More Replay and Play Meter Charts

Earlier, I posted some RePlay and Play Meter operator polls from the 1970s. Today, I'm posting some charts from the 1980s. These charts contain a lot more information and some may find them more interesting.

First, here's a chart from the July, 1982 issue of RePlay. Note that the Cocktail Videos charts didn't last very long.

Here's one from October, 1984. Very similar to the above except that the Cocktail chart is gone and they've added a "software" chart (i.e. conversion kits and system games).

Play Meter had a greater variety of formats. Here's one from the May 1, 1982 issue. I find this format interesting because it included actual weekly earnings figures (a practice they stopped after a year or so due to complaints that people might use the information to demand higher taxes/fees from operators etc.)

The next one is from the November 15, 1983 issue:

Finally, here's one from August 15, 1984, when they had six separate video game charts:

 

 

The Coin-Op Amusement Industry Year-By-Year: 1978

   I haven't done one of these in a while. This time, I'm only going to do a single year because I consider 1978 to be the last year of the "Bronze Age" (1979 was kind of a transition year).

1978

            RePlay’s annual review said of 1978 "Video games…disappointed this past year. Unfortunately, they were off in both sales and route collections in all parts of the country. It was probably the most disappointing year in the history of this college-bred phenomenon of the coin industry."  They also noted that the year was "less than a banner year" for the coin-op industry in general (outside of pinball and foosball). The main issues were over saturation and poor quality control. Video games did increase their collections for the third straight year, but at a much slower rate than previously. The European market for American video games was actually stronger than the domestic one. In RePlay's fall poll, 47% of operators said they planned on purchasing fewer upright video games versus just 28% who planned to buy more. For cocktail video games, which had been stung by the appearance of the "blue sky" operators, things were even worse with just 3% saying they planned to buy more versus 90% who planned to buy fewer. The variety of new video games continued to increase in 1978. After wowing at the 1977 AMOA show, Cinematronics' Space Wars went on to become the biggest hit of the year, topping both the Replay and Play Meter charts. This marked the first time a game not made by Atari or Midway was ranked #1. Indeed no non-Midway, non-Atari game managed to rank in the 6 in any of the four previous polls conducted by the two magazines. Space Wars also introduced the vector display to the industry.

Pinball and Other Coin-Op Games

            The big news in the industry continued to be the rise of pinball and especially solid state games. Replay noted that "Pinball is 'all the rage' in virtually every type of location. It's even beating out 'King pool table' in bars as the top coin-grabber in this year's poll ... a hard thing to believe…" Another issue declared that "Flipper games are the darling of the business right now." According to Play Meter average weekly collections from pinball games rose from $44 in 1977 to $62 in 1978. Replay reported in 1985 that 53% of income in street locations in 1978 and 42% of arcade income came from pinball. Bally introduced seven different pinball machines during the year that sold more than 10,000 copies, led by Playboy with 18,250 (though it wasn't released until December) and Mata Hari with 16,260. Outside of pinball and video games, Williams released its first solid state shuffle alley Topaz. Arachnid debuted English Mark Darts (which would eventually spark the electronic darts revolution). The AMOA allowed gambling games on the convention floor for the first time and distributors started to handle more than one brand of jukeboxes, breaking a long tradition.

Statistics:

# of Different Video Games Released: ca 110

Top Games

Replay: 1. Space Wars (Cinematronics), 2. Sprint 2 (Atari), 3. Sprint (Atari), 4. Sea Wolf (Midway), 5. Breakout (Atari), 6. Super Bug (Atari), 7. Starship 1 (Atari), 8. Sea Wolf II (Midway), 9. Smokey Joe (Atari), 10. LeMans (Atari)

Play Meter: 1. Space Wars, 2. Sprint 2, 3. Sea Wolf, 4. Sea Wolf II, 5. Super Bug 6. Starship 1 (Atari), 7. Circus (Exidy), 8. Breakout, 9. Night Driver (Atari), 10. Sprint 1 (Atari)

Significant Firsts:
First Cockpit Game: Star Fire (Exidy)
First Game To Record High Scores and Initials of Top Players: Star Fire (Exidy)

Top machine types, average weekly earnings:

Replay: Pins $51.50, Pool Tables $44.25, Upright Video Games $43.75
Play Meter: Pinball $62, Pool Tables $53, Jukeboxes $52, Video Games $50
Vending Times (no figures for jukeboxes): Pinball $48, Pool Tables $41, Video Games $36

