Way back when I stared this blog, I posted about Dave Needle's one-off Star Trek video game. That post was only part of a longer
chapter in my book about independent video game designers. Today, I am posting
the entire chapter (at least as it exists right now). The earlier post didn't
seem to arouse much interest, but it was actually one of the most interesting
stories I heard when researching the book. Now that I have a few more readers,
I hope this expanded version will be of more interest.
The history of coin-op video games usually runs something like this: first there was Nolan Bushnell’s Computer Space and then there was Pong and in-between there was nothing. In actuality, however, this may not have been strictly true (even aside from Galaxy Game and For-Play's Star Trek). The late 1960s and 1970s were a hotbed of activity in the computer field. A handful of companies, and even more individuals, were struggling to create a personal computer at the time and there may well have been others who were creating video games. These people may not have had Nolan Bushnell’s entrepreneurial instinct but it is likely that in at least a few garages and basements across the country, there were computer hackers and electronics tyros trying to build video games of their own.
Dave Needle
One such independent designer was
Dave Needle, who would go on to have a hand in the creation of 3D0, the Atari
Lynx, and the Commodore Amiga. After graduating high school, Needle started
attending Hunter College in the Bronx. It was there that he created his first
video game. |
| Dave Needle |
 |
| Article from November, 1972 Popular Electronics. This was probably the article Needle referred to |
This was the first time Needle by-passed his chance to get in on the ground floor of the video game explosion, but it wouldn’t be the last. After moving to California he graduated from Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Not long after graduation, he got a glimpse of Computer Space in a Long Beach arcade and was immediately captivated. He went home and created a baseball video game, and once again never thought about marketing it. When Magnavox came out with the Odyssey, he and a friend managed to bluff their way into a demo but could not get into the rooms where the game’s design was being discussed. After seeing the game, Needle once again designed a version of his own in an attaché case, and once again he didn’t think about marketing it.
Around this time, Needle took a job as a civilian technician aboard the USS Enterprise and in his spare time he continued working on videogames.
[Dave Needle] So I volunteer for work
on the USS Enterprise for the navy.
So I’m going to spend the next nine months at sea and what am I doing in my
spare time? Once again I’m building another game in an attaché case. This time it’s
a multi-game game. It has a version of Breakout,
it’s got a couple of different kinds of Pong
games, it’s got a maze game. [There was] no software. It was entirely hardware
driven…It grew to two attaché cases…with cables that connected them on the bottom.
In one of them was the power supply and all the joysticks and stuff. The other
one was this giant pile of wire-wrapped boards. So that’s what I did in my
spare time. I only made one of them. I never turned it into a business. What a
jerk I am.
Probably
around 1973 or 74 there was a fire on the Enterprise.
The fire was in my shop. It burned down my shop pretty bad. Most of the
equipment was totally destroyed. My game, which was in the shop at the time,
was totally drenched in this corrosive fluid that they used to put out the
fires and it was totally ruined.
[Dave Needle] Radio Shack didn’t have
the parts I needed. I was the manager of a team on the Enterprise…so I knew
where the Navy got their parts. So I would buy a lot of those parts from the
same sources the Navy was getting them from…I had military-capable wire-wrapped
boards…it was the only stuff I could buy. Then one day I stumble across a store
called I.C. Electronics in Los Angeles. They had a cool idea. Take integrated
circuits, resistors, etc. and vacuum-pack them in nice clean packages and sell
them at a decent price. Back then this was unheard of. . . One day I’m standing
in the store and in comes a guy with some circuit problem. The kid behind the
counter, who has no clue how to design circuits, has no way to help him. So I
start helping the guy and this went on for some number of weeks. One day I’m
helping a guy and he needs a part and there’s no one around so I yell at Don
“Hey can I go back and get this.” He says yes and I go into his rows of parts
in the back of the store and he’s got a ton of unlabeled stuff. I wound up
going to work at the store for free when I wasn’t working on the ship and he
paid me in parts. So I now got free parts for helping guys at an electronics
store. I was in heaven.
 |
| Todd Fisher and the legendary Mike Quinn (probably at Mike Quinn Electronics) Courtesy of Fischer's site www.Imsai.net |
[Dave Needle] I had
to build a ROM programmer. I didn’t have enough money [to buy one]. The first
ROM we were using had +9v and –12v, some ridiculous set of power supplies. So I
built this thing. It had 8 toggle switches, one for each bit. It had another
toggle switch that would increment the address starting from zero. It had a
third toggle switch that would generate the programming pulse. So you put in
the part, set up the bits, and you wiggled the toggle switch that programs in
the 8-bits. Then you hit the address incrementer (I had a set of LEDs reading
me the binary address), and you did it again and again. So, one-bit-at-a-time,
you entered the data. Because the parts were expensive and I didn’t have a lot
of space I made, in hardware, a small decompression mechanism and I had about
an 8-1 decompression of the imagery and the hardware decompressed on the fly to
give us those images and that was cheaper than [adding] more ROMs.
