Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech and Way back in
Speaker 1: twenty Holy Cow, more than a decade ago, tech Stuff
Speaker 1: did an episode that was a profile about Midway Games,
Speaker 1: and the company Midway was going through bankruptcy at that time,
Speaker 1: and it would effectively cease to be by two thousand
Speaker 1: and eleven. But the story of Midway is a really
Speaker 1: complicated one and it involves a lot of other companies
Speaker 1: as well. And while the company that fizzled out in
Speaker 1: can technically trace its history back to arguably you could
Speaker 1: go even earlier, it wouldn't be fair to say that
Speaker 1: was really the same come monny, throughout all that time, plus,
Speaker 1: titles that Midway created are still going strong today years
Speaker 1: after the company has gone away, as there is a
Speaker 1: new Mortal Kombat movie preparing to finish up on the
Speaker 1: big or more likely for most of us, the slightly
Speaker 1: less big screen. I figured that we could learn more
Speaker 1: about Midway, its history, it's influence on video games, the
Speaker 1: development of Mortal Kombat in particular, and While I could
Speaker 1: dive into excruciating detail, I'm not going to. This is
Speaker 1: going to be more of a summary than a full account,
Speaker 1: because to go year by year would be tedious. Uh,
Speaker 1: Midway has been involved in tons of different coin operated
Speaker 1: amusements and then later on the home market, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna take kind of a very high level view, but
Speaker 1: it also means we're gonna have to look at a
Speaker 1: lot of other stuff. So along the way we will
Speaker 1: learn about coin operated our acade games and amusements, how
Speaker 1: the video game crash affected the arcade industry, and more.
Speaker 1: But our story begins well before there ever was a
Speaker 1: Midway Games. We're actually going to look at a time
Speaker 1: that happened a century before Midway Games was founded. But
Speaker 1: don't worry, we're not again going to go into deep
Speaker 1: detail here. It is fascinating, but around the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: clever engineers figured out ways to make machines that could
Speaker 1: deliver some sort of product or service automatically in exchange
Speaker 1: for a coin. So a coin operated device, you might
Speaker 1: put a penny in a slot and then maybe a
Speaker 1: little ten figures like T I N ten figures begin
Speaker 1: to race around a race track. Or jazz band might
Speaker 1: appear to dance around as music plays from the machine.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you're ever in San Francisco, I
Speaker 1: highly recommend you check out muse A Mechanique. It is
Speaker 1: a an entire museum dedicated to coin operated devices, ranging
Speaker 1: from games like pinball two very odd and specific implementations.
Speaker 1: It is a fascinating place and I love it very much.
Speaker 1: Also kind of creepy. But the basic business model of
Speaker 1: this whole operation was that you have a company that
Speaker 1: builds these sorts of machines, right They specialize in creating
Speaker 1: the clockwork or mechanics that actually do the thing. And
Speaker 1: then that company, once making this machine, would sell that
Speaker 1: machine to various business owners, and the owner might run
Speaker 1: a bar or maybe an amusement park or carnival or
Speaker 1: a bowling alley or whatever, and the owner would then
Speaker 1: recoup the cost of that purchase a penny or much
Speaker 1: much later a quarter at a time. So as long
Speaker 1: as the machine was in good working order and people
Speaker 1: liked whatever it was the machine did, it would become
Speaker 1: a revenue generator and eventually turn a profit if you
Speaker 1: could run it for long enough. There's a great story
Speaker 1: of a sort of proto coin up device I want
Speaker 1: to talk about for a second. It came from the UK,
Speaker 1: specifically London, even more specifically Fleet Street, where a barber
Speaker 1: of some renown was known to cooperate with a local
Speaker 1: pie shop owner. But that's a musical for another time. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there was a bookseller and political agitator named Richard Carlisle
Speaker 1: who had this weird idea that it wasn't totally fair
Speaker 1: that only about three percent of the UK's population actually
Speaker 1: had the right to vote. So he set up a
Speaker 1: bookseller shop on Fleet Street. And the authorities didn't really
Speaker 1: care for some of the literature he was selling, and
Speaker 1: they brought upon him charges that he was knowingly selling
Speaker 1: prohibited books. Carlisle came up with what thought was a
Speaker 1: pretty clever workaround of this. He installed a shoot near
Speaker 1: the front of his shops. So there is a wall
Speaker 1: there and a little shoot a slot that was right
Speaker 1: there at the front, and there was also a coin
Speaker 1: slot and a dial next to the shoot, and customers
Speaker 1: could come in. They could put a coin into the slot,
Speaker 1: and then they would turn the dial to a number
Speaker 1: that would correspond to a specific title of a book
Speaker 1: that would otherwise prohibited, and then the respective literature would
Speaker 1: come down the shoot and the customer would pick it
Speaker 1: up and walk away. Now, the only reason this doesn't
Speaker 1: actually fall into a true coin op is that behind
Speaker 1: the scenes there was no automatic vending system. Carlisle had
Speaker 1: employees who were behind that wall. They could see what
Speaker 1: number of the dial was set to and then they
Speaker 1: would select the appropriate piece of literature and slide it
Speaker 1: down the shoote by hand. And carl Le wasn't trying
Speaker 1: to fool anyone into thinking the was an automatic system.