Total coin-op collections
Vending Times: $2.2 billion (does not include jukeboxes)

% of collections by game type (RePlay)

Street locations: flippers 53%, pool tables 18%, TV games 17%

Arcades: flippers 42%, TV games 31%, group games 12%

# of machines on location (in thousands):
Vending Times (no figures for jukeboxes): Pinball (573), Pool Tables (184.9), Video Games (164.6)
Play Meter: Pinball (737.6), Arcade Games [includes video games] (469.4), Jukeboxes (447), Pool Tables (268.2)

Total dollar volume of collections, by machine type (in millions):

Vending Times: Pinball $1,430, Pool Tables $394, Video Games $308
 
% of total equipment, by type (Play Meter)
Pinball: 33%, Arcade/Video: 21%Phonographs: 20%

# of new machines bought per operator, by type (Play Meter)

Pinball: 21, Video Games: 12, Phonographs: 5, Foosball: 5

Preferred Video Game Manufacturer (Play Meter)
Atari 69%, Bally/Midway 27%, Exidy 1%, Others 3%

Most popular game types (Replay)

Taverns: 1. Pinball Machines, 2.Pool Tables, 3. Shuffle Alleys, 4. Video Games
Restaurants: 1. Pinball Machines, 2. Upright Video Games 3. Wall Games and Cocktail Video Games (tie)

Summing it All Up - The Bronze Age

 By the start of 1979, it was clear that video games had brought about major changes in the coin-op industry. When Pong made its debut in 1972, the industry was in many ways not far removed from its penny arcade roots. It was an old-fashioned industry that was often difficult for new firms to enter and sometimes closed to new ideas. It was also an industry that was struggling. Sales were flat. Jukeboxes were in decline. Top pins were selling in the neighborhood of 5-6,000 units. In 1969, Chicago Coin's Speedway sold the "amazing" total of 10,000 units. The rise of video game technology and the phenomenal success of the games themselves would transform the industry and force it to modernize. In 1978, Play Meter editor Ralph Lally wrote "The introduction of video games will probably rank as the decade's number one innovation. No one can doubt the vast number of new locations and players they brought to this industry" (though he noted that the introduction of solid state pinball ran a close second).

The opening of new locations to coin-op games may have been video games’ greatest impact, not only because of the new revenue it generated, but because of the positive impact it had on the industry’s image. In an article in the October, 1976 issue of RePlay titled "TV Games and Respectability", industry veteran and video game skeptic Louis Boasberg explained.

[Louis Boasberg] …I will shout it to high heaven that all of us in this great industry owe a debt of gratitude to video games and the developers of same, for they have given us respectability and above all entree. I emphasize entree because video games have allowed operators to operate in thousands of locations where any kind of coin operated amusement game was taboo, unacceptable, and not permitted to operate in the past. To name a few of these locations: Such places as swank cocktail lounges, restaurants, hotel lobbies, hotel game rooms, airports, supermarkets, shopping malls, department stores and many others, and I might add the list is growing all the time

 Circa 2000, Industry veteran Paul Jacobs, who worked for over a dozen company during his 35-year (and counting) career echoed the sentiment.

[Paul Jacobs] The video game was the greatest change that ever occurred in the coin-op business. It opened up a whole array of new locations for operators. Our industry is now mentioned in the same breath as the motion picture industry and the recording industry.  It is the video game that did this. The industry is not viewed in the context of a smoke-filled pinball parlor anymore. We are looked upon as a very legitimate form of entertainment.  The video game has had such an impact on our industry that those who view our industry today refer to it as the video game business, not the coin-op business.

  For those familiar with the video game banning controversies of the 1980s or the seemingly endless campaign against video game violence, these comments may seem paradoxical, if not outright false. Prior to Pong, however, the coin-op industry had a reputation that was, I anything, even worse than it was at the height of the anti-arcade crusades of the ‘80s or anti-violence crusades of the ‘90s. Prior to the rise of video games, many considered the coin-op industry to be one step above organized crime and prostitution.

