The Pac-Man/Pizza Story - Video Gaming's Creation Myth?

The history of video games is replete with origin stories. Most of them are known only to those who follow gaming. There's one story, however, that the average person on the street is likely to have heard: the idea for Pac-Man came about when designer Toru Iwatani ordered a pizza for lunch, ate a slice, and looked at the pie with one slice missing. He was immediately struck with the idea for the game's main character.

It's a good story. But is it too good to be true?

Here's how Iwatani himself put it in Stephen Kent's Ultimate History of Video Games:

[Toru Iwatani] The actual figure of Pac-Man came about as I was having pizza for lunch. I took one wedge and there it was, the figure of Pac-Man.

Seems pretty definitive, no? Straight from the horse's mouth so to speak.
Here he is again in a 2010 interview for Wired.com

Wired.com: Is that story true, that you thought of the shape of Pac-Man after removing one slice from a pizza?
Iwatani: It's true[1]

 

So I guess that settles it, right? Case closed. Well - maybe not.

How about this, from a 1986 interview by Susan Lammers:

 

INTERVIEWER: Is the story about the pizza really true?

IWATANI: Well, it's half true. In Japanese the character for mouth (kuchi) is a square shape. It’s not circular like the pizza, but I decided to round it out. There was the temptation to make the Pac Man shape less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes; we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it[2].

Or this, from Trstan Donovan's Replay:

 

[Toru Iwatani] When I imagined what women enjoy, the image of them eating cakes and desserts came to mind so I used ‘eating’ as a keyword. When I was doing research with this keyword I came across the image of a pizza with a slice taken out of it and had that eureka moment. So I based the Pac-Man character design on that shape[3].

 

One recent author (I forget which one at the moment) claims that Steven Kent told him in a letter that Iwatani had later said something along the lines of "It would be nice if it were true?"

 

So is the story true, half-true, or just plain false?

We may never know for sure and Iwatani himself has given different answers at different times.

I actually think the Replay story is intriguing. Perhaps Iwatani did come across the image while doing research then he (or someone at Namco) embellished the story by adding the bit about lunch. Once a story is out there, it's harder to undo it (cherished myths can be hard to give up) - and It DOES make for a much better story.

This is, of course, mere speculation on my part.

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[1] Chris Kohler, Q&A Pac-ManCreator Reflects on 30 Years of Dot-Eating, May 10, 2010; http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/05/pac-man-30-years/

[2] Susan M. Lammers, Programmers at Work; New York, Microsoft Press, 1986 (http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pacman-designer/)

 

[3] Donovan, Tristan (2010-07-13). Replay: The History of Video Games (p. 87). Yellow Ant. Kindle Edition.

Great Unknown Bronze/Golden Age Game Designers

Back in the day, game designers got no respect. Most companies did not identify them and many were determined not to give them any public credit.

In the years since then, things have changed. Most gamers know who all the Atari designers were. Same thing with the Williams designers of the  1980s. Toru Iwatani, Tomohiro Nishikado, and Shigeru Miyamoto have become, if not household names, at least fairly well known.

Nonetheless, there are still a number of designers out there who haven't gotten the recognition they deserve.

Here are a few of them (only games through 1984 are included).

Howell Ivy

Clean Sweep – Ramtek – 1974 – Designer
Trivia – Ramtek – 1975 – Designer
Death Race – Exidy – 1976 – Designer
Robot Bowl – Exidy – 1977 – Designer
Circus – Exidy – 1978 – Designer
Mouse Trap – Exidy – 1981
Pepper II – Exidy – 1981
Venture – Exidy – 1981
Victory – Exidy – 1982
Vertigo – Exidy – Unreleased – Designer

Ivy was the head designer at Ramtek and was the second employee at Exidy (after founder Pete Kaufmann). Clean Sweep was actually fairly popular in its day. Death Race is well known. Robot Bowl and Circus were popular as well (the latter was Exidy's biggest hit in terms of units produced).

