1974
- Disaster Strikes
With the success
of Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney, Allied seemed poised to
become a major player in the video game jungle. They had built more Pong games than perhaps anyone else and
had streamlined their production process to eliminate waste. Then disaster
struck. In January of 1974, Ron Haliburton traveled to London to attend the
Amusement Trades Expo. When he stepped off the plane back in Florida, he was
hit with a bombshell. On January 31, Allied’s manufacturing plant had been
struck by a devastating fire. While the fabrication plant was virtually
undamaged and the woodworking shop completely untouched, half of their
headquarters and manufacturing facility was destroyed and production ground to
a complete halt.
[Troy Livingston] It was arson. [They
had] 5-gallon glass containers of gasoline. We had two compressor rooms…One of
those was thrown in each compressor room on opposite sides of the building at
Four O’clock in the morning and it burned to the ground… The fire burned down
three square blocks of buildings. We literally then went from a burned-down
building [and] 90 days later we were back in full production building the same
quantity of TV games.
Other sources cite
an electrical malfunction as the cause of the fire. Whatever its cause, the
fire was a financial catastrophe. Due to insufficient insurance coverage (and
some industrial doors that failed to release), Allied suffered half-a-million
dollars in losses (and over $1.5 million in total damages) from the fire, not
counting the downtime.
Thankfully, they weren't down for long. On March 1 they
moved into a new 40,000-square-foot headquarters and manufacturing plant and in
April, just 90 days after
the fire, Allied was back in full
production. The only problem was that URL now had an over-supply of
boards . In an effort to use up them
up, Allied quickly churned out a pair of
new ball-and-paddle games. Hesitation (April) was another soccer game and Zap (October) was a Ping-Pong game that
allowed players to move their paddles horizontally as well as vertically.
Neither game, however, matched the success of Paddle Battle. By 1974, the video game market had softened
considerably in the wake of the Pong glut
and Allied soon began looking for greener pastures.
They announced
plants to reenter the pinball market they'd abandoned in 1973 and to enter a
brand new market - gambling. The Gambling Devices Act of 1962 amended the
Johnson Act to permit states to allow the manufacture of gambling devices for
sale outside the state. Until the early 1970s, the only state to have taken
advantage of the act was Illinois and for nine years the only coin-op company
to enter the market was Bally. Then Seeburg dipped their toes in the water.
Allied had wanted to enter the market for years, especially when research
revealed that 2/3 of states were considering legalizing gambling. They could do
nothing, however, until Florida amended their laws. When they finally did,
Allied quickly announced plans to produce their first slot machine.
Despite all the
new plans, it was good old fashioned electromechanical arcade games that
remained Allied's bread and butter in 1974 as they released three new pieces
during the year. Knock Out (August)
was a twin-rifle game Chopper (October),
was another motorcycle game. The player sat on a simulated motorcycle while
steering a plastic toy model along a track. Unlike Wild Cycle and other driving games, however, this one didn't use a
projection screen. Instead the player "drove" along a non-moving
track while flashing strobe lights simulated the effect of speed.
Their biggest
hit of the year, however, was May's Super
Shifter. The gameplay was basically the same as Chopper, but there were two key differences. First, instead of a
motorcycle, Super Shifter featured a
glowing plastic corvette. Second, the game shipped in a sit-down cabinet
complete with racing seat. Chopper and
Super Shifter seemed to be more
exhibitions than games, but they were surprisingly fun. The emphasis was on
realism, with a tachometers, a digital speed readout, Christmas-tree starting
lights, revving engines, and flashing lights. The game was so popular that it was
put into production a second time after the initial run of 3,000 sold out. In
the April, 1977 issue of RePlay, a panel
of experts voted on the best arcade pieces of all time. Three of the five put Super Shifter among the top ten. Troy Livingston
tells of a humorous incident about a bomb threat Allied got while the game was
in production. When Livingston called the Hialeah police department and told
them to send their bomb squad, they hung up. They didn't have one. Bravely,
Livingston made his way to the Super
Shifter cabinet containing the alleged bomb As he began to open the cabinet
Ron Haliburton, who had staged the whole thing, tossed a cherry bomb behind him
and watched with glee as the "bomb" (and Livingston) went off.
While Allied
made a respectable $7 million in revenue in fiscal 1974, they lost $266,000 due
to the fire and the market downturn. On the other hand, they had survived a
disaster that could easily have spelled the end of the still-relatively-young
company. Only time would tell in 1975 would be any better.
1975-76:
Video and Arcade Games
Despite plans to curtail video game
production, Allied produced (at least) five new titles in 1975 and early 1976. Robot (February, 1975) and Fotsball (March) were ball-and-paddle
games, though the latter (a video version of foosball) came in an innovative
stand-around cabinet. Allied finally got around to producing video versions of
the two arcade game genres that had been putting bread on their table for
years.