In addition to the new locations, video games also bought a host of new manufacturers and operators into the industry. While many older operators complained that they didn't know how to service the newfangled video games and solid state pins, many new operators found them much easier to maintain. Servicing gun games and pinball required work and more than a little experience. Balls had to be cleared from playfields (which required removing the top glass), stuck relays had to be unstuck, and moving parts broke frequently. With video games, however, all an operator often needed to do was wipe down the glass and collect the coins. While servicing broken video games often required the assistance of technicians, the games didn't break down nearly as frequently as their electro-mechanical predecessors.

Of course, we don’t want to overstate the impact of video games on the coin-op industry either. Looking back from the 21^st century when video games are as ubiquitous as toothpaste, it’s all too easy to read our modern opinions back into 1978. Video games, for instance, did not render pinball obsolete overnight as some have written. Far from it. In fact, in the years 1976-78, it was the pinball game, not the video game, that ruled the roost in the coin-op henhouse. And the biggest reason was the introduction of the solid-state pin.

 

[Ed Adlum] During that time, the biggest event was the birth of the electronic pinball machine. It caused a two year pingame boom during which both the industry and the playing public fell absolutely in love with this updated version of the classic game. Bally dominated the market while all the remaining pin makers like Williams and finally Gottlieb got into the act.

 In 1978, for example, while arcade video games generated almost $400 million, pinball generated $1.4 billion – over three times as much[1]. Pinball controlled 53% of the coin-op market and it wouldn't be until 1980 that video games overtook them. According to Play Meter there were 738,000 pinball tables on location in 1978, compared to 514,000 video games and electromechancial arcade games (Vending Times gives very different numbers: 573,000 pinball games, 165,000 video games, and 9,500 arcade games). All three major trade magazines (RePlay, Play Meter, and Vending Times) agree that in terms of average weekly earnings, pinball games outranked video games in 1978. While video games may not have spelled the death of pinball – at least not in the 1970s, a better case can be made that they displaced electro-mechanical arcade games, ball bowlers, and wall games, which went into sharp decline around 1976 and had largely disappeared by 1978 (though they would later make a comeback). While video games had drawn new manufacturers into the industry, many of them left almost as fast as they entered. By 1979, the list of video game manufacturers that had disappeared or been absorbed by other companies included Digital Games, Electromotion, Meadows Games, Amutech, PMC, Mirco Games, Innovative Coin Corp., Fun Games, Electra Games, Computer Games, Amutronics, Brunswick, Ramtek, PSE, and Chicago Coin. The influx of new operators was even more chaotic and would eventually prove more of a curse than a blessing.

           In the years immediately after Pong's release, many in the industry simply ignored video games and even those who didn't saw that as little more than a novelty

[Ed Adlum] I remember an upstate operator named Millie McCarthy who wouldn't put a sit-down cocktail video game into any of her places for fear of someone dropping a beer mug onto the TV monitor...what we call the picture tube. In the beginning, video looked like just one more way to play a game. Even Nolan Bushnell himself once asked...and I was there when he did. . ."What else do you think we can do with this other than play tennis or soccer or hockey?"

 By 1978, few still considered the games a mere fad, but neither was it clear that they were the wave of the future and many operators remained leery of video games or saw them as just one of many options in the coin op world.  It was still possible (though barely) for an operator in 1978 to ignore the games entirely. Pong had been all the rage in the early ‘70s but its reign was relatively brief and the game quickly faded from memory. By 1978, few adults could name a single arcade video game other than Pong. In 1979 that would change. On the other side of the globe, a different kind of video game was taking Japan by storm and video games would once again become a national craze – one that would make the glory years of Pong seem tame by comparison. The golden age of video games was about to begin.

---

[1] Figures are from the Vending Times Industry Survey.  Other sources give figures of $200 million spent on video games and over $1 billion spent on coin-op games as a whole.

Pictures

From Electronic Games, August, 1982

From January, 1984:

Some Kiddie Ride/Video Game Combos from the early 1980s:

Intermark's Poker Machine (Play Meter, March, 1979)

Hologram Time Traveler - The Revolution That Wasn't

 

 

At the September, 1982 JAA show in Japan, Sega had had introduced Astron Belt, often cited at the first laserdisc game (though Electro-Sport’s Quarter Horse had actually preceded it). The game’s actual release, however, didn’t occur until late 1983 allowing Cinematronics to beat them to market with the Rick Dyer-designed Dragon’s Lair. Laserdisc games ultimately proved not to be the savior of the industry that many predicted (or at least hoped) they would be, but they were an interesting side note to video game history that made use of an innovative new technology.

