Speaker 1: Hey, folks, It's hard to believe, but Ephemeral has been
Speaker 1: on the air now or whatever the podcast equivalent terms,
Speaker 1: for almost three years. In that time, our team has
Speaker 1: continued to grow what for me has been a dream
Speaker 1: come true. To that end, this and next episode you'll
Speaker 1: be hearing from our producer, Max Williams, who heretofore has
Speaker 1: been working with Trevor and me behind the scenes. You
Speaker 1: might recognize him from Christmas Special Noel or as the
Speaker 1: on Mike producer of Ridiculous History. Fun fact, Max is
Speaker 1: also my little brother and frankly our family's expert on
Speaker 1: video games. So without further ado, enjoy the episode. Ephemeral
Speaker 1: is production of My Heart three D audio for full
Speaker 1: exposure listen was that phones gaming as a pastime goes
Speaker 1: back at least to ancient Greece, from Olympic tournaments to
Speaker 1: bouts of Aristotelian logic. For millennia, humans have been fascinating
Speaker 1: by the interplay of chance and skills. As games advanced
Speaker 1: alongside technology, The twentieth century brought with it new spaces
Speaker 1: dedicated to gaming. When I was a youngster, I fell
Speaker 1: in love with the arcade business when I visited a
Speaker 1: place called the Casino in the town of Rye, New York.
Speaker 1: I come from the Bronx and we bicycled up there,
Speaker 1: and I just loved the smell of the wood on
Speaker 1: the floor, the games, the noises they made totally unlike
Speaker 1: what we see today when you're going in an arcade
Speaker 1: with the electronic noises beeping and screaming and all of
Speaker 1: the interesting electronic aspects that define today's amusement king Back then,
Speaker 1: it was all mechanical stuff. It ran an electric city,
Speaker 1: of course in most cases, but not all. And we
Speaker 1: had machines like Chicago coins hockey table when you batted
Speaker 1: the ball back and forth underneath the glass, and recording
Speaker 1: studios wherefore a quarter and a dime you could get
Speaker 1: in there with your buddies and do anything you wanted,
Speaker 1: to sing a proper song or maybe use some foul
Speaker 1: language just to hear it played back in et cetera.
Speaker 1: My name is Eddie adlum Um, the publisher of Replay Magazine,
Speaker 1: which is a monthly trade journal. I've been covering that
Speaker 1: industry for approximately fifty four years right now, and I
Speaker 1: have continued to work in this field my whole life.
Speaker 1: And he grew up loving arcades, but he never thought
Speaker 1: he'd devote himself to them professionally. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: he fell into the game's business almost by accident. As
Speaker 1: the years went by, I graduated college. After a period
Speaker 1: of time which look magazine, shoppening pencils, and then the
Speaker 1: US Army, I answered an ad in the New York
Speaker 1: Times for an editorial assistant. It was with cash Box Magazine,
Speaker 1: now a defunct trade paper which largely centered on the
Speaker 1: recording industry, with a small section in its back page
Speaker 1: is devoted to the jukebox and games business. And they
Speaker 1: told me they were looking for somebody to do the
Speaker 1: pages in the back on the games business, and I
Speaker 1: said I needed a job, but I've been doing it
Speaker 1: ever since. We reached other Eddie to talk about video
Speaker 1: in arcade games, but he reminded us that their history
Speaker 1: went back further than most people think, and arcade is
Speaker 1: not unique. The penny arcade, as they were originally called,
Speaker 1: go back practically since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: A common name would be playland. The common machine would
Speaker 1: be a fortune teller or restraint testing thing that you
Speaker 1: squeezed together but basically only find them in major cities
Speaker 1: like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and so on. Up until
Speaker 1: the these arcades might have been purely analog games like
Speaker 1: ski ball or pinball. But with technology advancements in post
Speaker 1: World War two America, we saw the rise of electro
Speaker 1: mechanical games, and that brought a whole new level of
Speaker 1: popularity to gaming. In the sixties, there were no video games.
Speaker 1: There were electro mechanical games. There was pinball, but I
Speaker 1: really stunk at pinball. But you had Chicago Motor Speedway,
Speaker 1: which was this game where there was a screen that
Speaker 1: had sort of a cartoon of cars on it, and
Speaker 1: then there's a little plastic car and you tried to
Speaker 1: steer that little plastic car to avoid the cars on
Speaker 1: the screen. There was a game called Knife Bomber that
Speaker 1: was very fond of where you looked for a little
Speaker 1: head thing and you'd pressed button and I hope that
Speaker 1: you tie named that the bomb hit different targets. These
Speaker 1: games were very rudimentary. They were quarter gobblers. They were fun.
Speaker 1: My name is Steven L. Kent. I'm the author of
Speaker 1: the Ultimate History Video Games, Volume one and two. Been
Speaker 1: playing games for a long time. Although it doesn't show
Speaker 1: in my skill level. Although Stephen loved arcade gaming, he
Speaker 1: says back in the sixties arcade games were not as
Speaker 1: easy to find. There were pinball machines and electro mechanical
Speaker 1: machines in bowling alleys. Those were pretty safe places to go.
