"learn the board" and are no longer interested. The $400 figure turns out, most often, to be sucker bait, dangled to obscure the dreary truths that markets are becoming saturated and that dud games and obsolete good games bring in no money at all. The fads whirl by so fast that Bally does not even manufacture the historic game Space Invaders any more, although fans buy used machines for sentimental reasons, and many arcades keep one around as a gesture toward the old days.
Wait a minute. Old days? Historic Space Invaders? Just so. There is prehistory, and that is pinball. (And, of course, in Japan there were the jingly pachinko games.) Middle-aged arcade lurkers learned from pinball the cool, bent-kneed stances and the correct ominous angle at which to lip a toothpick. Pinball cost a nickel and had no-K intelligence. It used electromechanical kickers and—talk about primitive!—gravity for power. If you jostled too much it tilled. The very I skillful pinball bandit would lift the entire 500-lb. front ends of pinball games off the floor and onto the toes of his Army boots, lessening the incline of the table and foxing gravity. If he won 50 free games, as he was likely to, the blood stopped flowing in his feet. Pinball is still around, although it is not very lively.
Pong, invented by Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell, in the early 1970s, signaled the dawn of video-game history. Electronic paddles slapped a ball—really just a white blip—back and forth across a black-and-white TV screen. As Pong evolved, it permitted you to play another person, or, and this was the big excitement, the game would play you. Pong sold enormously for a few months in 1973. And then died. It was pushed into extinction not by a better game, but by its own lack of intelligence; it took a bit of time to master, but after that it was no challenge, and players became bored.
Nothing much happened in the arcades during the mid-'70s. Those were the Dark Ages: people picked up their pizzas and trudged home. Magnavox had marketed a console programmed so that some 20 games could be played on home television, but the games were not much more challenging than Pong. A line of Mattel hand-held, battery-powered computer games was cleverly engineered, but the games themselves were dull, and the firm almost lost its shirt. Milton Bradley sold a good handheld computer game called Blockbuster, in which the player tried to break down a wall on a tiny video screen. The firm also did well with a simple but clever computer puzzler called Simon; and Texas Instruments made a supposedly educational game called Speak & Spell that used a voice simulator and talked to you. Chess Challenger 7 made a good seven-level chess computer and then complicated it unnecessarily with a voice simulator.
The industry seemed fogbound until
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 Young gamesman battles Atari at home |
Alien
Creatures in the Home As anyone who has watched the gogglebox over the past six months knows, the television networks sold almighty quantities of advertising time to the makers of home video games. During the pre-Christmas buying frenzy, George Plimpton and that anonymous smug kid argued between halves of everything except the disarmament talks over whether the viewer should spend his last dollar on Atari or Intellivision. The commercial blitz paid off for all of the home console manufacturers. Mattel shipped more than 600,000 Intellivision units, a 300% rise from 1980. And Atari's Chairman, Raymond E. Kassar, said sales were "a magnitude beyond" earlier figures. Said he: "We all go to bed dreaming we'll have the kind of Christmas sell-through that we had this year." This triumph of TV ads manship seems at first hoot almost suicidal for the networks: for every one of the games that is in play, one television set, to which it must be hooked, is unavailable to receive General Hospital, The Dukes of Hazzard, and much needed information about what kind of snow tire and no-qual beer to choose. Has the tube at last succeeded in strangling itself? Or do the network ponderosos know something? Are the home video games really not that good? The view here, meticulously opinionated and scrupulously unscientific, is that the home game systems and the cartridges that plug into them range from fairly good to fairly disappointing. None is within a light-year of the best arcade games in color, sound or action. Manufacturers seem to be aware of these shortcomings; add-on voice simulators and cartridges to work them are on the way, and Atari promises a $349 unit that will give its console powerful additional circuitry. Three firms now dominate the console market. None of them accepts game cartridges made for the other two. Magnavox's Odyssey 2 costs about $200 for the basic console and $15 to $50 for cartridges. It has good joystick controls, but otherwise is not very satisfactory. The console incorporates a typewriter keyboard, but not much use is made of it in the game cartridges. Graphics seem perfunctory, and the games generally are too shallow to interest adults. Dynasty, a promising maze puzzle based on the Chinese game Go, is 'too easy to be interesting. Crypto-logic is a not-very-mystifying letter substitution code. Alien Invaders—Plus shows one imaginative quirk, a tiny figure that flees in terror when its fortress is destroyed, but otherwise is an uninspired copy of Space Invaders. The brightest and most imaginative graphics and sound effects in the industry are Intellivision's. The most rousing sight in home video is the between innings sequence of Intellivision's Baseball, in which, to the sound of cheers, one team trots in to the bench and the other sprints out to the field. The game soon becomes tedious, however, partly because of awkward hand controls (which hamper a good skiing cartridge) and partly because not enough of baseball's delightful complications are programmed in. It is not possible to catch a fly ball. A Poker and Blackjack cassette is fun to see once, but poor in concept, since neither game works unless money is at stake. Intellivision always puts on a handsome show, but a random sample shows that it has not yet learned to play a really good game. Atari's hand controls, too, are poor for a console that costs $150. Cartridges are $18 to $38. But they raise blisters on both adults and teen-agers, and that doesn't happen unless a game is fascinating. Atari has good simplifications of Space Invaders and Asteroids, and a good Missile Command. A firm called Acti-Vision makes $23 cartridges that fit Atari's console, and will soon make them for Intellivision. Acti-Vision's Laser Blast is a good fast-reflex game in which the player himself is the space invader. Its Tennis has a couple of good illusions—the ball bounces realistically on the court—but no effective simulation of hitting the ball, and no distinction between serves and ground strokes. Like too many cartridges for all three systems. Tennis is likely to be played twice and forgotten. |
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