            At the ACME show in March 1991, Sega would try again with another new technology – holography – when they introduced Time Traveler, billed as the first game to make use of hologram technology (it also used a laserdisc). Sega coin-op president Tom Petit called the game the “most radical departure in coin-op technology in 15 years” and said the game represented an entirely new class of machine “as different from conventional video games as pinball and redemption”. And this time, Sega knew that Rick Dyer wouldn’t beat them to market since he designed the game. Dyer was, if anything, more enthusiastic than Petit, predicting that the game would spark a degree of interest not seen since Pac-Man. As with the laserdisc game, however, the “hologame” (as Sega called it) failed to take the industry by storm – and for many of the same reasons. But before discussing the details, let’s take a quick look back.

A (Very) Brief History of Coin-Op Holography

Holography was nothing new in the coin-op world. It had been tried before, but had never really caught on (despite being proclaimed a key technology in the future of the industry since at least the early 80s). Perhaps the first holographic coin-op game was Kasco’s Gun Smoke, a western-themed gun game with a “holographic” target that debuted in late 1975 (though the game actually used a non-laser “hologram” rather than a true hologram – which involves shining a laser through special film or other recording media). The game was licensed to Taito America for U.S. distribution, who showed it at the 1975 MOA show. While the unit was a hit in Japan (reportedly selling 6,000 units), it flopped in the U.S. (with just 750 sold). Nonetheless, Kasco followed up with Samurai and Bank Robber (the latter, which used 8 different “holograms”, was shown at the ATE in London in January, 1977)

            Around July of 1976 came another holographic gun game – Midway’s Top Gun (which used a true laser “drum” hologram). Once again, however, the unit failed to sell. Some sources claim that artist Peter Claudius created the first X-rated holographic game in the 1970s (they may be referring to the erotic holograms created by Claudius shown at the New York Museum of Holography in 1978). At the 1977 IAAPA show, a Dallas-based company called Bacchus Games showed a machine called Morgana in which a holographic, floating face dispensed fortunes.

 

 

            What about video games? While a number of companies looked into the technology in the late '70s and early '80s, none were able to release a game (at least not an arcade game), and it is not certain if they even developed one. In 1978, Meadows Games was purchased by Holosonics, a Washington-based company that had bought up 90% of the patents in the field of holography. Not long after the deal, Meadows announced plans to produce a holographic video game, which was slated for release in early 1979, but Holosonics went bankrupt, Meadows Games folded, and the game was never produced. After producing the 3D game Dark Planet, Stern was reportedly at work on a holographic game, but it too was never released an no other information on it has ever surfaced. On the consumer front, of course, Atari produced Cosmos – a console that made use of holographic technology, but neither Atari nor anyone else is known to have produced a holographic coin-op video game. About the closest thing came in 1980 when a company called Lazeworld (founded by John Foy) produced a holographic overlay for Asteroids that produced multi-colored special effects when an enemy was destroyed (Foy also produced “pinball glasses” – a pair of glasses with holographic lenses that a player was supposed to wear while playing pinball to enhance the experience).  

The Creation of Time Traveler

It would be 1991 before a holographic game finally made its way into arcades. The genesis of the game came when Rick Dyer read a story in the February, 1990 issue of RePlay about a product called the Del Vision Micro-Theater that created 3D “holographic” images. The Del Vision was made by company in Chatsworth, California called With Design In Mind , though the technology had actually been invented (and patented) in Japan by Dentsu, Inc. – an advertising and PR firm that had been founded in 1906 and had produced the first newspaper ads and TV commercials in Japan. Dentsu used its holographic technology for advertising and point-of-purchase displays. It licensed the technology to With Design In Mind, who used it to create the Del Vision Micro-Theater (invented by Steve Zuloff and Barry Benjamin). The Micro-Theater debuted at the 1990 winter CES, where it wowed the audience with a demo that included multi-colored fish and jellyfish floating in space and a tiny ballerina that seemed to dance across a glass surface (RePlay said that the product “could almost be called the hit of the show”).

 

At the time, Dyer was working for a company called Allen Design in Carlsbad, California. After reading the article, he immediately contacted With Design In Mind and within a week, had inked a deal with the company (Capcom and Leland also tried to license the technology for use in video games, but Dyer beat them to the punch). Allen Design and With Design In Mind formed a partnership called Hologram Ventures and began designing a video game using the Micro-Theater technology. In truth, the Micro-Theater (and Time Traveller) did not use true hologram technology. Instead, it used a parabolic mirror shaped like a quarter sphere to project an image from a video monitor into space.