Not
long after the Enterprise fire,
Needle and his partner (either Stan Shepard or Bob Ewell) actually got their
first offer to make money at their time-consuming “hobby”.
[Dave Needle] I went to work at the
Naval Air Station in Alameda around 1974. So while I was there I decided to do
another game. The bar where I spent a lot of time…was looking for some kind of
an arcade game to have in the bar. So me and my buddy…built a multi-game game
that was a sit-down table game. Did I build twenty of these? Did I try to sell
it to anybody? No. I built only one. What a jerk I am.
For
their next effort, the pair decided to make use of some new technology. All of
the games Needle and friends had created so far had been 100% hardware based.
Now they decided to create a game using a microprocessor (they would actually
end up using two 8080s in the game). While Needle had no real knowledge of
software, Stan Shepherd was a software whiz. They took a trip to the Federation
Trading Post (an unauthorized seller of Star
Trek merchandise in Berkeley run by Charles Weiss and Ron Barlow) and
offered to create a Star Trek video
game for the place. When the owner told them “Sure, go ahead” they immediately
began working on the game. What they didn’t know was that the Trading Post got
offers like that every week and no one ever actually came through on their promise.
That wouldn't be the case this time. After about four months, Needle, Shepherd,
and Bob Ewell had finished the game and the people at the Trading Post were
stunned.
[Dave Needle] The
game had an Enterprise ship and a Klingon ship. They each had shields around
them with 16 shield segments. The shields took individual hits and glowed when
they got hit, which was a pretty good accomplishment in those days, and then
dimmed down to a lower level of brightness. A couple of hits on a shield would
make it die and then a direct hit through the shields to your ship would cause
some damage. You could rotate your ship so that the incoming weapon would hit a
shield instead of your ship. It was 2-player or one player against the
computer. You had 99 photon torpedoes and some amount of phaser energy. In those
days that was top-notch stuff. Plus we had a cloaked Romulan ship that would
show up when he felt like it and shoot a fireball at you. You could damage the
Romulan ship if you hit it while it was visible. The game had 16 levels of
gray. It had 42 or 43 plug-in, wire-wrapped boards in a big chassis, 2 fans in
the bottom
The
game was spectacularly successful. We didn’t understand gaming construction and
we built the cabinet bigger than 32 inches across. As a result a lot of places
we tried to play the game in couldn’t get it through their door. The other
mistake we made was we had this tiny coin box in the bottom that overflowed
every day. So we ended up taking it out and putting in two two-pound coffee
cans, one under each of the coin slots, which also filled up. While it was in
the Federation Trading Post, we were making $400 every couple of days. The
three of us, I now had two other partners, would leave work at lunch, drive out
to Berkeley and collect the money. After a while we got tired of driving there
and we just trusted him and once a week we’d go out there and they’d give us a
check of a pile of cash. Did I build ten of these? Did I sell it to someone?
No. What a jerk I am.
Jerry Lawson is one of the forgotten pioneers
of the video game industry. As
the designer of the Fairchild Channel F
console, Lawson has been called the "father of the video game
cartridge". Until recently, however, his work has gone all but unmentioned
in most accounts of video game history. Even less known than his work on the Channel F, however, is his creation of
one of the earliest coin-op video games to use a microprocessor. A game called Demolition Derby that Lawson designed
in his own garage.
The son of a longshoreman, Gerald A. Lawson was born in
Queens, New York in December of 1940. His grandfather had been a physicist, but
as an African American, the only job he could get was at the post office. His
father had a keen interest in science and that interest rubbed off on Jerry. As
a youth Jerry dabbled in chemistry, ran an amateur radio station, repaired TVs,
and built walkie-talkies. After attending Queens College and CCNY, Lawson
worked for ITT, Grumman, and PRD Electronics before heading west to work for
Kaiser Electronics in Palo Alto. He eventually made his way to Fairchild, who
hired one of its first "field application engineers" - engineers who
would work with customers in the field to help out with their designs.
Fairchild had recently released its microprocessor, the
F8, in 1975 and Lawson was convinced it could be used to make a video game. A
few years earlier (he recalls that it was 1972 or 1973), he had built a game
called Demolition Derby in his spare
time and soon got to work converting it to use the F8[5].