Bill Adams et al
Kickman – Bally/Midway – 1981 – Project Leader
Tron – Bally/Midway – 1981 - Programmer
Satan’s Hollow – Bally/Midway – 1981
Discs of Tron – Bally/Midway – 1983 - Group Manager
Spy Hunter – Bally/Midway – 1983
Curve Ball – Mylstar – 1984 – Designer, Programmer

These games (except the last) were created by Midway's internal team, thus I could have included a number of others instead (George Gomez, John Pasierb etc.)

Richard Ditton et al
Domino Man – Bally/Midway – 1982 – Programmer
Journey – Bally/Midway – 1983 – Programmer
Tapper – Bally/Midway – 1983
Wacko – Bally/Midway – 1983
Root Beer Tapper – Bally/Midway

Same thing here. I could have included others from the Marvin Glass team (Elaine Ditton, Scott Morrison, Steve Meyer etc.)

Alan McNeil

Boot Hill - Bally/Midway - 1977
Seawolf II - Bally/Midway - 1978
Berzerk – Stern – 1980 - Designer, Programmer
Frenzy – Stern – 1982 - Designer, Programmer

Some sources have him working on Wizard of Wor as well.

Ted Michon
Air Combat – Digital Games – 1976 – Hardware
Night Racer – Micronetics – 1976 – Designer
Star Fire – Exidy – 1978 – Designer
Fire One! – Exidy – 1979 – Designer
Kreepy Krawlers – Exidy – 1979
The Last Starfitghter – Atari – Unreleased – Hardware

The last four were created by Technical Magic, where others like David Rolfe also worked on them.

Larry W. Hutcherson
Mouse Trap – Exidy - 1981
Pepper II – Exidy – 1981
Hard Hat – Exidy – 1982
Crossbow – Exidy - 1983
Fax – Exidy – 1983
Cheyenne – Exidy – 1984
Teeter Torture – Exidy – Unreleased

Perhaps Exidy's most prolific programmer/designer of the 1980s. Probably the biggest Exidy name I've yet to contact. As with lists above, others (like Vic Tolomei) worked on many of these games.

Dave Thiel
Q*Bert – Gottlieb – 1982 – Sound
Reactor – Gottlieb – 1982 – Sound
M.A.C.H. 3 – Mylstar – 1983 - Sound
Mad Planets – Gottlieb – 1983 – Sound
Q*Bert’s Qubes – Mylstar – 1983 – Sound
Arena – Gottlieb – Unreleased – Sound
Insector – Gottlieb – Unreleased – Sound
Videoman – Gottlieb – Unreleased – Sound

Dave Thiel is somewhat well known and Q*Bert designer Warren Davis is quite well-knonwn. Artist Jeff Lee also worked on pretty much all of these games.

Larry Rosenthal
Space Wars – Cinematronics – 1977 – Designer
Scramble – Vectorbeam – 1978
Speed Freak – Vectorbeam – 1979
Tailgunner – Vectorbeam – 1979
Oops! – Vectorbeam – Unreleased

Rosenthal is well known for Space Wars but his other work isn't so well-known

Dave Nutting

Gun Fight – Bally/Midway - 1975
Seawolf – Bally/Midway – 1976
Tornado Baseball – Bally/Midway  - 1976 – Hardware Effects
Boot Hill – Bally/Midway  - 1977 – Hardware Effects
Seawolf II – Bally/Miwday – 1978
Adventures of Robby Roto – Bally/Midway - 1981
Wizard of Wor – Bally/Midway - 1981

I'm sure Dave worked on a number of other games. I known that he played some role on Tron.

 

George Opperman
Not a game designer, per se but in my mind perhaps the greatest unsung hero of Atari. Opperman designed the company logo, but his real legacy is that he was the main driving force behind the cabinet art work for almost all of their golden era hits.
I think the cabinet art for these games was a bigger part of their success than many people credit.