Speaker 1: He just wanted plausible deniability. If the fuzz came by,
Speaker 1: then Carlisle could claim that the customer would be unable
Speaker 1: to say who it was that sold them the book
Speaker 1: because whomever it was was behind a wall. Reportedly, this
Speaker 1: defense wasn't really impressive to the coppers and not found
Speaker 1: to be legally sound, but by the eighteen seventies the
Speaker 1: basics of coin operation and automation had really taken shape.
Speaker 1: Penny arcades would then become a thing, and they were
Speaker 1: extremely popular from the eighteen nineties into the first few
Speaker 1: years of the twentieth century. So these were areas that
Speaker 1: were specifically set aside to hold different amusements that were
Speaker 1: operated by the insertion of a penny, and then you
Speaker 1: would get to do whatever it was like. It might
Speaker 1: be a game, or it might even be sort of
Speaker 1: like a little movie. There were these devices called muto scopes.
Speaker 1: They did not mutate people. Rather, they were kind of
Speaker 1: a predecessor to motion pictures, and they allowed people to
Speaker 1: watch short, silent movies. It was really a series of photographs.
Speaker 1: I mean all movies are really those, a series of
Speaker 1: photographs that were mounted on stiff cards that were then
Speaker 1: in turn mounted on a round drum. So the machine,
Speaker 1: once you put a pinnion, would rotate the drum and
Speaker 1: that would present these photographs in series at a speed
Speaker 1: fast enough to create the illusion of animation. Many of
Speaker 1: these early devices were of a rather salacious nature. They
Speaker 1: featured movies of young women cavorting in various stages of undress,
Speaker 1: and each device was dedicated to a specific film, sometimes
Speaker 1: with incredibly evocative titles like what the Butler Saw. This
Speaker 1: also meant that the industry in general of the coin
Speaker 1: op world was starting to get a bad name for itself. Uh.
Speaker 1: A lot of the people behind it also abandoned it
Speaker 1: because they started to get into the actual motion picture industry.
Speaker 1: So for a couple of different reasons, the penny arcades
Speaker 1: began to have a bit of a decline in popularity,
Speaker 1: and they definitely had a stigma attached to them. I mean,
Speaker 1: the fact that you had these little, you know, movie
Speaker 1: machines showing off women partially undressed, meant that they were
Speaker 1: essentially associated with a certain clientele of low repute. And
Speaker 1: the next big advantage in coin operated amusements fell into
Speaker 1: the gambling category, with like the early versions of slot machines,
Speaker 1: and that further associated coin operated devices with the more
Speaker 1: seedy elements of society. First you had peep shows, now
Speaker 1: you got gambling. Such stuff attracts the wrong crowd, you know,
Speaker 1: like hoodlums and gangsters and hop heads and whatnot, or
Speaker 1: so thought the various guardians of virtue, many of whom
Speaker 1: were self appointed. Meanwhile, some inventors were creating devices that
Speaker 1: introduced games of skill rather than just games of chance.