 

 

Unlike a true laser-based hologram (which allowed viewers to see an image from different perspectives as they walked around it), the mirror technique produced the same perspective from every viewing angle. One issue that Dyer’s team had to solve was the mirror, which, according to Dyer, had cost $7,600 per unit when used in Japan (a prohibitive cost for an arcade video game). To solve the problem, Dyer subcontracted the creation of the mirror to an aviation firm that made canopies for fighter jet cockpits who was able to produce the mirror at a much lower cost. Nevertheless, development of the game was still expensive. Dyer’s team worked 24-hour shifts for the last 10 months to get the game ready for the ACME show (Dyer claimed it was one of the biggest R&D commitments in the history of the industry). Meanwhile, in late 1990, Sega had signed on as a partner to manufacture and promote the game. While Time Traveler used a laserdisc to store the game’s footage, unlike Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, the game used live action rather than animation. 1,000 actors auditioned or the game’s 36 speaking parts. Actor and professional Hollywood stunt coordinator Steve Wilbur landed the role of the game’s hero Marshal Gram. Las Vegas aerobics instructor LeAnn McVicker played Princess Kyia-La and Robert Mannigan (a struggling actor who was producing a cable access show in San Diego) was cast as the game’s villain Vulcor. Filming in San Diego, a crew of about five people headed by producer director Mark E. Watson, created about 30 minutes of footage for use in the game, complete with full digital soundtrack.

 

Time Traveler  on display at the ACME show in 1991

 

 

The Game

In the game, Kyia-La, Princess of the Galactic Federation, travels back in time from the 26^th century to the wild west to recruit the hero Marshal Gram (a sutble pun on “hologram”) to track down the renegade scientist Vulcor, who has “disrupted the time continuum of the universe”. To stop the dastardly Vulcor, Gram has to travel through 12 different eras of time (though from YouTube videos, there appear to be only 7), from 50,000 BC to 2552, squaring off against a host of enemies including ninjas, knights, cavemen, punk rockers, archers, the devil, and a 300-pound Amazon queen (played by actor Kevin Mein in drag). The action consisted of a series of short segments in which the Marshal used a joystick and buttons to either outdraw his enemies, or duck and jump to avoid their deadly weapons. To aid him on his quest, Gram had a limited supply of “time reversal cubes”, which would turn back the hands of time after the Marshal’s untimely death to give him a second chance (additional cubes could be purchased from a sultry female "trader" by inserting more quarters). While the game may sound interesting, generated a lot of buzz, and met with initial success (grossing a reported $18 million), it ultimately failed to deliver on its promise and disappeared even more quickly than Dragons's Lair and Space Ace. Part of the problem was its insane level of difficulty, which frustrated a number of players. A bigger issue, however, was that many felt the game itself just wasn’t very good. Like Dragon’s Lair and the other laser disc games of the 1980s, it was little more than a reaction meter/memory test in which the player merely had to learn the correct sequence of moves and then repeat them. Likely in an effort to alleviate this problem, the game chose randomly from five different scenes per era and also included a few additional elements (like a scene in which the player gambled with the devil for his life) but the basic gameplay was sparse. The various scenes largely consisted of an enemy or two running in from the left or right to attack the Marshal, who then had to shoot them (sometimes jumping or ducking a few times first). Most were less that 30 seconds in length. Once the novelty wore off, there wasn't much of a game left. In addition, the game was soon overshadowed by the genre-defining megahit Street Fighter II, which debuted around the same time. In an attempt to cash in on the fighting game craze, Sega produced a follow-up to Time Traveler called Holosseum in 1992 that combined a fighting game with hologram technology but it lacked real interactivity and fared even worse than Time Traveler and holographic arcade games died an even quicker death than laserdisc games had. Nonetheless, Time Traveler stands as a fascinating sidebar in video game history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 10

 Today's post is the final part of my history of Allied Leisure/Centuri

 

            In 1983, Centuri’s licensing arrangement with Konami began to bear fruit in a major way. In prior years, Konami’s games were primarily known to U.S. gamers via the licensed versions produced by Stern, including Astro Invaders, Scramble, Super Coba, Tutankham, Amidar, and others. Centuri’s first Konami-licensed game, Loco-Motion, had not been a major success. That would change in 1983 when the two companies teamed up to produce a string of hits that are among the most well-remembered games of the mid-80s. As part of the deal, Centuri usually produced the dedicated version of the games while Konami released the conversion kit.