On the same lines, I could have included Pat "Sleepy" Peak, who did cabinet art for Exidy (most famously for Death Race).

Dave Needle's One-Of-A-Kind Federation Trading Post Video Game

One of the greatest pleasures of researching a book on video game history is interviewing the designers who made it happen. One of my all-time favorite interviews was with Dave Needle.
Needle is probably best known to video game fans for his work on the 3DO, the Atari Lynx, and the Commodore Amiga but did you know he started out as an independent video game designer way back in the early 1970s?  Or that this eventually led to his working on Midway's 1980 arcade game Space Encounters?
The story of how it happened involves Star Trek, the US Navy, and a late-night TV horror host.
Sound intriguing? Read on.

I would love to go into all the great stories he told me about his early years, when he passed up chance after chance to get in on the ground floor, but that would be a LONG post.

Instead, here's a super-brief summary:

• He built an early home Pong game in an attaché case in his bedroom - before Atari's Pong came out
• He also built a gun game
• After seeing Computer Space in a Long Beach arcade, he built a baseball game
• He and a friend bluffed their way into an Odyssey demo and once again made another game-in-a-briefcase
• The next game came after he got a job as a civilian contractor on the USS Enterprise

[Dave Needle] So I volunteer for work on the U.S.S. 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.

• He and a partner built a cocktail-table multi-game arcade game for a bar in Alameda around 1974

All of these games were done in hardware using TTL/discrete logic. Needle never thought about trying to make commercial versions of ANY of them. I wish I had time to tell you about how he and his partners started buying parts at Mike Quinn Electronics, but I've got to get to the main point of the post some time.

 

 

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.

The trio's Star Trek game (which was probably created around 1977 or 1978) had another feature that would appeal to fans of the series. When a player lost, the Doomsday Machine from the episode of the same name (kind of a gian, floating cornucopia) would appear on screen and destroy their ship. The game was so popular that a local TV station got wind of it and the designers were asked to appear on Bob Wilkins’ Creature Features, a Sacramento area late-night show featuring horror movies and hosted by Wilkins, who also interviewed celebrities, the most famous being Christopher Lee[1]. The next day, Needle and his friends were recognized in the streets, but even more importantly, the segment had brought them to attention of Bally/Midway who soon contacted them about creating a game under contract. With the Bally contract in hand, Needle and crew set about work on a game that would eventually see light as Space Encounters and Needle was finally able to turn his “hobby” into a profession[2].

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[1] Wilkns’ show is said to have persuaded a young fan named George Lucas to begin making Science Fiction movies.

[2] The group had actually designed a quickie game for Ramtek earlier, but the game was never released.

So does anyone out there remember this game?

Nutting Associates, Dave Nutting Associates, Nutting Industries - What the...?

Studying the early history of coin-op video games can be confusing. Especially when it comes to the name Nutting. Before long, the budding historian encounters Nutting Associates, Dave Nutting Associates, Nutting Industries, Dave Nutting, Bill Nutting etc.

What is the relationship between all these entities - and whatever happened to Nutting Associates?

Nutting Associates

Let's start with Nutting Associates. They have gone down in the annals of history as the manufacturer of the first mass-produced commercial coin-op video game - Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney's Computer Space. Their history extends back farther than that, however.

Nutting Associates was founded by Bill Nutting, sometime between 1965 and 1967. Wikipedia claims it was formed in 1965 but the earliest reference I found to it (though my search was brief) was an article in the August 12, 1968 issue of Billboard. Another article in the December 7th issue provides a bit more information, noting that they were moving from a smaller facility they had occupied for a year and a half into a new, larger one (it also noted that they had around 50 employees at the time).