Speaker 1: So in other words, it was something where the person
Speaker 1: putting in the coin actually had a chance to to
Speaker 1: change the outcome in some way, as opposed to just
Speaker 1: hoping that dumb chance makes a ball fall into a
Speaker 1: particular pocket or something. But the association with stuff like
Speaker 1: gambling and peep shows clung to these devices too, and
Speaker 1: they were all kind of lumped into uh machines that
Speaker 1: were guaranteed to send the country into moral decline. Then
Speaker 1: we get into pinball, which similarly had to deal with
Speaker 1: the problem that citizens of unimpeachable morality were sure that
Speaker 1: pinball machines would lead the innocent youth astray and perhaps
Speaker 1: serve as a front for organized crime. Serious of y'all.
Speaker 1: And there were tons of other coin operated amusements, some
Speaker 1: of which simulated various sports. So you could play a
Speaker 1: sort of game of baseball or tennis on this mechanical device.
Speaker 1: It was coin operated, and you would control these little
Speaker 1: figures using different handles and wheels and other types of
Speaker 1: you know, input devices. And and they were also early
Speaker 1: pellet gun based games and later light gun based games,
Speaker 1: so they were shooting games as well. Meanwhile, mass production
Speaker 1: had also become a thing, with assembly lines and efficient
Speaker 1: methods of making a lot of versions of the same product.
Speaker 1: That led us to the birth of several companies that
Speaker 1: started to specialize in coin operated entertainment. One of those
Speaker 1: companies was Lynn Durance United manufacturing company, which would end
Speaker 1: up being incredibly important for our story. It first burst
Speaker 1: onto the scene in ninety two, but its first really
Speaker 1: big hit was in had a bowling game called Shuffle Alley.
Speaker 1: The game had these little cutouts that represented bowling pins.
Speaker 1: They were suspended from hinged poles. So you would slide
Speaker 1: a puck like device down the alley, uh, which really
Speaker 1: is going kind of underneath where the pins are. But
Speaker 1: as it goes down the alley, it would trigger these
Speaker 1: little switches that corresponded to those suspended pins. So as
Speaker 1: the puck would trigger the switch, those poles would flip
Speaker 1: up and retract the pins, which represented that they had
Speaker 1: been knocked down, like in a game of bowling. And
Speaker 1: it was a really big hit. But more importantly, United
Speaker 1: employed a couple of amusement designers who are critical to
Speaker 1: our story. One was Marcine Iggy Wolverton. He went by Iggy.
Speaker 1: I felt that Marcine was a uh an effeminate name
Speaker 1: that he didn't want, and so he went with Iggy.
Speaker 1: And he was an engineer who had worked on everything
Speaker 1: from military aircraft in World War Two two juke boxes
Speaker 1: before he actually joined United. The other was an electrical
Speaker 1: engineer named Hank Ross, and together Wolverton and Ross worked
Speaker 1: on lots of different amusements coin operated amusements, but in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, United was going through some financial difficulties
Speaker 1: and Wolverton and Ross decided that they wanted to strike
Speaker 1: out and found their own company. They did so in
Speaker 1: Franklin Park, Illinois, and they named their company after the
Speaker 1: nearby airport in Chicago. They called it the Midway Manufacturing Company,
Speaker 1: and it officially became a thing in nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 1: Funding coincidence, the Midway is also the name for the
Speaker 1: area in a carnival that hosts stuff like games and
Speaker 1: amusement rides, so in this case the name of the
Speaker 1: company had a sort of double meaning. Anyway, the two
Speaker 1: men founded the company with a startup fund of just
Speaker 1: around five thousand dollars, and they knew that they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to compete on the same scale as the larger,
Speaker 1: more established companies in the business, most of them located
Speaker 1: out of Chicago, so their plan was to keep costs
Speaker 1: low so that they could sell their games and their
Speaker 1: amusements for lower prices than other companies. The margins would
Speaker 1: be small it would be hard work, but they figured
Speaker 1: they could carve out a place in the market for themselves.
