Living
| 1979. Then, suddenly,
airports, delicatessens, gas stations and Chinese
restaurants started crawling with electronic
columns of squiggly, glowing monsters that
marched toward earthmen with a measured thump,
thump, thump that changed, as the battle boiled
faster, to a frenzied thumpthumpthump. The
subtleties that make a game great, or fail to do
so, are akin to the mumblings of metaphysics.
Space Invaders, a Japanese import licensed to
Bally, had an eerie capacity for seizing sane
people by the imagination. A minor delight was
that the forts behind which the shooter crouched
crumbled as they took enemy fire. A major
occasion for romantic fatalism occurred as each
wave of attackers was expunged and another took
its place, so that even the most valiant defender
at last was overwhelmed: each teen-ager or
corporation blue-suit was his own Beau Geste. But
what gave the machine special fascination was its
ability to increase the fury of the attack and,
as the players improved, the mocking bombast of
its splendid sound effects. It was not just a
clanking coin-eater. It was, or seemed to be, a
sentient alien. Anyone who played Space Invaders even semiseriously in those days remembers that reports soon spread by jungle telegraph of stupendous scores racked up elsewhere, by "a kid out in Chicago," "a guy in Jersey." But by 1980 there was a new big video-game hit, Atari's Asteroids. This free-moving, doom-in-space melodrama, in which the weightless, drifting shooter tries to blast his way through showers of astral garbage and an occasional scout ship, also had a measure of immortality programmed into it: it was among the first arcade games to invite heroic scorers to record their initials. No game manufacturer has bothered yet to program a system in local high scores are fed into a national data bank, but there is nothing impossible about the idea, and it might even be profitable, as quarters continue to pour down the coin shoots. Whither vid-mania? In a Walt Disney film called Tron, to be released this summer, one designer goes berserk and enters the microchip world of video games. Just now, the games are everywhere, and trade publications are full of puff pieces by manufacturers and distributors assuring each other that the game phenomenon is not a fad. They may be right; the Brock Hotel Corp., whose stock registered a 130.2% increase last year, the third highest on the New York Exchange, owes its success to a chain of video-and-pizza parlors. Whatever the future holds, just now the game manufacturers require earth-moving equipment to clear away the coin. In 1981 Bally's sales jumped to an esti- |
mated $880 million from
$693 million in 1980. Williams, which makes
Defender, saw nine months' gross sales go from
$83 million in 1980 to $126 million last year,
and it has just opened a new plant in Gur-nee.
Ill., capable of producing 600 to 700 Defenders a
day. The other big manufacturer is Atari, whose sales are estimated to have risen more than 120% from 1980 to 1981. Part of this sunny good fortune comes from its heavily promoted consoles and game cartridges for play on home TV, Mattel's Intellivision and Magnavox's Odyssey 2 are the primary competitors with Atari for the home
market, and the odds are that all three will live or die less on the quality of their engineering than on the cleverness of their games (see box). Until home video consoles evolve as programmable computers (at least two software firms, Broderbund and USE, are marketing programmable games for Apple home computers for less than $50), and until somebody makes a designing breakthrough on the order of Space Invaders to popularize them, it seems probable that the arcade coin-eaters will continue to be the flashiest, noisiest and most vllainously intelligent of the video products. Talking games are commonplace now; Sega/Gremlin's Space Fury growls menacingly at prospective players, "So, a creature for my amusement." As might be expected, new mazes on the order of Pac |
Man were common at a
recent trade exposition in Chicago. The hit of
the show was a highly sophisticated space saga
called Eliminator, made by Sega/Gremlin, an
imaginative small manufacturer. Up to four
players man the deluxe Eliminator and try to
blast each other and the computer until only one
player survives for the final combat with the
computer. Sega/Gremlin has demonstrated its own
three dimensional game, and a company official
says that it should be on the market in twelve to
20 months. Holographic 3-D is a distant
possibility, and voice-activated games may come
fairly soon. Only high costs block the
manufacture of arcade space trainers, in which
the player would sit inside a closed, movable
cockpit and see nothing but void and space
monsters through his windshield. Such a gadget
may soon be feasible: computer costs are coming
down, and exactions on players are rising to meet
them. The 50¢ game is already a gruesome reality
in some arcades, and the $1 game is surely
speeding toward us by bankruptobeam through
hyperspace. Mere earthlings, meanwhile, cope as best they can. As might be expected, with-it doctors have detected such video-related maladies as Space Invaders wrist and Pac Man elbow. And of course there are psychological swamps into which enthusiasts may sink. Julie Winecoff, 21, an unemployed truck driver from Charlotte, N.C., paid her way to an Atari tournament in Chicago recently, lost ignominiously to Ok-Soo Han, 25, a Korean immigrant from Los Angeles, and dolefully swore off the stuff- "I'm never going to play another game of Centipede as long as I live," she said "I've been whupped bad. I've been sure 'nuff tore down." And Steve Juraszek, hero of song and news story? His high school banned him from leaving the school grounds for a few days be cause he missed afternoon classes on the day he set his record. But his eye remains on distant peaks. "I'm going to pick a weekend," he says. "I'll work out before on those spring things to strengthen my wrists and fingers. Then I'm going to go to sleep right after school on that Thursday and Friday and I'll start on Saturday morning and go the whole weekend." …A
man ain 't nothin' but a man (plink, plunk) —By John Skow. Reported by Steven Holmes/Chicago and Jeff Melvoin/Los Angeles, with other bureaus |