[Jerry Lawson] I did my home coin-op
game first in my garage. Fairchild found out about it — in fact, it was a big
controversy that I had done that. And then, very quietly, they asked me if I
wanted to do it for them. Then they told me that they had this contracted with
this company called Alpex, and they wanted me to work with the Alpex people,
because they had done a game which used the Intel 8080. They wanted to switch
it over to the F8, so I had to go work with these two other engineering guys
and switch the software to how the F8 worked. So, I had a secret assignment;
even the boss that I worked for wasn't to know what I was doing.
I was directly reporting to a vice president at Fairchild, with a budget...and finally, we decided, "Hey, the prototype looks like it's going to be worth something. Let's go do something." I had to bring it from this proof of performance to reality — something that you could manufacture. Also, a division had to be made, so I was working with a marketing guy named Gene Landrum, and sat down and wrote a business plan for building video games[6].
I was directly reporting to a vice president at Fairchild, with a budget...and finally, we decided, "Hey, the prototype looks like it's going to be worth something. Let's go do something." I had to bring it from this proof of performance to reality — something that you could manufacture. Also, a division had to be made, so I was working with a marketing guy named Gene Landrum, and sat down and wrote a business plan for building video games[6].
Lawson
created a top-down driving game called Demolition
Derby, which he sold to Major Manufacturers - a small manufacturer in San
Mateo, California. Major tested the game at a Campbell, California pizza parlor
but went out of business a short time later[7]
and apparently built only one copy of the game ever built (Lawson was unable to
get funding to build more). As head of Fairchild's video game division, Lawson
went on to create Fairchild's Channel F
home video game system and also became one of only two black members of the
legendary Homebrew Computer Club. In March of 2011, Lawson finally got some
long-overdue recognition when he was honored as an industry pioneer by the
International Game Developers Association. A month later, on April 9, he died of
complications from diabetes in in Mountain View, California.
Others
Needle and Lawson weren't the only videogame
designers who started out as independents. Among the others were Larry
Rosenthal, Ted Michon, Dave Nutting, and (of course) Nolan Bushnell (all of
whose stories will be told in later chapters). There is no telling how many
other unknown and unsung engineers were creating games in the videogame stone
age only to fade forever into anonymity before their games saw the light of
day.
Sidebar
- Was Demolition Derby the first coin-op game with a microprocessor?
Some
sources have suggested that Demolition
Derby was the first game to use a microprocessor and even that the game was
released not long after Pong, but is
this true? Lawson claims he started working on the game in 1972 or 1973 and sold
it to Major Manufacturers of San Mateo, CA. Some sources (including the Wikipedia article on Lawson) claim that the
game "debuted" shortly after the release of Pong. The F-8, however, was not released until 1975 and Major
Manufacturers was not incorporated until October of 1974. The October, 1975
issue of Play Meter announced that at
the 1975 MOA show (the same show where Gun
Fight was introduced), Major Manufacturers would be "…. introducing
two new upright games that use a microprocessor...instead of a logic board, as
well as exhibiting their line of video games and a new designer cocktail table".
The article does not name any of these games, nor do any other issues of Replay or Play Meter. It is not clear from the description if the microprocessor games were video games or not. The October, 1975 issue of Vending Times, however, does list two games that the company
was to display at the MOA: Lunar Module and Fascination - but does not mention whether they use a microprocessor.
The 1972/1973 date thus seems clearly too early, at least for a microprocessor
version of Demolition Derby (though
Lawson could have started with a non-microprocessor version). In addition, only
one copy of Demolition Derby is thought
to have been built and it never went past the field testing stage. On the other
hand, while it seems unlikely that it was field tested prior to 1975, given
that Major Manufacturers did plan to show microprocessor games at the 1975 MOA,
it (or one of Major's other games) may have been tested prior to the release of
Gun Fight.
[2]
Probably the article from the November, 1972 issue. Though it was actually published the same month Pong debuted.
[3] Wilkns’ show is said to have
persuaded a young fan named George Lucas to begin making Science Fiction
movies.
[4] The group had actually designed a
quickie game for Ramtek earlier, but the game was never released.
[5] The timing of all of this is unclear.
While Lawson says he created the game in '72 or '73, the F8 didn't come out
until 1975 (it could have been designed earlier, but surely not as early as
1972). While Lawson's memory could be off, another possibility is that the game
started without a microprocessor and he added one later.
[6] From a February 2009 interview
conducted by Vintage Computing and Games (http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/545)
[7] Major Manufacturers was incorporated on
October 22, 1974 and had a booth at the 1975 MOA show where they introduced Fascination and Lunar Module and displayed other video games (though it isn't known
if Demolition Derby was among them).