Speaker 1: That way, they might not get rich, but they thought
Speaker 1: they could make some interesting games and devices and earn
Speaker 1: a good living. Their first game was called Bumper Shuffle,
Speaker 1: a sort of shuffle board game with bumpers similar to
Speaker 1: what you would see in a pinball machine. But their
Speaker 1: first big hit came out in nineteen sixty It was
Speaker 1: Shooting Gallery, and it used a pellet gun. It was
Speaker 1: such a hit that shooting games became a cornerstone of
Speaker 1: their business. They also kept innovating. In nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: they created a system in which the machine would automatically
Speaker 1: speed up the moving targets as players scored more points, so,
Speaker 1: in other words, the game got more difficult if you
Speaker 1: were good at it kept the game interesting for like
Speaker 1: highly skilled players. They also introduced targets that were covered
Speaker 1: in fluorescent paint, and they started to use black lights
Speaker 1: and some of their games, and both of those innovations
Speaker 1: would find their ways into shooting games moving forward. Before long,
Speaker 1: the demand was high enough that it required them to
Speaker 1: move to a larger building to house their operations. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, Midway, the company that was going to
Speaker 1: be a scrappy little underdog had become an overdog, or
Speaker 1: maybe just a dog whatever I mean. It got big,
Speaker 1: big enough to stand toe to toe with the four
Speaker 1: other big coin operated companies in the United States GOTTLIEB Williams, Bally,
Speaker 1: and Chicago Coin and spoiler alert. Two of those four
Speaker 1: are going to be incredibly important to our story. And
Speaker 1: let's go ahead and get this one of those. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, there would be a big change in
Speaker 1: the industry. That was the year that Bally bought out
Speaker 1: Midway Manufacturing. Bally was known not just for coin operated amusements,
Speaker 1: but specifically for gambling devices, though it had made its
Speaker 1: name early on with pinball machines. And if you listen
Speaker 1: to the whose song Pinball Wizard, you'll hear the lyric
Speaker 1: I thought I was the Bally table King, but I
Speaker 1: just handed my pinball crown to him. So yeah. Bally
Speaker 1: also very much associated with pinball machines as well as
Speaker 1: gambling machines. Bally itself had nearly collapsed in nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: that was the same year the Midway was founded. That
Speaker 1: was when Bally's founder had passed away. A group of investors, however,
Speaker 1: came in and purchased Bally's and the company went on
Speaker 1: to produce updated slot machines kind of similar to the
Speaker 1: ones that you might find in a casino today, of
Speaker 1: the classic type, that is, and Bally had a near
Speaker 1: monopoly on slot machines and casinos in Nevada and became
Speaker 1: financially stable, in fact, flourishing enough to acquire Midway Manufacturing
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine. So at this time, the Midway
Speaker 1: division was still making electro mechanical arcade devices. But in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen seventies things changed. The birth of the
Speaker 1: video game opened up new possibilities. You could make a
Speaker 1: game that ran on code instead of on servos and
Speaker 1: actuators and lightbulbs. You could reduce the number of possible
Speaker 1: fail points, and that would reduce how much maintenance you
Speaker 1: would have to perform on machines, and so Midway's focus
Speaker 1: began to include video games. Early on, Midway established a
Speaker 1: couple of incredibly important partnerships with Japanese companies. The first
Speaker 1: was with Tito, which produced the phenomenally popular Space Invaders
Speaker 1: video game. At the end of the nineteen seventies. Midway
Speaker 1: would also become the North American distributor of Space Invaders,
Speaker 1: and that got that company a lot of money. The
Speaker 1: second big partnership was with Namco. That's the company that
Speaker 1: brought us pac Man. So Midway introduced these games two
Speaker 1: Americans who went gaga for them, and Midway, Tito, and
Speaker 1: Namco all benefited from this relationship. Around this time, Valley
Speaker 1: merged its own games division with Midway, creating Bally Midway. Previously,
Speaker 1: both divisions had been making games like pinball machines on
Speaker 1: their own. Now their forces were combined and they moved forward,
Speaker 1: with Bally usually using its own name for the pinball
Speaker 1: machines and using Midway for the arcade video machines. Midway
Speaker 1: would also jump on some other opportunities. When a company