Speaker 1: Then there was pinball and electro mechanical machines. For instance,
Speaker 1: if you went to Vegas or Taho, you might see
Speaker 1: some of those in the hotels. Other than that, you
Speaker 1: saw them in pool halls. And pool halls were actually
Speaker 1: pretty spooky places to go. They were associated with vagrants
Speaker 1: and tough guys um some crime. And then there were
Speaker 1: arcades which were certainly associated with vagrancy and problems. Komy
Speaker 1: Island is the classic one that you always hear and
Speaker 1: they might smell like somebody and urinated just outside. Somebody
Speaker 1: might have vomited. They were places you didn't necessarily want
Speaker 1: to send your five year own. When you see arcade,
Speaker 1: the young folks they have a very different view changed
Speaker 1: with all the redemption games the game for you get
Speaker 1: the tickets that you've been redeemed for a game. When
Speaker 1: you say arcade to old folks, they think of a
Speaker 1: room where cavern, where the lights are almost all out
Speaker 1: except for maybe some neon lights on the wall. Music
Speaker 1: is playing, maybe a juke box. She's got Benny Davis
Speaker 1: eyes by Kim karn I have the Tiger. Most of
Speaker 1: the light in the room is the low glow coming
Speaker 1: from the arcade machines, and you can hear all those
Speaker 1: iconic little lips and squeaks and things that the different
Speaker 1: machines made, And people are making little rows of quarters
Speaker 1: to say that they're reserving the next game. Eddie says,
Speaker 1: there's a reason that kids like Stephen found our kids
Speaker 1: so wonderful despite the grudginess. It's the poor man's country club,
Speaker 1: whereas people with money could go to the literal country
Speaker 1: club and play golf and blah blah blah. People who
Speaker 1: are working class people or youngsters in high school could
Speaker 1: get into a different realm in the head with the
Speaker 1: lights of the machine. The challenge of trying to beat
Speaker 1: it so you get to repeat play or extra innings
Speaker 1: is just a nice way to recreate. The word recreation,
Speaker 1: if it's pronounced properly, is recreated. Although it wasn't yet
Speaker 1: available in ourcades, the first video game was being developed
Speaker 1: behind the scenes in the nineteen fifties. You would have
Speaker 1: to say that the inception of video games was with
Speaker 1: Willie Higgins Boffel, who was working at the Cave in Labs.
Speaker 1: It was a nuclear power facility, but they were having
Speaker 1: an open house. He thought nothing could be more more
Speaker 1: than an open house here, so he took it in
Speaker 1: a selescope and he built an interactive game into it
Speaker 1: called Tennis for two. Really, truly, you have to say
Speaker 1: that's the inception. Tennis for two was literally just a
Speaker 1: dot of light on a screen. They were bounced back
Speaker 1: and forth, prompted by buttons corresponding to each side of
Speaker 1: the screen. From there, It's always been rumored that Ralph Bear,
Speaker 1: who worked for Sanders Associates, which was a military contractor,
Speaker 1: attended that open house and Ralph, while working at Sanders Associates,
Speaker 1: came up with an idea for taking a TV and
Speaker 1: being able to do something more than just watch television
Speaker 1: shows on it. He developed an interactive game, which started
Speaker 1: out really dismally. One of the first things they did
Speaker 1: for it was there was a little box that would
Speaker 1: be red and then you had a pump, and if
Speaker 1: you really pump that pump furiously, the box turn Blue
Speaker 1: represented a house that was on fire and you were
Speaker 1: pumping water into it to put the fire out. They
Speaker 1: came out with a little dot that would travel and
Speaker 1: you had a little toy gun and you would shoot
Speaker 1: at it, and that was supposed to be like shoot
Speaker 1: at clay pigeons. And they came up with the tennis game,
Speaker 1: Uh Sanders Associate supports itself couldn't publish it. They were
Speaker 1: military contractor, but they eventually almost told it to our
Speaker 1: c A and eventually sold it to Magnavox and it
Speaker 1: became Odyssey, the first console. And tomorrow he's sure to
Speaker 1: see all the holiday specialist at your Magnavox dealer. Outstanding
Speaker 1: values and videomatic color televisions that adjust their own picture
Speaker 1: the changing room like automatic an exceptional offer on Odyssey.
Speaker 1: The exciting electronic game. The Magnufox Odyssey was released in
Speaker 1: nineteen sevente well very rudimentary, it was also revolutionary. The
Speaker 1: Odyssey was the first game system that you could hook
Speaker 1: up to a TV at home. Families who are content
Speaker 1: to let television do its things often find themselves at
Speaker 1: its mercy for a choice of entertainment. Wild people who
Speaker 1: want television to do their things entertain themselves with Odyssey,
Speaker 1: and it caught the eye of someone else who was
Speaker 1: also developing games at that time. Nolan Bushnell came across
Speaker 1: it because he happened to be going to school at
Speaker 1: the University of Utah, which was one of the great
Speaker 1: schools and computers of the time. There was m I T,
Speaker 1: there was Stanford, and there was the University of Utah.
Speaker 1: No One. Bushnell had just released a game called computer Space,
Speaker 1: developed with a company called Nutting Industries. The game was
Speaker 1: only moderlly successful, but it helped bush now make a
Speaker 1: name for himself. It's a big, tall, well animated showman.
Speaker 1: Because it was an twenties then I also got to
Speaker 1: see this machine, which my immediate reaction was, is nobody's
Speaker 1: going to buy this? And it didn't do well at all. However,
Speaker 1: the next year, Nolan had left nothing and gone into
Speaker 1: business for himself with a name he picked called Atari.
Speaker 1: Nolan hired a guy by the name of al al
Speaker 1: Corn to design a game based upon a Magnavox game.
Speaker 1: That Magnavox game was the tennis game mentioned earlier, as
Speaker 1: released on the Odyssey in nineteen seventy two. Tori's first
Speaker 1: product was Palm, which was of course very closely based
Speaker 1: on Odyssey. It was battened the image of a ball
Speaker 1: on a TV screen from left to right, left to right,
Speaker 1: left to right, and Nolan told al make me a
Speaker 1: coin machine version of this. Nolan Bush No wentl Corn
Speaker 1: described the Odyssey game he had seen at that trade
Speaker 1: show and said, can you make something like that? And
Speaker 1: all Corn went to work and not only made it,
Speaker 1: but made it a lot better than the Odyssey. I
Speaker 1: first started about it over the telephone when I was
Speaker 1: working at cash Box that in the West Coast. This
Speaker 1: machine had been put down into locations, bars, et cetera,
Speaker 1: and made nothing but money. They got it all done
Speaker 1: and they thought, okay, a Torii doesn't manufacture the games.