Time Pilot

 

Centuri’s second Konami license would feature much more traditional gameplay, and prove to be one of its biggest hits - the free-form air combat game Time Pilot. The concept was fairly straightforward. The player piloted a plane through give different eras, each with its own distinctive enemies: 1910 (biplanes), 1940 (fighters and bombers), 1970 (helicopters), 1982[1] (jets), and 2001 (UFOs). Each era also featured a boss “mother ship” that appeared after a specific number of enemies were destroyed (a blimp, a B-25, a CH-47 helicopter, a B-52). The player could also fly over parachutists for bonus points.

Time Pilot was designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, who would go on to become one of the most prolific game designers in Japanese gaming history, working on games like Street Fighter II. Like Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Okamoto started out as a graphic artist. When he took the job, in fact, Okamoto didn’t even know that Konami made video games, and certainly had no desire to work on them. Instead, he chose to work there for a much more practical reason.

[Yoshiki Okamoto] The truth is my wife at the time had something to do with it. I got a job after graduating from school, and the place where I had to work was far away from where…she lived. She told me that it was too far away and that we should break it all off. I didn’t want to do this, so I looked for another job close to where she was living, and it just happened to be a game company.

< http://spong.com/feature/10109663/Interview-Folklore-Yoshiki-Okamoto>

If Okamoto took the job to save his marriage, it didn’t work. He and his wife were divorced shortly after he arrived. In addition to his design skills, Okamoto was known for his zany sense of humor. He always loved a good prank and wasn’t above pulling a fellow employee’s pants down in the street. When he later moved to Capcom, he pulled a more original prank. When a coworker fell asleep during a meeting, Okamoto pulled down the shades, turned off the lights, ushered everyone out of the room, and set the clock to 3 A.M. At Konami, Okamoto started off doing art for posters and flyers used to advertise Konami’s game. He then moved on to designing characters before he was finally asked to design a game of his own (he suspects that this was why Konami had hired him in the first place). Konami wanted him to design a driving game in which a player had to earn their driver’s license by navigating through roads and traffic. Okamoto didn’t want to design a game at all, but if he did, he wanted to create a game that someone like him, a non-video game fan, would want to play. He asked to be allowed to design a flying game based on Namco’s Bosconian. When his boss refused, Okamoto created the game anyway, surreptitiously slipping his code to a data-entry person while showing his boss the “progress” he was making on the driving game he was supposed to be working on. Perhaps Okamoto’s boss should have listened to him. Okamoto’s flying game, Time Pilot, went to be one of the company’s biggest hits, reaching #1 on Play Meter’s charts. Konami also released a sequel to the game, Time Pilot ’84, as a conversion kit for the original (though a few hundred dedicated cabinets were made) and scored another #1 Play Meter hit.

Gyruss

           

While Time Pilot was a hit, Yoshiki Okamoto didn’t get a chance to bask in its success. After refusing to let him work on the game, Okamoto’s pass pulled a “Larry Tate” (Darren’s boss on Bewitched), claiming he’d like the idea all along and taking credit for the game himself. Despite Time Pilot’s success, Okamoto still didn’t want to make video games. 

[Yoshiki Okamoto] "I don't want to make games," I told them, "but fine, I will make another one. But after that I want to make a poster." I mean, I was hired as an illustrator, and that's what I was hoping I could do there. So they said I could work on a poster when the game [Gyruss] was finished.