Speaker 1: called General Computer Corporation created a modified version of pac Man,
Speaker 1: Midway agreed to act as distributor, and through collaboration, this
Speaker 1: game evolved into MS pac Man. It was fairly late
Speaker 1: into that project when Midway actually bothered to seek out
Speaker 1: the blessing of Namco that's the producer of the original
Speaker 1: pac Man game. They were able to get it, obviously,
Speaker 1: but they also had to agree to pay out royalties
Speaker 1: to Namco for leaning so hard on the I P
Speaker 1: And that only makes sense. So you had engineers, developers, artists,
Speaker 1: and such working on games under the Bally Midway label.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we're going to switch gears and
Speaker 1: talk about a totally different company. But don't worry, it
Speaker 1: all comes back together as we head toward Mortal Combat. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take a break now, all right, it's time
Speaker 1: for us to backtrack a little bit. You might remember
Speaker 1: before the break that when I listed out the big
Speaker 1: coin op companies that emerged from the nineteen fifties, one
Speaker 1: of them was called Williams, which also grew out of Chicago. Now,
Speaker 1: remember when I mentioned United Manufacturing, that was the company
Speaker 1: founded by Lynn Durant. Well, technically there was a co
Speaker 1: founder to that company, Harry Williams, And that means you
Speaker 1: can actually trace the history of both Midway and Williams
Speaker 1: to this one company that produced coin op entertainments way
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen forties. Harry Williams actually left United
Speaker 1: after only a year of being with the company, and
Speaker 1: then he formed his own Williams Manufacturing company in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three, Williams had already made a ton of contributions
Speaker 1: to the development of games like pinball. He had actually
Speaker 1: introduced elements like the tilt detector, which can tell if
Speaker 1: someone's trying to nudge or tilt a pinball table in
Speaker 1: order to control where the ball is going. If that happens,
Speaker 1: they tilt detector shuts everything down and allows the ball
Speaker 1: to drain. It's kind of a punishment for people who
Speaker 1: are trying to cheat the game. He also introduced the
Speaker 1: concept of a free play. If a player achieved a
Speaker 1: sufficiently high score on a game, the Williams Manufacturing company
Speaker 1: would have a pretty wild ride of its own. I
Speaker 1: guess it's a good thing there wasn't a sensor in
Speaker 1: the company for tilt, because it would have gone off
Speaker 1: numerous times. In ninety eight, Sam Stern would buy to
Speaker 1: the company, taking up almost half of the ownership Williams
Speaker 1: is Harry Williams focused on developing games, while Sam Stern
Speaker 1: kind of handled most of the business side of the enterprise.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty nine, a conglomerate out of New York
Speaker 1: called Consolidated sun Ray bought out Harry Williams share of
Speaker 1: the company and it became the Williams Electronic Manufacturing Corporation.
Speaker 1: Harry Williams essentially left the company at this point, though
Speaker 1: he did occasionally design games for Williams in the following years.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty one, sam Stern then purchased the shares
Speaker 1: that were owned by Consolidated sun Ray, but in sixty
Speaker 1: four he sold the company to another corporation called ce Berg,
Speaker 1: which also acquired the old Union Manufacturing. So yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: getting kind of dizzy too. The operations transferred over to
Speaker 1: a factory that had been owned by Union, and the
Speaker 1: entire company adopted the Williams brand name, becoming Williams Electronics.
Speaker 1: Sam Stern was actually brought back in to run the
Speaker 1: operations that were overseeing the coin op amusements like Bally
Speaker 1: and Midway. The folks that Williams understood the potential for
Speaker 1: video games as those came onto the scene, and so
Speaker 1: the company started to work on developing arcade video games
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen seventies. This coincided with a restructuring
Speaker 1: of the company, and in nineteen seventy four we got
Speaker 1: Williams Electronics Incorporated, which was still a subsidiary to see
Speaker 1: Berg at that point. But in nineteen eighty a guy
Speaker 1: named Louis Nicastro purchased Williams Electronics from Seaberg. It was
Speaker 1: this version of Williams that would introduce the world to
Speaker 1: some incredibly popular arcade titles like Joust Defender and Robotron.