Speaker 1: Attari creates the games then sells it to other companies,
Speaker 1: to pinball companies like Williams, Valley, Midway, Sterns. And so
Speaker 1: Nolan went off to Chicago to try and sell Palm
Speaker 1: to one of the established manufacturers. While he's gone, alal
Speaker 1: Corn gets a call from Andicapps Tavern, which is the
Speaker 1: place where they had a demo unit out to see
Speaker 1: how people would react. It's a call from the manager saying,
Speaker 1: can you come out here? The machine's broken down. So
Speaker 1: he comes out in the morning and the manager is him.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the strangest thing. Normally we don't get
Speaker 1: any traffic at all early in the morning, but these
Speaker 1: days I come out to open the tavern and there's
Speaker 1: a line and they're not here to drink. They're walking
Speaker 1: over and playing Palm. Al opens the machine to see
Speaker 1: what's wrong with this and Quarters poor out. It was
Speaker 1: overflowing with Quarters. That's what's going wrong. So he called
Speaker 1: Nolan and told him, and Nolan decided on the spot,
Speaker 1: a Torii isn't going to just design the machines. A
Speaker 1: Torii is gonna start making. Nolan, working with Ted Dabney,
Speaker 1: figured out how to take this game that will only
Speaker 1: play on a thirty computer and replicate it on a
Speaker 1: relatively inexpensive technology that people could play in ourcades. And
Speaker 1: the result was Ahead. You say, what is ahead? Machines
Speaker 1: cost money. If you have a machine, let's say in
Speaker 1: the bar, where the commission to the bar owner is
Speaker 1: generally of the take, and you have two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: in the cash game in that machine, when you come
Speaker 1: to make collections, you net a hundred dollars. You need
Speaker 1: a lot of plays to just pay for the machines,
Speaker 1: and I they're paid in a respectable length of time,
Speaker 1: and then continue to make good revenue. You've got a hit.
Speaker 1: Pong officially launched a video game sensation, although as Eddie
Speaker 1: tells us, that term was still the making. The phrase
Speaker 1: video game was coined by myself when in the early
Speaker 1: days of covering it for cash Box, I got tired
Speaker 1: of calling them TV games television games. We were coming
Speaker 1: up with all kinds of names to call this class
Speaker 1: of amusement game. And one day I was sitting at
Speaker 1: the typewriter writing another story about somebody's machine, and I says,
Speaker 1: I remember we used to call the movie jukeboxes audio
Speaker 1: video machines. I says, hey, video game, and I started
Speaker 1: to do it the rest of that his history. With
Speaker 1: the release of Pong, video games quickly became a burgeoning industry.
Speaker 1: So Pong barely came out, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: everyone starts making Pongo likes because they can see the
Speaker 1: writing on the wall. Pong is huge. Pong is also
Speaker 1: cheaper to make than a pinball machine, much easier to
Speaker 1: maintain than a pinball machine. Plus it's more popular. So
Speaker 1: Williams and Midway and everyone else started coming out with
Speaker 1: their own versions of Pong, and new companies came out
Speaker 1: of nowhere to do it as well. That you are
Speaker 1: watching the most exciting game you will ever see on
Speaker 1: your TV set till start by Kalico with three different
Speaker 1: games tell Star Tennis with digital scoring, variable speeds. But
Speaker 1: the first real competition came from Key Games. Key Games
Speaker 1: was a bunch of Atari ex patriots who went off
Speaker 1: and trying to compete. Only it turns out that that
Speaker 1: was a lie. Atari owned Key Games. Attari always owned
Speaker 1: Key Games, but they pretended like they were arrivals, and
Speaker 1: that's pushed the industry further. If you take a look
Speaker 1: at what Atari did. They made Pong the first sports game,
Speaker 1: They made Gotcha, the first maze chase game. They had
Speaker 1: Grand Track and Sprint, the first racing games. As the
Speaker 1: leader in the industry, Attari grew rapidly. In nineteen seventies six,
Speaker 1: They're at least a video arcade game, Breakout, which was
Speaker 1: partially designed by two famous Steves, Steve Jobs Steve Wasniac.
Speaker 1: Did you try and break Out? Did you try and
Speaker 1: break out, and it would sort of a return to
Speaker 1: bomb and only now you're not playing horizontally. You're playing vertically.
Speaker 1: And at the top of the screen there are bricks,
Speaker 1: and when you're ball hits those bricks, the bricks disappear,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to beat your way through one wall,
Speaker 1: and then there's another wall, and then there's another wall.
Speaker 1: No one bush Nell says he designed the game. Other
Speaker 1: people have said that other people designed, and who knows
Speaker 1: for sure, but one thing is certain. There was a
Speaker 1: young Atari engineer who was involved in all of this.
Speaker 1: His name was Steve Jobs. When you design a game,
Speaker 1: every chip in that game is gonna cost you, over
Speaker 1: the life of the game, tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 1: Let's see you make ten thousand copies of that game,
Speaker 1: the chip costs five bucks. That's fifty dollars. Bush Nell asked,
Speaker 1: who can redesign this game to get some of the chipstell.