Street
Burners (May, 1975) was a driving game while Ace
(March, 1976) was a two-player aerial combat game in which each player
controlled a biplane and tried to shoot down his opponent. When a player’s
plane was hit, he bailed out and unscrupulous (or morbid) players could shoot
helpless opponents as they slowly descended in their parachutes. Fire
Power (January, 1976) was a tank vs. airplane game that some say was one of
the earliest video games to feature scrolling. Ski was one of the more inventive of the video games released in
the late 1970s (though there is some question as to whether it actually was a
video game). The player stood on a pair of footpads while gripping a pair of
ski poles. By twisting her body she could move the footpads and control the
direction in which the on-screen skier was travelling while the ski poles could
be used to control speed. As the player shooshed down the slopes, they were
serenaded by alpine music. RePlay reported
that the game did especially well in ski resorts in New York.
Allied produced
only one electromechancial arcade game in 1975, but it was a doozie. The "fabled" (as RePlay later described it) F-114 (June) was an absolutely
gargantuan projecting screen air combat game that put the player in a swiveling
seat, facing an ginormous screen while blasting away at enemy jets. Allied's
sole arcade effort of 1976 was Daytona
500, another outstanding sit-down projection screen driving game.
Manufacturing problems, however, pushed its planned May release to June and
affected sales projections
An
Unusual Departure (or two)
In January, 1975
Allied entered into an agreement with another company (probably Advanced Patent
Technology of Nevada, who
sued them in 1978) to begin development on a solid-state slot machine. In 1976,
Allied introduced one of their oddest and most expensive products - the AstroPrint photo booth. In development
since 1975, the machine printed computer-generated portraits of patrons. While
paying money for a low-res, pixilated, "photo" from a dot matrix
printer might seem downright loopy today, at the time the units were all the
rage. When Allied debuted the unit at the Circus
Circus casino in Las Vegas, the line extended all the way around the
mezzanine. Almost no one lined up to buy it however. By the end of 1976, they'd
sold only 20. Maybe it was the $12,500 asking price. Hoping to do better, the
company hired two salesmen just to market the unit but by 1977 it, along with
their ill-fated slot machine venture, appear to have gone by the boards.
1975/76
- Solid State Pinball
Allied's most
significant move in 1976 was its reentry into the pinball market. The move had
actually started in late 1975 with the introduction of Dyn-O-Mite, the company’s first traditional pin. One thing about
the machine, however, was anything but traditional. Dyn-O-Mite was the first successful solid-state,
microprocessor-based pinball game. Unlike shakerball, Allied’s earlier pinball
“innovation”, solid-state pins would catch on. Indeed they would completely
transform the industry. Companies like Atari and Bally had produced
experimental pins with microprocessors as early as 1973 but none ever made it past
the prototype stage. At the 1975 MOA show in October, a small company from
Phoenix called Mirco Games, best known for its foosball tables, introduced a pinball
game called Spirit of ’76 which is generally considered the first
microprocessor pin to have been commercially released. Mirco’s game may have been innovative, but it
sold less than 200 units (partly due to its uninspired playfield and backglass
art). Dyn-O-Mite proved much more
popular. The playfield featured the stylized likeness of Jimmie Walker, the rubber-faced
young star of the sitcom Good Times
uttering his catch phrase “dyn-o-mite!”
While Dyn-O-Mite made its debut around the
same time as Spirit of ’76, however,
the Mirco game has generally been given precedence. There is evidence however
that Allied may have beaten them to the punch. In addition to the two-player Dyn-O-Mite, Alled released a four-player
version called Rock On, which may
have been released as early as September, 1975, a month before Spirit of ’76 debuted at the MOA show.
At the time, Allied had actually been working on solid-state pins for months,
perhaps even years and may have been the first company to fully commit to the
concept. Development of Dyn-O-Mite was
underway by April of 1975, when a prototype version was shown to distributors,
and even that may not have been the company’s first stab at solid-state pins. In
Brian Bagnall’s Commodore: A Company on
the Edge Chuck Peddle, reveals that he had visited Allied while trying to
drum up customers for his 6502 microprocessor. Created by Peddle at MOS
Technology, the 6502 would be used in a number of early personal computers, including
the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore
PET. At the time of Peddle’s visit,
Allied was talking with a number of microprocessor companies with an eye toward
investing in the new technology. To convince them that the 6502 could be used
in coin-op games, Peddle volunteered to build them a microprocessor-based
pinball game. Working through the night and sleeping on a mat at Allied during
the day, Peddle created a prototype and showed it at the National Computer Conference.
Bagnall does not name the machine, mention anyone else working on it, or give a
date (though it seems to have occurred sometime in 1975, the year the 6502 was introduced).
While this could have been Dyn-O-Mite or
Rock On, it seems unlikely. Troy
Livingston described another early Allied attempt at a microprocessor pin.