<1up.com/features/republic-yoshiki-okamoto-interview>

In addition to promising to allow Okamoto to return to poste work, Konami also gave him carte blanche to create whatever kind of game he wanted (though at least two sources claim the game was developed by Ultimate Play the Game/Rare[1a]). Despite his reluctance, Okamoto came up with another winner - the classic shoot-em-up Gyruss, a game that has often been described as a combination of Galaga and Tempest. The description is accurate (though it’s more of the former than the latter). The player controlled a ship that moved in a circle around the edge of the screen, firing at a host of enemies that moved outward from the center. The goal was to fight your way through a series of planets: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and finally Earth. Each planet featured a number of “warps” (levels) that had to be completed before reaching the planet. There were “2 warps to Neptune” and 3 to the remaining planets. After reaching each planet, the player faced a “chance stage” that was essentially the same as the “challenge stage” in Galaga. Other similarities to the Namco/Midway classic included enemies that flew into formation from off-screen and bonus enemies that appeared in groups of three. Similarities aside, the game was a classic. The pulse-pounding gameplay was supplemented by a driving, rock version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. Gyruss provided Centuri with another hit, but due to the decline in the video game industry, it didn't sell as well as Time Pilot. Despite this, Osaka left the company shortly after the game was released. There are varying accounts as to why. In an interview with VideoGameSpot, Okamoto claimed that he asked the company for a raise, vowing to quit if they didn’t meet his demands. The next day, he said, they fired him. In his 1Up interview, however, he tells a different story, claiming that he left because Konami broke their promise to let him go back to designing posters.

[Yoshiki Okamoto] But after it [Gyruss] was done, they didn't keep their promise. They wanted me to continue to make more games. That's when I quit working at Konami.
<1up.com/features/republic-yoshiki-okamoto-interview>

 After leaving Konami, Okamoto moved to Capcom where he designed the classic shooter 1942.   

Track and Field/Hyper Olympic

 

            Meanwhile, the industry downturn had begun in earnest and many were pinning their hopes on laserdisc games to pull the industry out of its doldrums. The 1983 AMOA show was jam-packed with laserdisc games, including Konami’s own Badlands (more on that one later). To the surprise of the industry, however, the hit game of the show turned out not to be a laserdisc game, but another Konami offering – the sports-themed Track & Field. The game was known as Hyper Olympic in Japan (Centuri supposedly changed the name because Atari owned exclusive rights to use the word "Olympics" in a video game in the U.S.)  According to RePlay magazine[2], the idea for the game had come from Centuri president Arnold Kaminkow during a January dinner meeting. With the Olympics approaching, Kaminkow suggested that Konami create a sports-themed a game that put the player in the role of an Olympic athlete.

            That’s just what Konami did. The game featured six Olympic events: 100-meter dash, long jump, javelin, 110-meter hurdles, hammer throw, and high jump. Controls consisted of a pair of “run” buttons and a “jump/throw” button that controlled the timing and angle of jumps and throws. The player had to qualify in each event to move on to the next. While the game featured a score, it also tracked the top three “world record” times or distances for each event.  Each event had an Easter egg that could earn a 1,000-point bonus (throw a javelin at maximum angle, for example, and you spear a bird). What most people remember about the game is its adrenaline-pumping action. Track & Field was a real button-pounder. To build up speed (as most events required), the player had to alternately pound (and pound, and pound…) the run buttons as fast as was humanly possible. Top players had a variety of techniques to accomplish this exhausting task. Some used the "double tap", hitting the buttons alternately with their index and middle fingers. Others placed a pencil across the two buttons, over one finger and under another creating a kind of see-saw that they could hammer rapidly on one end. In the documentary Chasing Ghosts, two players reveal an ingenious method that involved the use of disassembled electric knife. While Centuri had a major hit in the U.S. with the game, Konami did even better. By January of 1984 they had sold 38,000 Hyper Olympic boards in Japan[3].

Hyper Sports/Hyper Olympic ’84, Circus Charlie, and Mikie
 

            Konami followed up Track & Field/Hyper Olympic with Hyper Sports (Hyper Olympic ’84 in Japan). While it used the same basic concept as Track & Field, Hyper Sports featured a much more eclectic lineup of events, some of which relied on timing rather than button-mashing: 100m freestyle swimming, skeet shooting, long horse (vaulting), archery, triple jump, weight lifting, and pole vault. A less successful (though still fun) variant on the Track & Field theme was 1984’s Circus Charlie, which replaced the track and field events with circus-themed competitions: fire rings (jump through flaming hoops riding a lion), tightrope (jump over monkeys while walking a tightrope), ball walk (hop from one rolling ball to the next), horseback (leap from a moving horse to a springboard and back to the horse), trampoline (bounce across a series of trampolines while avoiding jugglers and fire-breathers), and flying trapeze. 