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs was not an engineer, but he was working
Speaker 1: on a small homebrew computer package was a good friend
Speaker 1: named Steve Woznia. He was quite the engineer. I think
Speaker 1: he was viewed pretty roundly as the most brilliant engineer
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley at the time. Jobs was also not
Speaker 1: a huge video game player. Wasn'tiac was So Jobs asked
Speaker 1: Wasniac to come over and gave him pizza, let him
Speaker 1: play whatever game he wanted for a while, and then
Speaker 1: when everyone was gone, said could you redesign this game
Speaker 1: for us and get some of the chips out. The
Speaker 1: story goes that his redesign worked perfectly, but it was
Speaker 1: so brilliant and he had taken so many chips out
Speaker 1: that they couldn't replicate. Famously, Steve Jobs told Steve Wasniac
Speaker 1: that he was only in a portion of what he
Speaker 1: really was getting, and he pocketed the rest. According to
Speaker 1: Bushnell and according to anyone who would know, Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: then plowed all the rest of the money directly into Apple,
Speaker 1: but he didn't mislead Wasniac, and that was pretty much
Speaker 1: the end of their friendship. Meanwhile, companies in Japan was
Speaker 1: starting to jump on the video game bandwagon, the first
Speaker 1: of which was Namco. You have to look in Japan
Speaker 1: of the time to understand their success. First of all,
Speaker 1: Japan loves technology, and Japan loves storytelling, Japan loves glitz,
Speaker 1: and video games were all of those things right from
Speaker 1: the start. Japan at the time was better at renovating
Speaker 1: than innovating, so they took this idea of video games
Speaker 1: that American companies would come up with, and they found
Speaker 1: ways to change it to make it more fun. Video
Speaker 1: games became incredibly popular in so incredibly popular that there
Speaker 1: was no keeping up with the math. Pretty soon, Tito
Speaker 1: creates a game which Midway imports and adds the changes.
Speaker 1: They enhanced it with a computer was the first game
Speaker 1: to have a computer processor in it. That game was Gunfight.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't even the most impressive trick that Tito
Speaker 1: had up their sleeves. In nineteen they would turn the
Speaker 1: industry upside down by releasing Space Invaders. Where and whereas
Speaker 1: Pond made a big hit in the USA and some
Speaker 1: other places, Space Invaders absolutely hit the entire world. It
Speaker 1: was a great game and it still is a fun
Speaker 1: game to play. They may know, but three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: of these machines, which is unheard of. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you have a battle going, especially seventy nine. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you have Space Invaders and a Tory football
Speaker 1: exploding on the American public. And a Tory football that
Speaker 1: was the one with this big old track ball. People
Speaker 1: would be slapping until they had blisters on their hands.
Speaker 1: Their hands are numb. Sometimes your skin got caught in
Speaker 1: the little circle that held the track ball in place,
Speaker 1: so people got cuts. But they loved that game. They
Speaker 1: played that game silly until January when the Super Bowl
Speaker 1: took place, and then they moved on because football season
Speaker 1: and with Space Invaders that didn't happen. Space Invaders season
Speaker 1: never added. Reacting to Space Invaders, nam could develops some
Speaker 1: big hits of their own, including pac Man and Rallyatts.
Speaker 1: Also around this time, a small Japanese company named Nintendo
Speaker 1: started to make games. Nintendo did okay in Japan, it
Speaker 1: really floundered than the United States. They had a game
Speaker 1: called Radar Scope that was like the third biggest game
Speaker 1: in Japan in the year came out and they thought
Speaker 1: it would be big here, but it wasn't, and so
Speaker 1: they created a conversion get to make it a new
Speaker 1: game they thought might be able to save the company,
Speaker 1: and that new game was Donkey Kong. And he calls
Speaker 1: this period the Golden years of the games. It was
Speaker 1: almost entirely fueled by Japanese companies. It was known and
Speaker 1: is known to the general playing public as the pac
Speaker 1: Man Days, Defender Days, Donkey Kan Days, Centipede, Millipede by Atari.
Speaker 1: The just classics of that period captured the attention and
Speaker 1: the devotion of kids and even some grown ups all
Speaker 1: over the country and all over the world. During the
Speaker 1: Golden Years, which really started with the Space Invaders, that's
Speaker 1: the Japanese machine. Pac Man and Mrs pac Man are
Speaker 1: Japanese machines. Donkey Kan is the Japanese machine. Now you're
Speaker 1: looking to some of the classics, and they deserved everything
Speaker 1: they got over here. The so called Golden Years of
Speaker 1: video games change commerce across the entire entertainment industry. In
Speaker 1: the late seventies and into the early eighties, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, it's not just boollyon alleys and pool halls
Speaker 1: that have video games. People are seeing that you can
Speaker 1: attract people to your business with video games. Business owners
Speaker 1: and managers are seeing that you can even make money
Speaker 1: with video games. The game's only lasted most of them,
Speaker 1: so people were crowding, and all of a sudden, grocery
Speaker 1: stores and drug stores malls are just putting up video
Speaker 1: game areas and arcades are appearing everywhere. By eighty arcades
Speaker 1: are a big thing. And the money that went into
Speaker 1: those machines, which by the way, we're popping up everywhere,
Speaker 1: including in the funeral home in one case, was so
Speaker 1: large that it hurt the recording industry. It hurt the
Speaker 1: movie industry. It became the number one form of entertainment,
Speaker 1: but it didn't last. The reason it didn't last was
Speaker 1: it again, something developed by Nolan Bushnell. It was what
Speaker 1: we call consumer video. You could play Pong on your
Speaker 1: home TV set using this little gizmo. I think it
Speaker 1: was called the Atari twenty four D the Atari twenty
Speaker 1: DRED because if you've got Matari you can play pac Man,
Speaker 1: Bang Out, Spice Invitas with free with the Atari Movie
Speaker 1: EA gmes in any other system. With Alligator clips, you
Speaker 1: could clip it onto something in the back of your
Speaker 1: TV set at home and play Pong for free. And
Speaker 1: that was the beginning of the end of the boom days.