 

Prior to forming Nutting Associates, Bill Nutting had invested in a company called Edex, which made teaching equipment for the U.S. Navy. One of their products was called The Knowledge Computer, which engineer Richard Ball redesigned for Nutting Associates who released it as Computer Quiz. Computer Quiz was an electro-mechanical quiz game that stored multiple-choice questions on a strip of 16mm film and projected them onto a tiny screen. It was the company's most well-known product and some credit it with opening street locations (such as bars) to arcade games. Other games Nutting Associates made prior to Computer Space include ESP (a number-guessing game), Astro Computer (a horoscope machine), and Sports World (possibly another quiz game).

 

Nutting Industries

Bill Nutting recruited his brother Dave to work on Computer Quiz. To be closer to Chicago (then center of the coin-op industry), Dave moved to Milwaukee and set up his own company, Nutting Industries. in 1967. At the time, Dave was employed by Brooks Stevens Associates (where he had worked on Willy's Jeep Grand Wagoneer - the first SUV). After quitting Brooks and forming Nutting Industries, Dave released his own version of Computer Quiz called Dual IQ Computer. Nutting recalls that he sold about 4,000 units of his version while Bill sold about 3,500 of his. Nutting Industries specialized in quiz games. Other products included Golf IQ and Sensorama (a learn-to-bowl game).

Milwaukee Coin Industries

In 1971, Dave Nutting formed a new company called Milwaukee Coin Industries. MCI’s main business was the manufacture of projection screen games, crude ancestors to the laser disc games of the mid-80s that used images from a film disc or strip projected on a screen to create a realistic background for arcade games. MCI released a number of projection games including Desert Fox, Red Baron, Flying Ace, and U-Boat. They also made a few coin-op oddities such as Airball (in which the player maneuvered a small ball around the field with a column of air) and The Safe (in which the player tried to find the combination of a safe). Keith Egging (later of Taito America) recalls that they also made a Pong clone.

MCI wasn't long for the coin-op game world. One of their customers was Aladdin's Castle, a series of arcades being opened in shopping malls. MCI's investors wanted MCI to get into the mall arcade business and shut down the video game division. MCI then started their own arcade chain called Red Baron, with 20 locations. Nutting wanted no part of it so he and Jeff Frederikson (another MCI associate) took two MCI techs and formed their own design firm called Dave Nutting Associates.

 

Dave Nutting Associates

MCI’s primary distributor had been Empire Distributing, which was owned by Bally. When Bally got wind of Nutting’s design skills they contracted with his company to create a hardware system. To make a long story short, DNA went on to establish a relationship with Bally and designed a number of games for them over the years, including Gun Fight, Seawolf, Boot Hill, Wizard of Wor, Gorf and others.

But What About Nutting Associates?

After Computer Space, Nutting Associates produced a handful of video games, including Computer Space Ball, Wimbledon (one of the first video games to use true color), Paddle Derby, and Missile Radar (which Nolan Bushnell supposedly saw and which later provided the basis for the idea that became Missile Command). Watergate Caper is sometimes listed as a video game, but I suspect that it's actually an electro-mechanical game (perhaps a version of MCI's The Safe). The last game I know of bearing the Nutting Associates name was 1977's Ricochet.

 

By this time, Bill Nutting was long gone. In 1974, Nutting Associates had gone bankrupt and in 1975 Nutting sold it to a Reno slot machine manufacturer named William "Si" Redd, owner of A-1 Supply. Redd began producing video gambling games and later formed the companies Sircoma and International Game Technology where some credit him with single-handedly launching the video poker industry (he somehow managed to convince Bally to sign an agreement giving him exclusive rights to make video gaming machines for five years [Bally got the rights to reel slot machines - they didn't see any future in video gaming machines]).

 

And Bill Nutting? He went on to form an air-taxi service for missionaries in East Africa.

 

What Was The Best-Selling U.S. Arcade Video Game Prior to Space Invaders?

Taito's Space Invaders absolutely revolutionized the world of coin-op video games when it was released in 1978. It was the best-selling coin-op video game to that point in time by a huge margin. Estimates for the number Bally/Midway (who licensed the game from Taito) produced in the U.S. vary, but 65,000 is the number I've seen most.

