1980s Video Store and Arcade Models

Video stores and arcades. We used to love them. Now they are gone. Check this out.

The true story of the videogame craze – according to channel 7 news

Next time your mom picks you and your friends up from the mall after a 4-player Gauntlet marathon, she will inevitably ask "What are these videogames all about?" No longer must you strain your brain translating this cultural phenomenon to mom-speak; channel 7 in Los Angeles has got you covered with a complete primer for adults. KABC 7 reports on the true story of arcade games from the perspective of game manufacturers, the industry's existence validated by its massive intake of coinage.

Lest you think this series is unbalanced, it also provides hard-hitting investigation of arcade dangers - both the potential for physical injury as well as psychological addiction. Join Tawny Little and Jack Mittle on a truly bizarre exploration of the 80's generation's favorite past time.

Join Tawny Little and Jack Mittle on a truly bizarre exploration of the 80's generation's favorite past time.

Retro Reading

My kids think magazines are broken iPads.

If you really want to get your retrogeeking on, you've got to put down the mouse, walk away from your computer, and sign up for a subscription to the newest retro-gaming magazine on the newsstands -- yes I said "magazine" and yes I said "newsstands" -- titled simply Retro. Although now that I think about it, you'll probably have to sit back down at your computer to actually set up the subscription. So forget what I just said. Anyway, this Kickstarter-funded publication is now on its fourth issue and as a subscriber myself, I can attest to its retro-goodness. Led by native-Californian and founder of GameGavel.com, Mike Kennedy, Retro features a team of video-game experts whose talent and experience spans a whopping three decades and promises to be your next go-to source for all things digital and retro. Check out their Kickstarter video below to hear more about it!

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE HOME OF RETRO MAGAZINE

Into the Dragon's Lair

Illustration by TBottch. Stolen from DeviantArt.com - how's THAT for deviancy?

In 1983, as the Great Video Game Crash was looming upon the horizon, ready to crush huge software development houses and well-established corporate brands into digital dust, the gaming industry still had a few tricks up its Coca-Cola shirt sleeve. While kids continued to rabidly stuff quarters into arcade machines all over the country, the availability of increasingly sophisticated home gaming consoles was already chipping away at the coin-op market. This of course wasn't that surprising because after all, who wants to drive all the way out to the mall and drop $5 in quarters on Donkey Kong at the arcade when you could hit "reset" on your Colecovision at home as many times as you liked? So just as the film industry had done by introducing Technicolor and Panavision into theaters to stave off irrelevancy during the post-war television boom, the video game industry began looking into ways to pull kids away from their Ataris and Intellivisions in their living rooms and back into the money-sucking arcades.

Improvements upon graphics and sound had been, up until then, the standard way to attract gamers who were looking for the latest and greatest in what the arcades had to offer, but the computer technology behind most games of the time was already being pushed to its limits. As fate would have it, however, a bright fellow named Rick Dyer, who at the time was the president of Advanced Microcomputer Systems, got the idea to take the basic structure of early computer text adventures and scale it up to accommodate prerecorded audio and photo stills, which would form a sort of visual story in which a player could take part. After several failed attempts at generating investor interest for what he dubbed his "Fantasy Machine," a chance viewing of producer Don Bluth's 1982 animated film, The Secret of NIMH, got him thinking about replacing the static photos with quality, full motion video which, as it turns out, was just what the project needed to get people excited about it. So Rick hired the veteran Disney animator's production company to do the grunt work and on an anemic budget of about a million dollars plus, they produced roughly 22 minutes of animated footage, which could then be played back on standard arcade machine monitors using Pioneer laser-disc players and coordinated by Dyer's "Fantasy Machine" hardware.

In partnership with seasoned coin-op manufacturer, Cinematronics, the first game released to utilize this new laser-disc technology was called Dragon's Lair. It's story revolved around a brave but sometimes reluctant sword and sorcery hero named Dirk Daring, whose purpose it was to explore a dark wizard's castle and battle magical monsters in order to rescue the beautiful Princess Daphne from the clutches of the evil dragon, Singe. As in most video games, the player would interact by using a joystick and button, and had only a limited set of lives with which to complete the game. However unique to the arcade industry at the time, Dragon's Lair cost not just a quarter but a whopping 50¢ to play, which didn't sit well with a lot of gamers. Complaints also surfaced regarding Dragon Lair's gameplay as the pre-rendered video scenes only allowed the player to react to the canned events of the game, which meant that the player could not actually direct character movement or action as in traditional video games like Pac-Man, Galaga, etc.