Speaker 1: Just like how Palm started the video games industry, it
Speaker 1: also birthed the home video game market. The home version
Speaker 1: of Pong was released in nineteen and although it would
Speaker 1: be a few more years before home consoles fully grab hold,
Speaker 1: people liked the convenience, so some companies started to make
Speaker 1: more consoles. First there was the fair Child channel left
Speaker 1: and that was as I recall was the first console
Speaker 1: that used cartridges. I had never heard of. I think
Speaker 1: his name was Gerald Lawson, the gentleman who invented the cartridges.
Speaker 1: Until he came around, consoles pretty much had one or
Speaker 1: two or three hardware games and the loss and changed
Speaker 1: all that all of a sudden. Now you can play
Speaker 1: completely different games. So ATRII sees that and picks it
Speaker 1: up with the twenties six hundred. I'd like a system, please,
Speaker 1: and everything that goes with everything everything. I want everything
Speaker 1: you gotta do, low price after thirty dollars, a rebate
Speaker 1: office and that everything. He's got everything you can do
Speaker 1: nearly think on your different company. Yes, not think something,
Speaker 1: but it's not everything will be a voice do a
Speaker 1: track bowl, remote and rol joysticks and the commute amazing.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, but it's not everything, not everything. They will
Speaker 1: be educational games. Prease at everything to every thing. My
Speaker 1: favorite home console of the eighties was actually the Collico Vision.
Speaker 1: Now bring the arcade experience home because your visions vision,
Speaker 1: especially Donkey Comb on the Callico Vision looked exactly like
Speaker 1: Donkey Kong in the arcade. A lot of the games
Speaker 1: look better on Collico vision. A fun fact is that
Speaker 1: Colliko is short for the Connecticut Leather Company. They used
Speaker 1: to make these little kids like wallets the cub scouts
Speaker 1: would get. That was what Collico actually originally did. As
Speaker 1: the arcade in the Street fell apart, Kaliko made a
Speaker 1: really interesting investment. There was a little company making dolls
Speaker 1: outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and they looked at that and
Speaker 1: they said, Okay, video games are falling apart, will buy
Speaker 1: This was cabbage Patch Dolls. Their Cabbage Catch kids. You
Speaker 1: can give them all you love. Cabbage Patch kids are
Speaker 1: each old separately. Each doll comes with him a ten
Speaker 1: bird certificant in adoption papers from Colico. They made more
Speaker 1: off cabbage Patch dolls in one year than they ever
Speaker 1: did off video games. Eventually, Warner Brothers caught wind of
Speaker 1: Atari and all their success. They bought the company from
Speaker 1: Nolan Bushnell. Nolan still ran things for a while, at least.
Speaker 1: Nolan Bushnell is a very smart guy. He's got Atari going,
Speaker 1: and he's always going down to the research and development
Speaker 1: team and he's looking over people's shoulders. He's gotta have
Speaker 1: of giving people suggestions, you should really do this and this.
Speaker 1: You know that would work better if you do this
Speaker 1: and this. Then he'll come back two weeks later and
Speaker 1: he'll say, you know, you should do it like this
Speaker 1: and this, and he's making people undo the changes they've
Speaker 1: just made to accommodate him before. So it became a
Speaker 1: real problem. Al Alcorn, who was running research and development
Speaker 1: at first. One he would do was the moment Nolan
Speaker 1: came into research and development, al would rush over as
Speaker 1: quickly as he could. No one has to sort of
Speaker 1: a shorter attention span, so he put his hand on
Speaker 1: no one's shoulder and said, oh, look at this one.
Speaker 1: And by the way, let's look at this one over here.
Speaker 1: Oh look, we're at the end of the research and development.
Speaker 1: No one was so nice of you to stop by.
Speaker 1: We'll see you next time. And he'd rush him through
Speaker 1: before he could do too much damage. But then no
Speaker 1: one caught onto that, and so the next thing they
Speaker 1: came up with was al would tell people, you don't
Speaker 1: have to do what no one tells you to do
Speaker 1: until he's told it to you three times. No one
Speaker 1: would come through, and he'd make suggestions and people would
Speaker 1: ignore him. They had a company wid beating out at
Speaker 1: Grass Valley and no one came up to speak. And
Speaker 1: he stands up in front of the crowd and he says,
Speaker 1: I hear that there's new policy going around it. When
Speaker 1: I tell you to do something, you don't have to
Speaker 1: do it until I told you three times. I'm telling
Speaker 1: you right now. When I tell you to do something,
Speaker 1: you do And somebody from the back of the audience yelled, hey,
Speaker 1: could you see that two more times. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers wasn't pleased with bush Now's antics. Warner looked
Speaker 1: at Nolan and his Shenanigans and some of his other
Speaker 1: executives and fired them all. Retired them would be a
Speaker 1: much more accurate way to say it, but put them
Speaker 1: out the pasture with nice severance packages, and replaced Nolan
Speaker 1: with a guy named Ray Kassar. Ray had no idea
Speaker 1: what he was getting until he came from Burlington, the
Speaker 1: cope manufacturer, the textile manufacturer. His first big move was
Speaker 1: to hold a company meeting in which he tried to
Speaker 1: ensure his game designers that he knew how to work
Speaker 1: well with designers because he'd been working with them for years.
Speaker 1: He was talking about the town manufacturers as of creating
Speaker 1: towels was similar to creating video games that didn't not
Speaker 1: go overwhelmed. Kastar was not well liked from within the
Speaker 1: game's industry. A lot of people left because they didn't
Speaker 1: like being under rak a star, and a lot of
Speaker 1: people left because they knew there was money at the
Speaker 1: other end of the rainbow, and that wasn't an Atari.
Speaker 1: They were making dollars a year. They were making Natari
Speaker 1: a lot of money, but they weren't making a lot money.
Speaker 1: Raykassar told all of his designers, the guys who designed
Speaker 1: my towels, don't tell everyone what towel they did. I
Speaker 1: don't want you telling people what games you worked on.
Speaker 1: But there was a silver lining to his lack of popularity.