But what game held the record before Space Invaders?

One of the challenges of writing a book about coin-op video game history is finding a good source for production numbers. Such figures are few and far between and what scant information is out there is of such questionable reliability that an author (or blogger) would have to be a fool to write on the subject.

So here I go.

One of the few seemingly reliable sources out there is an internal document listing Atari production runs for several of their games (unfortunately, Pong isn't one of them).

Another source that I just discovered is Ralph Baer's excellent account Videogames: In the Beginning. On pages 10-13 he presents a hand-written spreadsheet created in April of 1976 that listed estimated production runs for several coin-op games produced since 1972. Unfortunately, I am not entirely clear on the source of the information (I am still reading the book). It says that he got them from Play Meter magazine, but I've never seen production runs in Play Meter or Replay (though I've only got a few issues of the former). The numbers also appear to be rounded off to the nearest 50.
Perhaps he got the names and years of release from Play Meter and estimated the production numbers using an unspecified method (I'm hoping that he really did get them from Play Meter and that I will be able to find a trove of numbers therein, but I doubt it)

Anyway, on to the contenders (I list all games with 5,000+ produced):
NOTE that the following should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
NOTE 2 - this includes only U.S. production numbers.

Super Soccer (1973, Allied Leisure) - 5,000
As per Baer.

Tennis Tourney (1973, Allied Leisure) - 5,000
As per Baer - a figure supported by Allied's Troy Livingston who remembered a figure of "4 or 5 thousand".

TV Tennis (1973, Chicago Coin) - 5,000
As per Baer - who for some reason omits TV Ping Pong, the company's first game.

Formula K (1974, Kee/Atari) - 6,000
As per Baer.

Pro Tennis (1973, Williams) - 7,500
Surprised? I was. The number here is from Baer. It's surprising to me because Williams got out of the video game field after releasing 3 games in 1973. Then they produced Road Champion in 1977 (which may have been licensed from the Italian company Fox). Then exited again until Defender in 1980.
I'd always guessed that it was because their games didn't sell well, but 7,500 (assuming it's roughly accurate) isn't bad at all.

Of course Baer does not include the company's first game Paddle Ball, which may have sold even better (though I doubt it).

Wheels (1975, Midway) - 7,000+
As per Baer, however, Baer does not list individual titles for Midway in 1976, merely noting that the produced 8,000 units overall that year.

Gun Fight (1975, Midway) - 8,000

Sprint 2 (1976, Kee/Atari) - 8,200

Winner (1973, Midway) - 7,000-10,000
Baer supports the lower figure.

Seawolf (1976, Midway) 10,000

Pong (1972, Atari) - 8,000-12,000
This is probably the natural first choice. I've seen figures for the game ranging anywhere from 8,000 (a number supported by Baer) to 12,000 with a number of sources saying "around 10,000". One figure I've seen claimed there were 100,000 ball-and-paddle games created with Atari making about 10% (Baer lists a total of 80,000 ball-and-paddle games but omits a lot of them, including what was probably the biggest of them all).

Atari Football (1978, Atari) 11,351
According to the Atari document, a total of 11,351 were produced (10,405 or the original and 901of the 4-player variant).

Flim Flam (1974, Meadows Games) 12,000?
I'd have to double-check but I'm pretty sure this number came from an issue of Replay. Baer lists only 6,200 but stops in April of 1976 and the game was still selling (it sold 200 in the portion of 1976 included). One of Meadows' problems is that they became so closely associated with the game.
Still, the discrepancy between Baer and Replay is huge. Replay may be including Flim Flam II (or Baer may be incomplete or inaccurate.

Breakout (1976, Atari) 11,000-15,000
The internal document lists 11,000 uprights produced but does not have figures for the cocktail version. I have seen estimates as high as 15,000.