[Troy Livingston] Allied Leisure
actually was the first company to build a solid-state pinball machine. Bally
patented it first but Allied Leisure actually built the first totally
solid-state electronic pinball machine. We built 13 units and it took about 18
months to build. They were solid PC boards. It was the first totally electronic
pinball machine ever. It was a disaster.
[It used]
7400-series TTL chips. I don’t know how many chips it had in it but it probably
had 10 square feet of PC boards – literally. The entire inside of the cabinet
was lined with PC boards. It was so expensive; we could have never made it on a
production basis. Also, you just couldn’t keep it working. There was very
little in the way of signal-level connectors available in those days...or they
were for the fledgling space industry and were like $1000 each. So we were
literally having to make our own connectors. Now you go to AMP and you buy a
nice connector but in those days it didn’t exist.
Then the
microprocessor… came out. Luis Sanchez
and a couple of the other guys learned how to use it and designed the first
processor-controlled pinball machine and manufactured it. We didn’t file
patents on it, but I had machines sitting on the floor before Bally’s patent.
The prototype
was designed by Ian Richter, another former NASA engineer. So should Allied be
considered the father of the microprocessor pin? Probably not. Peddle’s game likely
came well after Atari’s Delta Queen or
Bally’s Flicker prototypes and there
isn’t enough information to date Richter’s game (assuming, that is, it isn’t
the same game mentioned by Peddle).
Chuck
Peddle at Allied
Chuck
Peddle at Allied
The most
innovative thing that came out of Peddle’s prototype project, however, had
nothing to do with pinball. While working on the game, he had befriended Allied
engineer Bill Seiler. Personal computers were just appearing on the market and
Seiler ordered a kit computer from a Denver company called The Digital Group.
In 1975, The Digital Group began selling what they called the “Cadillac of
Computers” - a kit system that offered users a choice of four CPUs and included
cassette, video, and keyboard interfaces. While it was much easier to use than
the Altair 8800, there was no real software available for it and after Seiler
got his unit up and running he was hard pressed to find something to actually
do with it. Seeing Seiler’s enthusiasm for the product, despite its obvious
shortcomings, Peddle realized there was a market for personal computers and
after completing his pinball game, he returned to MOS Technology and began
working on the Kim 1, an inexpensive, user-friendly PC based on the 6502 that
was released in 1976. Before leaving, Peddle promised Seiler that the two of
them would one day design a personal computer together. When he later moved to
Commodore and began working on the PET,
he made good on his promise and brought Seiler in to work on the design.
Pinball
Problems
Despite their promising
start, Allied’s reentry into the pinball market ultimately proved unsuccessful.
They sold just 1600 pins in the 1976 fiscal year. State-of-the-art technology or
no, Allied had little experience designing pinball games. When they put their
first game on test, for instance, they were surprised when they arrived at the
test location to find the playfield covered in black streaks. They had used a
chrome plated ball - something pinball designers didn't do because, well - it
left black streaks on the playfield. The real issue, though, was reliability. The
games were plagued with technical glitches (the most serious of which was a
balky digital scoring unit). Cancelled orders poured in, damaging Allied's
relationship with its distributors. In June, they cut back substantially on the
pinball production (they resumed production in November), leading to an even
more fateful decision.
Entering
the Consumer Market
In June, after
the pinball sales fell off, Allied decided to enter the home video game market.
Projecting sales in excess $1.5 million for the upcoming Christmas season, Allied
produced two home units (though it appears that both were actually produced by
URL under contract). Name of the Game I was
a $67 four-player game that offered the choice of four ball-and-paddle games
and two target games (via a gun controller). Name of the Game II was cheaper ($45) two-player version. They
quickly lined up order for 60,000 units - over $3 million worth. Once again,
however, most of the orders were cancelled - this time because of shipping
delays for a key component and because FCC approval of the game, which was scheduled
for September, was delayed until December. Allied also had commitments to buy
parts for 25,000 units. In the end, Allied built only 17,000 units and
Christmas sales totaled only $350,000. They sold another $320,000 worth in
fiscal year 1977 but still had 4,000 units in inventory, which they ended up dumping
for as little as $15 apiece. And they probably didn't even get to keep all of
theat. To rub salt in their wounds, Magnavox brought suit against Allied for
patent infringement. Allied signed a deal promising Magnavox a 1.25% royalty on
future arcade product sales (except pins) up to $225,000, plus a maximum base
royalty of 4.75% on sales of products covered by the Magnavox patents, and a
maximum base royalty of 6% on sales of home products covered by the patents -
including, of course, Name of the Game.
.jpg)
Supposedly, only about 20 were produced and it doesn't appear to have been widely advertised (if at all) so some might see it more as a prototype than an actual release. It was apparently designed to be played sitting down, but given the height of the barrel and position of the monitor (which, in existing photos, appears to be at the bottom of the barrel), there is some question about this. There is also some question as to exactly when it was released. Nolan Bushnell reports that it was made early in Pong's production run, but exactly when is unclear. It was likely made in the first half of 1973.
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