            The final Centuri/Konami game was Mikie (aka Mikie: High School Graffiti). The player took the role of an “average high school boy” named Mike who moved through a school collecting messages (hearts) from his girlfriend. Action started in home room class, where Mikie had to bump his classmates out of their chairs with his butt while avoiding, or head-butting, the teacher, all to a bouncy version of “A Hard Day’s Night”. The action then moved to a locker room, where Mikie had to head-butt open lockers to collect more hearts. In the cafeteria, Mikie had to avoid pies tossed by angry cooks. Mikie finally found his true love in the girls’ gym class where the gym teacher was none too pleased by his intrusion. Finally, hand-in-hand, the two lovers made their way through the courtyard to Mikie’s car while avoiding football players. While Mikie was a (very) minor hit, by the time of its release, Centuri was on its last legs and much of their inventory of boards ended up being sold off to other companies.

Centuri 1983 and 1984

             Thanks in part to their profitable relationship with Konami, Centuri rebounded in 1983. Revenues for the year were $141.8 million and the company turned a profit of $2.6 million. While over 2/3 of revenues came from Outdoor Sports, video games accounted for 40% of net income and 93% of operating income. Of the $32.5 million in revenue generated by video games, 72.3% came from just two games: Gyruss and Track & Field (and the latter was still going strong at the end of the year). The company even won in the courts. In October, the company won a $5.25 million settlement from Atari in a case involving the 1982 licensing deal they had struck with the company.

                 Once again it seemed that Centuri had turned a corner. And once again, it didn’t last. 1984 revenues were $124.8 million, but the company lost $2.2 million. While Track & Field and Hypersports did well (accounting for 87% of video game revenues), the video games division lost $3 million – more than the company overall (the other divisions were profitable). By fall, with their long and lucrative relationship with Konami coming to an end, things looked bleak. At the 1984 AMOA convention Centuri dropped a bombshell when they announced their new "Direct Connections" marketing program – an attempt to sell directly to operators, bypassing the distributor. The announcement was the talk of the show and drew heated commentary pro and con. Some distributors were outraged. Others didn't like the move but understood why Centuri felt they had do it. Still others felt it was a desperation move by a company on its last legs trying to unload its inventory before they went under. In an interview in the December 31, 1984 issue of Play Meter, Centuri president Arnold Kaminkow denied this, claiming that the idea had come up in February and the decision to go ahead with it had been made in July. In Kaminkow's view, the distributor just didn't fit into the video game picture anymore – especially with the rise of conversion kits and system games. Operators and location owners didn't need a middle man. Service could be handled via UPS or over the phone (unlike pinball games and jukeboxes). Kaminkow also pointed out that direct sales were more the norm in Europe and Japan.

In any event, distributors didn’t have long to stew on their outrage. In December (just as Kaminkow's interview war appearing in operator mailboxes) Centuri’s board of directors voted to discontinue the video games division entirely. The company's video game assets were snapped up by other companies. Wico, the joystick and control manufacturer, got the customer service stock and some complete games. Jon Daugherty of United Artists Theater Amusements got the 50 remaining Badlands (with plans to put them in theater lobbies). The rest of the stock - 540 Mikie boards plus around 700 older kits - went to Video Ware, Inc., a company founded by John Hibbs that billed itself as "America's largest PC board dealer".

By the time of the decision, Centuri was already on its way out of the coin-op biz. Outdoor Sports Headquarters was the company’s leading revenue generator and they had begun expanding into other areas as well. In 1981 they had invested in a contract electronics firm called IEC. In 1984, they purchased the Virginia Capes Seafood Company and in 1985 they acquired Poloron Homes of Pennsylvania Inc. – a manufacturer of modular housing[4].These new investments would take Centuri into the 1990s, by which time video games were a distant memory.

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[1] 1983 in the Centuri version, as it was released in 1983 in the U.S.
[1a] The two sources are the book The Complete History of Video and Computer Games, published in the U.K. by Video & Computer Games magazine in 1996 and The Digital Antiquarian website.
[2] RePlay, December, 1983

[3] RePlay, January, 1984.

[4] They also owned a boat repair company, but that was sold off in 1984.


BONUS PICTURES

Here are two pictures of Allied's facilities in 1974 (sorry for the poor quality)

A photo of the wives of Atari executives, ca November, 1976

Speaking of Konami, here's a picture of the Mega Zone kit, produced by Konami and Interlogic.

Finally, some more undocumented games