Tank (1974, Kee/Atari) 15,000+
Baer lists 10,000 sold in 1974 and 5,000 in 1975 but also appears to list Tank again in 1975 with 1,000 sold. I'm guessing that the second entry is for Tank II.
Other sources give a figure of "over 15,000", leading me to believe that the exact number is somewhere between 15,000 and 16,000 and probably much closer to 15,000.

Space Wars (1977, Cinematronics) 10,000 (-30,000??)
The 30,000 figure is from Tim Skelly's recollections. Other sources give a figure of 10,000 and I tend to believe the lower figure much more

Paddle Battle (1973, Allied Leisure) - 17,000-22,000
This is the game that gets my vote. Troy Livingston remembers that they sold 17,000 (plus another 4 or 5 thousand of the follow-up Tennis Tourney). Jack Pearson (another Allied engineer) remembers selling 22,000 units (could he be mentally combining the figures for Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney?). Oddly enough, Baer doesn't list it at all (which is surprising since the main point of the spreadsheet was to account for all the tennis games out there)

So, if the above numbers are accurate, why did Allied sell so many more than the competition?

With Atari, it actually isn't that surprising. Atari was a newcomer to the field and lacked the experience, production capacity, and capital that the coin-op veterans had.
Note that Williams, Chicago Coin, and Midway all did very well with their Pong clones (Midway reportedly licensed the game from Atari). Baer lists figures for dozens of others from new companies like PMC and Ramtek and none came remotely close to the figures put up by the heavyweights.

OK, so beating Atari makes some sense. But what about those heavyweights?
How did Allied, which had only been formed in 1968, beat out the venerable Williams, Midway, and Chicago Coin.

It could be that they beat them to market. My figures (which could be off) indicate that Paddle Battle was released in March, Winner and ChiCoin's TV Ping Pong followed in April and Paddle Ball in May.
Given that Baer does not list TV Ping Pong or Paddle Ball, they may have outsold their follow-ups, but if so, I've never heard it.

Jack  Pearson recalls that when Midway came out with Winner, Paddle Battle was selling for around $995. In an effort to undersell them, Midway introduced Winner at a price about $50 lower. In response, Allied lowered its price, forcing Midway to do the same and this went on until the games were selling for around $795 at which point Midway found it difficult to turn a profit (Allied, who had already made most of their profit, could afford such tactics).

BONUS:
Here are the rest of the Atari/Kee estimates given in Baer's book (if you want to see the rest, buy the book - Baer's that is, not mine).

NOTE that for Atari, Baer does not list individual titles for 1976, but mere lists that they sold 3,000 total (remember, the list was created in April)

Crash N Score - 500
Elimination - 500
Gotcha - 3,000
Gran Trak 20 - 4,500
Indy 800 - 200 (may have sold more in 1976. Given its size, however, I doubt it)
Jet Fighter - 500
Pin Pong - 250
Pong Doubles - 500
Qwak - 250(Shark) Jaws - 500
Space Race - 1,500
Steeplechase - 500

Replay Magazine #1s

Replay magazine used to publish monthly Player's Choice charts. The chart was based on surveys mailed to operators, who were asked to rate games from 1-10 based on performance/earnings.

The monthly charts started in April of 1980. Prior to that, they did year-end surveys for 1976-1979 (the year-end charts mixed video and pinball games. I have stripped out the pinball games to create a list of video games only for these 4 charts).

Note that some issues are missing. Replay sent me copies of the charts several years ago (which I lost after transcribing the info I wanted) and I think they told me that there were some months when they didn't publish a chart, but I'd have to check the issues for the missing months to be sure.
Missing Issues/Chart Not Published: May 1980, September 1980, November 1980, September 1981, June 1984, August 1984, October 1984, December 1984.
(if you have any of these issues and can verify if they have charts or not, please let me know)

Below is a chronology of the #1 game through the end of 1984.