The initial success of Dragon's Lair did succeed in bringing excited gamers back to the arcades and eventually resulted in a number of sequels, knock-offs and competitors entering the market. But it was a short-lived victory as the Great Crash (known in Japan as Atari Shock) eventually came anyway and obliterated everything in its path, leaving the landscape fresh and clear for a little company called Nintendo to take root and rebuild the video game industry from scratch. But that's a tale for another time.

In the meantime, please enjoy this video which contains all 22 minutes of the original Dragon's Lair footage, as well as about 8 minutes of prototype video, taken from the 2002 laser-disc reproduction of the game.

BONUS VIDEO #1: AN EPISODE FROM THE VERY SHORT-LIVED ANIMATED SERIES

 

BONUS VIDEO #2: DON BLUTH TALKS ABOUT MAKING DRAGON'S LAIR

 

Sheena Easton breaks up with Defender

...because she likes Sinistar better.

The birth of the video arcade

I'm a Nutting Associate, he's a Nutting Associate, wouldn't you like to be a Nutting Associate too?

If you believed the first coin-op video game was Nolan Bushnell's Pong, like most people, you'd be wrong. The first arcade game as we know them today was Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space, which preceded its better-known, wood-paneled cousin by a full year. Computer Space was released by Nutting Associates in 1971 and represented an impossible feat of visionary genius. The machine had no microprocessor, no RAM, and by all accounts should not have been possible to bring to market for several years after the fact. (It was also a giant flop.)

If you're talking about the first successful coin-op video game: yeah, that was Pong. Easier to learn, cheaper to produce, and manufactured by Atari, it was released in 1972 and sold over 10,000 units. It sparked a craze that would put video arcades in every town in America. The game itself was just uh, Pong—a rip off of the Magnavox Odyssey Tennis game, but with the novel addition of sound.

Computer Space, both the game and the story of its unlikely birth, are far more interesting. Bushnell's drive to turn his arcade vision into reality is covered in-depth in this Technologizer article: Computer Space and the Dawn of the Arcade Video Game »

Side-by-side: Pong with Computer Space.

Update - Aug. 30, 2012
Credit where it is due

The in-depth Technologizer article linked above was published just 2 months after an in-depth RetroGamer feature on Computer Space hit the shelves, no doubt providing much of the research for the article. Check out RetroGamer issue #93 to support the original investigative journalism.

Or for additional info that won't cost you 5 euros, see ComputerSpaceFan.com for an obsessive array of pictures, minutia, and even a Computer Space sim for PC.

Update - Sept. 13, 2012
Quick video snippet

Star Wars Micro Arcade Machine

In 1983, the Star Wars franchise was still quite the Hollywood juggernaut as the final installment (or so we thought) of the classic space saga had just been released and moviegoers everywhere were lining up in droves to find out if Darth Vader was really, in fact, Luke Skywalker's father (SPOLIER ALERT: He was, and also Chewbacca turned out to be his sister). Now, the other pimply-faced-teen-oriented money-making powerhouse at the time was none other than the venerable Atari Corp., who had previously been responsible for many of the world's best-loved arcade titles, such as Asteroids and Centipede, as well as some of the worst, like E.T. Little did they know at the time that their hitherto unstoppable cash-machine was about to come to a grinding halt, precipitating the North American Video Game Crash of '83. But just before the proverbial shit hit the metaphorical fan, they managed to release several more classic arcade machines, not the least of which was Star Wars, a game that successfully married the action-packed wizardry of Atari with the spectacular imagination of George Lucas. While of course it's considered to be fairly simple by today's video game standards, Star Wars still holds up as a competent first-person space-shooter that eschews pure realism for good old twitchy fun. So fun, in fact, that a very clever fellow, who goes by the name of Le Chuck, decided to build his own Star Wars arcade machine to have around the house. Well ol' Chuckie must have been short on space because he ended up making a 1:6 scale version of the game which, at 12 inches high, makes a great companion piece to any standard 12 inch action figure, which can be seen HERE along with several other photos of this minuscule masterpiece (worth it). Check out the (somewhat long) video below to get a peek of it in action - yes, it is fully functional including the custom-built steering yoke. And make sure you catch the last 2 minutes if you'd like to see a slide show of the building process. If Le Chuck ever decides to sell this thing, it'll be number one on my Christmas list.