a hedge against the mid-project doldrums, just to have a woman sit with us a while so the guy could strut a little bit and be peacocks.

            It wasn't all fun and games, however. 10-14 hour days were not uncommon and programmers sometimes didn't leave until two in the morning. The primitive (by modern standards) tools at the time didn't help.

[Lonnie Ropp] We had these huge floppies that you would compile your code and link on, then burn EPROMS. To do all of that…would take half a day…and that's every change that you made. So basically what we would do is we'd go home at night - because it's video games and you love  what you're doing -  and write a bunch of code. [Then] come to work. Type all that stuff in, compile it, burn an EPROM and it's time for lunch.
And then You did some more writing and hopefully before you left that night you went through one more iteration. So basically we had…two code iterations a day. That's amazing when you look at these games where  you get to see the results of your work and then make additions or modifications of corrections.

Hard work or not, Rock-Ola never really had a major hit to match those of crosstown rivals Williams, Gottlieb, or Bally.

[Mike Perkins] Our games always had one or two followers, but never enough to shill the game to the point of reaching success past the game designed by real game designers, which we were not. We were technical guys turned, by circumstances, into fledgling game designers. But our ideas and sophistication was never a match for the pinball game designers who waltzed into video games with their understanding of what makes people excited about playing arcade games…The problem was that I, and Rock-Ola in general, was always one game-cycle behind, if not two.

While they may not have been video game veterans, Rock-Ola's video game team didn't lack design skills. Jaugilas, Ropp, and Bak went on to design a number of successful home games at Action Graphics and Ropp became a top pinball game designer. The Rock-Ola designers, however, faced limitations that their cross-town colleagues did not.

[John Jaugilas] We had good design skills but Rock-ola was cheap. While other companies like Williams and Bally would design and build new boards with new capabilities Rock-ola wanted us to recycle overrun game boards from bad video games. Rather than designing and building a good game capability from scratch using good graphics processors, they would find old bad games (that is why Rock-ola had some many cheesy bad games from overseas) buy up the whole stock of game board cheaply, put a few on the market and then have us try to re-program the boards with a better game. We were a game board recycling shop. That fact that we could get games like Demon or Nibbler made out of some old reject game board made our jobs a lot harder than someone working at Williams or Bally that were working on game boards that were one or two generations ahead of what we were given to work with.
     The game developers at Rock-ola had an arm and leg tied behind their backs and were told to run the race and finish in the top 5. They made plenty of money that way. that is also why some of us were successful working on home game systems after Rock-ola. At least we got current technology to work with.

Rock-Ola didn't last long in the video game world. By the time Ropp was hired in 1982 the company was under a hiring freeze and beginning to feel the pinch from the coming crash. In addition the company's overall sales were in sharp decline. One VP tried to initiate the same bundling strategies they'd used with vending machines by requiring distributors to buy a certain number of jukeboxes for each video game they bought. Instead, the distributors bought neither and jukeboxes sales to 75 a week (from 750 not too many years before).

[Mike Perkins] The first indication to me was the flagging jukebox sales, because of them being the staple for Rock-Ola, with AMI eating our lunch, not just technically, but with a fresh sales approach. When video games came along, the future looked brighter to me, personally, because of the technical challenge and fun it presented. So for a couple of years, I had blinders on, and didn’t pay much attention to the business aspect – we all kept getting paychecks and things were fine. We played kick Frisbee, shot-putted transformers, threw 45s onto tar-encrusted roofs across a bed of train tracks, and had some marvelously-fun lunches at places like Bishop’s Chili and Jimmy’s Red Hots. We were kids doing kid-things. But when our paychecks one week dropped to 80% of what they had been, the fun was over, and the writing was on the wall.

Before long the game developers began to scatter to the winds, Rock-Ola went to a 4-day workweek and in 1983 the company shut down its video game division. Lonnie Ropp went to Entertainment Sciences where he worked on Bouncer before returning to Chicago. John Jaugilas and Joe Bak went to Action Graphics, where they developed home and computer games (along with Richard and Elaine Ditton from Marvin Glass/Midway and Dave Thiel from Gottlieb). Jaugilas, Bak, and Ropp (along with the Dittons) later formed Semaphore Systems. Jaugilas and Bak then left the coin-op game industry, but Ropp became a pinball designer and to date has worked on 61 games (tied for 15th on the all-time list).
            As for Rock-Ola, the company eventually moved to nearby (and much safer) Addison. David Rockola continued to show up for work each day into his 80s. In 1992 the company's jukebox assets were sold to Glenn Streeter of the Antique Apparatus Company who moved the company to Torrance, California where it still exists today. David Rockola died in 1993 at the age of 96.