Upright Video Games Chart (for licensed games I only list the company that released the game in the US):
·         10/76 and 11/77: Sea Wolf (Midway)
·         11/78: Space Wars (Cinematronics)
·         11/79: Space Invaders (Midway)
·         4/80-3/81: Asteroids (Atari)
·         4/81-5/81: Defender (Williams)
·         6/81: Scramble (Stern)
·         7/81: Pac-Man (Midway)
·         8/81-11/81: Defender
·         12/81-3/82: Pac-Man
·         4/82-5/82: Ms. Pac-Man (Midway)
·         6/82: Zaxxon (Sega/Gremlin)
·         7/82-9/82: Ms. Pac-Man
·         10/82: Jungle King (Taito)
·         11/82-12/82: Ms. Pac-Man
·         1/83-2/83: Joust (Williams)
·         3/83-8/83: Pole Position (Atari)
·         9/83-11/83: Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics)
·         12/83: Pole Position
·         1/84: MACH 3 (Gottlieb/Mylstar)
·         2/84: Track & Field (Centuri)
·         3/84-4/84: Spy Hunter (Bally/Midway)
·         5/84: Track & Field
·         7/84: Punch Out (Nintendo)
·         9/84,11/4: Spy Hunter

Software Charts: Replay started a separate chart for conversion kits/kit games in May of 1983.

·         5/83: Black Widow (Atari)
·         6/83: Mr. Do! (Universal)
·         7/83: Super Zaxxon (Sega/Gremlin)
·         8/83-11/83: Mr. Do!
·         12/83-5/84: Pole Position II (Atari)
·         7/84: Vs. Tennis (Nintendo)
·         9/84-11/84: Vs. Baseball (Nintendo)
 

 

 

 

The Story of Journey - the Video Game

Today I'm going to do a post where I actualy include an excerpt from my book.
The topic is the coin-op video game Journey, released by Bally/Midway around April of 1983 and designed at Marvin Glass Associates.

First,  a little background.
By the mid-1980s, Bally/Midway had a number of teams designing games for them.
They had an internal team and at least three external ones: Dave Nutting Associates, Arcade Engineering (in Florida), and Marvin Glass Associates.

Marvin Glass was a legendary toy design firm that created such toys as Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, Ants in Your Pants, Lite Brite, Mousetrap, Operation, Toss Across and Mystery Date. They even created the original chattery teeth novelty. In the 1980s, Marvin Glass established a video game design team and began creating games for Bally/Midway.

On to the game (the rest of the post is excerpted from my book All in Color For a Quarter. Note that the book is in rough draft form):

Journey

 

            In late 1982, Bally approached the Marvin Glass team with another proposal. They wanted to create a video game starring the popular rock group Journey. At the time, the group was at the height of its popularity. Its last five albums had made the top 40 and in 1981, they had two hit albums. First was Captured which went to # 9 then came their biggest hit, Escape which went all the way to #1, eventually sold over 9 million copies, and produced the top-ten hits “Who’s Crying Now”, “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Open Arms”. They were about to go on tour to promote their new album Frontiers and thought that a video-game starring the band might be a good idea and could perhaps even be incorporated into their stage show. The group had become video game fans after bassist Ros Valory and drummer Steve Smith discovered a Defender game while touring Japan. For the next two years, a Defender game accompanied the band on its tours. One member who didn't like the idea was frontman Steve Perry, who thought it was silly and felt the band didn't need to promote itself with a video game. The band quickly arranged to have both a home video game (Data Age’s Journey, released for the Atari 2600 in Christmas 1982) and a coin-op video game based on the band. There was a catch, however,

[Scott Morrison] Midway came to us and told us they had a deal with Journey to do a video game based on the band. They wanted it done in less than three months, to coincide with the release of Journey’s new album and their American tour. Midway came to us because their own design group said it was impossible to do. Of course, we had to prove them wrong, so we brainstormed and came up with a game that we thought we could do in that time frame.