Speaker 1: We got to give credit where credit is new. The
Speaker 1: first open world game is also the game was the
Speaker 1: first Easter Ring. Of the original ten designers would all
Speaker 1: last two to remain was a guy named Warren Robinette.
Speaker 1: Warren was working on a game called Adventure. If you've
Speaker 1: watched many player one, that's the game. At the end.
Speaker 1: Was proud of Adventure. He wanted people to know who
Speaker 1: was behind it. That's why you created the first did
Speaker 1: you at Easterday? You could only carry one object at
Speaker 1: a time. If you carried the ladder, you didn't have
Speaker 1: a sword to defend yourself. But if you got that
Speaker 1: ladder and you leaned it against the wall at the
Speaker 1: very end of the game, at the far end, and
Speaker 1: you climbed up to the top of it, even though
Speaker 1: there was no visible door, you would pass through an
Speaker 1: invisible hole in the wall, and then if you ran
Speaker 1: your cursor over that wall, you'd find that there was
Speaker 1: one hot pixel. And then if you pull that pixel
Speaker 1: and you carried it back to the front of the game,
Speaker 1: you opened a hidden room. And in that hidden room.
Speaker 1: In Rainbow Letters by Warren Robinette, he didn't think anybody
Speaker 1: would ever find that. I remember talking to him about it.
Speaker 1: He told me about going out to dinner. He'd quit
Speaker 1: Atari by this time, or was just about the levator.
Speaker 1: He's out to dinner with his friend. And I said,
Speaker 1: what did your friends say when you told him that?
Speaker 1: And he said he didn't And I said why And
Speaker 1: he said, well, if I couldn't keep the secret myself,
Speaker 1: how could I ask my friends to keep. So here's
Speaker 1: this amazing innovation he's done. There's no way in the
Speaker 1: world anybody's ever gonna find it, right, except there's this kid.
Speaker 1: He's in Salt Lake City. He's got nothing to do.
Speaker 1: I think it's the dead of winter in Salt Lake
Speaker 1: it gets snowy. He maybe he's a nerd like me,
Speaker 1: trying to play pong with both hands to see how
Speaker 1: far he could get. For some reason, he climbs up
Speaker 1: the ladder. For some reason, he walks through the hole.
Speaker 1: For some reason, he finds the pixel and terries it
Speaker 1: all the way back, and he calls it try and says,
Speaker 1: there's a glitch in your game. They had no idea.
Speaker 1: They thought he was crazy. Unfortunately, for a tory, stories
Speaker 1: like this for a few and far between and left
Speaker 1: them unprepared for what came next in the video games
Speaker 1: industry break. His Stars run as head of Atari did
Speaker 1: not go well. It didn't take long for Rade to
Speaker 1: alienate and in some ways ruin Atari. I was lucky.
Speaker 1: I think post Atory I may have been the only
Speaker 1: interview he ever grabbed. He was touching the first point. Now.
Speaker 1: It was his idea to bring space invaders to the
Speaker 1: Attori twenties and unt out here we entertain ourselves at home,
Speaker 1: so we got an Atari video game. There's so many
Speaker 1: different games to play. We especially like Space Invaders, Stafano's
Speaker 1: Little Devils from Outer Space. It's fun, but personally I
Speaker 1: think the whole idea of creatures from outer space is
Speaker 1: a little far fetched. And that was a big thing.
Speaker 1: But they made some huge mistakes. There were two almost
Speaker 1: concurrent as a Master's. The first one was ET. The
Speaker 1: movie ET had come around was a huge success. Warner
Speaker 1: want to lure Steven Spielberg away from Universal where he
Speaker 1: was making ET and movies like E T and Jaws,
Speaker 1: and so part of what they did was they said, look, Steve,
Speaker 1: here's twenty five million dollars licensing fee for ET. Twenty
Speaker 1: five million was unheard of. So they promised him all
Speaker 1: that money, and they promised him the game would be
Speaker 1: ready for Christmas, and he was gonna hold them to that.
Speaker 1: They didn't realize it takes a year to make a game,
Speaker 1: and this is July. They're leaving three or four months
Speaker 1: to make a game. And they brought him this one guy,
Speaker 1: Howard Scott Warshaw, to make the game Warshaw was a
Speaker 1: good choice. He was a bright guy. He was a
Speaker 1: good game designer. He had made the Raiders and lost
Speaker 1: our game. They assigned him to make the e T game.
Speaker 1: They gave him no time to do it. They gave
Speaker 1: him really truly no budget because the million had been
Speaker 1: spent on it. Games at that time were made by
Speaker 1: one person. There's gonna be music in the game. You
Speaker 1: came up with the music. There's art. You came up
Speaker 1: with the art, and you did the program in the game.
Speaker 1: Howard an unreasonable task, and he went after it and
Speaker 1: came out with a virtually unplayable game. I mean, everyone
Speaker 1: in the world hates that game. I'm not sure you
Speaker 1: can fully blame Howard for it. According to Eddie, this
Speaker 1: sort of tie in movie and game deal it's a
Speaker 1: pretty common thing in the nineties. We call that a
Speaker 1: license game. It's good marketing tool. It draws you, but
Speaker 1: they're only good for the first quarter. We used to say,
Speaker 1: and you say, what does that mean. The rule is,
Speaker 1: if the license is basically a marketing draw, it's an
Speaker 1: eye attractor and into detractor, but basically the game itself,
Speaker 1: regardless of what it's called, it's gonna have to happen
Speaker 1: in the legs. Let's say the Roaming Stones Pinball. Ooh,
Speaker 1: I wonder what that's like. You're going when you're playing
Speaker 1: a couple of times. If the game isn't any fun
Speaker 1: and don't care if it George Washington or your teacher
Speaker 1: at school face on the game, You're not gonna play.