With the impetus of the new challenge, the Marvin Glass team began work on the game around October of 1982.

The game was the work of programmers Richard and Elaine Ditton (who also created the game’s sounds) and artist Scott Morrison. It also featured work by another video game veteran (and I do mean veteran). Journey made use of digitized photos of the band members using a digitizing camera that had been developed by none other than Ralph Baer, the “father of video games” who’d created the Odyssey back in 1966. Baer had come to Marvin Glass in the mid-1970s and his early projects there included a record changing device for phonographs and Milton Bradley’s Simon . The game also featured actual Journey music supplied via cassette tape.

Baer had developed his digitizing camera for use in video games before coming to Marvin Glass. When he demonstrated the unit for chief engineer John Pasierb, Midway was very interested and immediately contracted with Baer who went to work with the Marvin Glass group. The first game to try the new technology was a prototype called Clone. In Clone, rather than just including pre-generated digitized graphics in the game, each machine would contain a digitizing camera that allowed players to take their own pictures so that they could become part of the game. The player would then fly his or her animated face around the screen and replicate themselves into empty pods. A prototype was built and play tested but when (predictably to anyone who knows a thing about teenage boys) some players took pictures of body parts other than their faces, plans for the game were scrapped.

[Stan Jarocki] Kids were dropping their pants and girls were baring their breasts and all that kind of stuff. We had it out on test at Aladdin’s Castle for a while and all of a sudden you see a butt on the shoulders of this character and think “This ain’t gonna fly” but it was a great idea.

 When the idea for Journey came around, Marvin Glass saw another opportunity to put Baer’s digitizing technology to use. Initially, Morrison created some storyboards and traveled to San Francisco to meet with Jim Welch who’d created the band’s album covers and stage visuals. After Welch approved the game concept, Morrison returned to Chicago where work on the game began in earnest. At first, the team tried to digitize existing photos of the band but it just didn’t work, so they hired a professional photographer and, carting along Baer’s digitizing camera, made their way to a Journey concert in Salt Lake City to snap some backstage photos. After prying groupies off of a reluctant Steve Perry, the photos were taken and made their way into the game (they were black and white and seemed a bit large for the character’s computer-generated bodies). The game's attract mode describes it as follows:

 

"Wild alien groupoids have seized Journey's electro supercharged instruments. Your mission is to help Journey retrieve their instruments from the dangers of the five galaxies. Trek through hazardous obstacles in quest of each instrument and then battle your way back to the scarab vehicle. When all five missions are completed Journey begins a spectacular concert at the Galactic Stadium."

Journey was a multi-stage game with each band member having their own unique mini-game. Lead singer Steve Perry, for instance, had to navigate a series of swinging gates to reach his microphone then blast his way back to the top of the screen to the awaiting spaceship (a video representation of the scarab-like ship that had appeared on many of the band’s album covers). In Steve Smith’s segment, the drummer bounced off a series of drums trying to turn them all the same color then leaped behind the wheel of a laserbeam-equipped drum set to fight his way through a horde of enemies. Other segments included guitarist Neal Schoen fighting through a cavern with a rocket-powered backpack to retrieve a guitar/laser rifle, keyboardist Jonathan Cain leaping over conveyor-belts strewn with hurdles to reach his piano, and bassist Ros Valory hopping on a series of telescoping blocks. After all five band members made it to the awaiting ship, action switched to a scene of Journey in concert where manager Herbie Herbert had to prevent legions of half-crazed groupies from running backstage while Journey music played in the background. The Marvin Glass team finished the game by February of 1983, managing to do what the Bally team had called impossible and while the resulting game looks somewhat rushed (and with good reason), it was an admirable job given the constraints and remains a rare example of actual celebrities appearing in a video game[1].

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[1] Bally/Midway also produced another rock-themed video game: Pink Floyd’s The Wall That never went past the prototype stage.