Speaker 1: It's only good for the first few players, until the
Speaker 1: game itself is the attraction rather than the license. The
Speaker 1: other game was a pac Man. Bear in mind that
Speaker 1: at the time, pac Man was the most popular game
Speaker 1: in the world. Pac Man has been on the cover
Speaker 1: of Time magazine and Mad Magazine. Pac Man was the
Speaker 1: best selling our Ka game of all times all by Time.
Speaker 1: Pac Man into or a Tirey video computer system and
Speaker 1: you're playing the hottest games and Spice Invitus time pac Man.
Speaker 1: They released the Detroy twenty version of it, and it's
Speaker 1: don't It was terrible. It didn't play or look even
Speaker 1: vaguely like the game in the arcade. People didn't like it,
Speaker 1: and concurrently, America had lost its focus on video games.
Speaker 1: Arcades started closing. First. It was the big words. You
Speaker 1: had these huge arcades, and arcades are like blue whales,
Speaker 1: the biggest animal that's ever lived, but it only eats krill.
Speaker 1: And it's the same thing. And these huge arcades that
Speaker 1: were living on quarters, and as long as you have
Speaker 1: quarters lined up on the machines, you can live on
Speaker 1: those quarters. But when a few less people show up
Speaker 1: and a few less people are playing, and the people
Speaker 1: who did show up again again were the people who
Speaker 1: were better at games. They were the people who could
Speaker 1: make a quarter less a minute, and thus arcades started
Speaker 1: to fall out of popularity. Meanwhile, Nintendo was hard at
Speaker 1: work at developing their own home council, The nes released
Speaker 1: in over in Japan, Nintendo is just preparing to release
Speaker 1: their fammycom which is short for Family Computer, which would
Speaker 1: be repackaged as the Nintendo Entertainment Center in the United States.
Speaker 1: It played games that looked closer to the arcade games,
Speaker 1: and interestingly, it had basically the same processing chip in
Speaker 1: it as the Autori twenty, and if you played Mario
Speaker 1: on it, it looked just like the arcade game. And
Speaker 1: I remember looking at that and thinking this is high art.
Speaker 1: There were other companies that tried to compete, but the
Speaker 1: only one that even made a dent on the market
Speaker 1: was Sega with the Sega master System. The Sega master
Speaker 1: System actually had slightly better graphic's, a little more memory
Speaker 1: and everything. But there was this thing called packing game.
Speaker 1: If you bought consoles back then, and if you bought
Speaker 1: a Sega master System, it came with Super hang On,
Speaker 1: which was a pretty good game. It was a motorcycle
Speaker 1: writing game. But the basic packet on the nes was
Speaker 1: Super Mario Brothers. That was all the technology Nintendo needed
Speaker 1: to be anybody. Stephen says Nintendo was successful because they
Speaker 1: were smart about design. They created iconic characters that would
Speaker 1: stick in the minds of players everywhere. Giant trap you.
Speaker 1: In a lot of ways, the growth of video games
Speaker 1: is like the growth of Hollywood. In some ways, the
Speaker 1: death of arcades is like the death of movie theaters.
Speaker 1: There was a time when Charlie Chaplin was very big,
Speaker 1: and then people kind of looked at Charlie Chaplin and
Speaker 1: you know, it was cool. He was old school. But
Speaker 1: we like Hattie Murphy, Addie, Welcome to the Army, Our
Speaker 1: thanks themis nice to see you again, where we like
Speaker 1: John Wayne, I got no interest in you today, Stan Claire,
Speaker 1: and you won't get hurt or eventually we like Arnold
Speaker 1: schwarzenegg Asta le Vista Baby. Originally, pac Man and the
Speaker 1: Aliens from Space Invader were cool things, but they had
Speaker 1: a very long ways. Donkey Kong somehow became far more iconic,
Speaker 1: even though pac Man outsold Donkey Kong. But Mario had
Speaker 1: an advantage and that Mario got the nes. There was
Speaker 1: never a Capcom consult right. The people at Nintendo were
Speaker 1: very intelligent and that they realized as Mario goes, so
Speaker 1: goes are consult they started looking for other icons they
Speaker 1: could create. What will the future bring from nintend Dome
Speaker 1: more hits like Super Mario Brothers, arcade hits like Cotton Food.
Speaker 1: Nintendo has the most video game hits Halkin's Alley, Duck Utters,
Speaker 1: and more like Baseball and Excite Bike, and you can
Speaker 1: play them only on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Now you're
Speaker 1: playing with power. For a little while, it looked like
Speaker 1: it might be Excited Bike. Certainly, Duck Hunt is still remembered,
Speaker 1: but they came out with this game that was so
Speaker 1: dicey called the Legend of Zelda. Did you see the
Speaker 1: latest Nintendo newsletter? Whoa nice graphics? I'd like to get
Speaker 1: my hands on that game. You mean you haven't played
Speaker 1: it yet? We can play on my Nintendo Entertainment system.
Speaker 1: It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad. Those
Speaker 1: creatures from Ghana are pretty bad rock tech tanks leaders too.
Speaker 1: But when you'll help a harrow polster, Yeah, awesome, intense
Speaker 1: Nintendo Entertainment System, your parents help you look get up?
Speaker 1: Did people really want to invest this much time in
Speaker 1: the game. There was a nicy thing for Nintendo to do,
Speaker 1: but they really threw their weight behind him. Um it
Speaker 1: caught on. It rivaled Mario in popularity. Nintendo released their
Speaker 1: first handheld counsel in They called it the Game Boy.
Speaker 1: This effort was led by a man named gun Pay
Speaker 1: your COI. That's a very sacred name to me because
Speaker 1: Goompey was one of my first friends in the industry.
Speaker 1: He affected Nintendo culture almost as much as Shaguiro Miamoto,
Speaker 1: the creator of Zelda and Mario and Donkey K. Miamoto
Speaker 1: created the personality of the games. Nintendo to this day
Speaker 1: makes family friendly games because Miamoto likes the smile when
Speaker 1: he creates games. Goompeo KOI. He was nice, he was quiet,
Speaker 1: and he was miserly. His whole view was that you
Speaker 1: could do things using old technology very cheaply. Even though
Speaker 1: he wasn't the greater the ne s, the people who
Speaker 1: did create it were trained by him and the nes.
Speaker 1: If you take a look as basically the same chip
Speaker 1: as the attar he created the arcade hardware that Miamoto
Speaker 1: used for Donkey Kong, and in the case of game Boy,
Speaker 1: he takes just this very very old chip and monochrome
Speaker 1: technology and he puts it all together. What he sees
Speaker 1: is everyone knows this chip. This is an ancient chip.
Speaker 1: Anyone in the world can program on. It doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be color. And he makes an assumption that nobody
Speaker 1: else would make. He assumes that when people play portable
Speaker 1: game games, they want portability. They're not looking to play
Speaker 1: the exact same game on their game Boy that they
Speaker 1: would play on their console. So a lot of the
Speaker 1: games are built around the idea that they're small, you
Speaker 1: can pick them up, you can play them very quickly,
Speaker 1: you can put them down, you can play them while
Speaker 1: you're on the bus. You don't have to concentrate the
Speaker 1: same way you would concentrate for other games. The technology
Speaker 1: is cheap. Heads Game Boy sells for nine bucks. When
Speaker 1: it came out, they said it wasn't humanly possible. All
Speaker 1: the power and excitement of Nintendo right in the palm
Speaker 1: of your hand. Introducing Game Boy. It's portable, it's in stereo,
Speaker 1: and its games are interchangeable. Game Boy comes complete with
Speaker 1: batteries and the outrageous new game Tetris and for head
Speaker 1: to head competition, use video link and blow your opponent away.
Speaker 1: Game Board only from Nintendo. Now you're playing with power.
Speaker 1: Power Atari coming out with the Links was color and
Speaker 1: had a better processor and eight batteries. Live introducing Links
Speaker 1: from a Torii, the color video game He Can get
Speaker 1: away with Sometimes never knew what hit it. The first
Speaker 1: three thousand units of a game Boy were sold out
Speaker 1: within two weeks of release. By the game Boy had
Speaker 1: sold sixteen million units. The Autari Links sold fewer than
Speaker 1: seven million units. By that same time, goon Pay was
Speaker 1: a bona fide hero. His next big project would be
Speaker 1: the Virtual Boy, which everyone looks at as a disaster,
Speaker 1: but it was brilliant. Again. He simply took monochrome technology
Speaker 1: and he put it on a view Master. It was
Speaker 1: a failure, so he was in the doghouse for about
Speaker 1: a year. About the same time that the N sixty
Speaker 1: four came out, they had a Space World that's the
Speaker 1: Nintendo proposed dietary game show. And last time I saw
Speaker 1: my friend Gumpey was at that Space World in Maco Hare.
Speaker 1: It's in this big warehouse and if you went off
Speaker 1: to the far right corner, that's where they at the
Speaker 1: N sixty four. So everyone went there, and then there
Speaker 1: were nests. The Soprannias was still pretty popular at that point,
Speaker 1: and Game Boy games out, and then in a small
Speaker 1: corner near the exit was what was left of Virtual Boy,
Speaker 1: and Gunpay was there holding down the fort trying to
Speaker 1: show anybody who would come by what Virtual Boy would do.
Speaker 1: And when I walked by, he said, please, please come,
Speaker 1: let's talk. He didn't speak English and my Japanese is
Speaker 1: completely non existent, but he showed me as games and
Speaker 1: then we sat down and talked for about an hour,
Speaker 1: and then I left, and that was the last time
Speaker 1: I saw gun Pay. Then left Nintendo and went on
Speaker 1: to develop the Bandai wonder Swad, a short lived handheld
Speaker 1: gaming device, but it was the last project he would
Speaker 1: work on. In October four, Goom pay tragically died in
Speaker 1: a car accident. The world gave him a nice tribute
Speaker 1: when he died. I was very surprised and very pleased.
Speaker 1: I think he got more attention when he passed, maybe
Speaker 1: the Hiroshi Yamochi, the guy who took Nintendo into video games.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of attention about the father of
Speaker 1: game Boy dying. Game Boy was amazing because to that
Speaker 1: point in time, the biggest electronics family of product was
Speaker 1: Walkman family and products. Game Boy was a close second.
Speaker 1: Then the PlayStation brand name came and that was that
Speaker 1: Sony Entertainment entered the video game market or with the
Speaker 1: release of PlayStation. We'll talk about Sony, Nintendo, and the
Speaker 1: Microsoft Xbox in Part two. All that on the next
Speaker 1: episode of Ephemeral. This episode of Ephemeral was co written
Speaker 1: by Max Williams and Trevor Young, with editing and sound
Speaker 1: design by Max Williams. Stephen Kent is the author of
Speaker 1: The Ultimate History of Video Games Volumes one and two,
Speaker 1: and Eddie Adlam is the publisher for Replay magazine. Some
Speaker 1: of the great music this episode, like the piece you're
Speaker 1: hearing now, comes courtesy of the artist mon Plasier. If
Speaker 1: you've listened to Ephemeral for a while, you've heard a
Speaker 1: lot of their work, and we're happy to announce we'll
Speaker 1: have an upcoming episode interviewing the artists for now here
Speaker 1: more at Loyalty Freak music dot com. Tune in next
Speaker 1: episode for video Games Part two. In the meantime, find
Speaker 1: us on social media. We're at Ephemeral Show and for
Speaker 1: more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. H