Speaker 1: Classic arcade game nerds will be familiar with those titles,
Speaker 1: which sucked down quarters at an incredible pace. Now, a
Speaker 1: related area of revenue was the blossoming home video game market.
Speaker 1: That one one was ramping up quite a bit, in fact,
Speaker 1: a bit too fast, as would turn out. Usually, companies
Speaker 1: like Midway or Williams wouldn't develop games for home systems. Instead,
Speaker 1: they would license out their i p to other game studios,
Speaker 1: which would then create home versions of those arcade games.
Speaker 1: The home versions were often, at best pale imitations of
Speaker 1: the original arcade game experience, and there were a couple
Speaker 1: of big reasons for this. Some of them are technological,
Speaker 1: some of them are more related to gameplay, and let's
Speaker 1: go with technological first. From that perspective, early game consoles
Speaker 1: had a really limited amount of processing power. Moreover, I
Speaker 1: am really talking about consoles that could play different games,
Speaker 1: typically by inserting a cartridge into the video game console.
Speaker 1: The games were hard coded into the circuitry inside those cartridges,
Speaker 1: and plugging the cartridge into the console connected the game's
Speaker 1: circuit board to the consoles processors. Arcade games were instead
Speaker 1: dedicated machines that just did one thing. They played a
Speaker 1: specific game based on whatever wrong chips that is, read
Speaker 1: only memory chips were plugged into the circuit boards for
Speaker 1: that arcade cabinet. Arcade games provided a more sophisticated experience
Speaker 1: than the home game market, even when the experience was
Speaker 1: still fairly primitive early on. You would never say that
Speaker 1: the Atari twenty version of pac Man was identical to
Speaker 1: the arcade version, because it clearly was not. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was pretty awful. But from a gameplay perspective, there
Speaker 1: was another big difference. Let's talk about why arcade game
Speaker 1: designers made games the way they were. So. The whole
Speaker 1: point is to convince someone to plunk over a quarter.
Speaker 1: In order to play a game, the game has to
Speaker 1: be interesting and more importantly, arguably fun. It needs to
Speaker 1: give the player the sense that if they are skilled enough,
Speaker 1: they can progress further into the game, perhaps even getting
Speaker 1: a high score or finishing out of storyline depending on
Speaker 1: how the game is constructed. But that's just one side
Speaker 1: to it. The machines have to make enough money to
Speaker 1: convince proprietors, that is, the people who own a video game,
Speaker 1: arcade or a carnival or whatever. It has to convince
Speaker 1: them that they will recoup their investment after they purchase
Speaker 1: the arcade game. And if a machine costs a couple
Speaker 1: of thousand dollars, the proprietors want to know that at
Speaker 1: the end of a week they'll have a few hundred
Speaker 1: bucks in quarters. And this is really important because games
Speaker 1: might pass out of fashion. That means over time you're
Speaker 1: gonna expect to see smaller takes at the end of
Speaker 1: a week, So you need a lot of quarters. Well
Speaker 1: how do you get a lot of quarters? Well, part
Speaker 1: of it is that you have to make a game
Speaker 1: that people want to play, But another part is figuring
Speaker 1: out a kind of an amount of time that the
Speaker 1: average person might play before they run out of lives
Speaker 1: and thus require the player to either cough up another
Speaker 1: quarter to start over or to continue to play, or
Speaker 1: they'll move on and open up the arcade machine for
Speaker 1: some other player to come and try it out. That
Speaker 1: amount of time has changed over the years, like the
Speaker 1: amount of time that developers aimed for, but at one point,
Speaker 1: the general rule of thumb was that a company wanted
Speaker 1: a player to plunk in another twenty five cents every
Speaker 1: forty five seconds or so, so less than a minute.
Speaker 1: So your game had to convince a player to keep
Speaker 1: ongoing and reward that player with the possibility of hitting
Speaker 1: new heights or getting further in the story. If it didn't,
Speaker 1: people would just give up after getting obliterated, and then
Speaker 1: they would talk about it, and word would get around,
Speaker 1: and then that game might sit in the corner unplayed,
Speaker 1: and the proprietor of that establishment, whether it was an
Speaker 1: arcade or a movie theater or whatever, might not be
Speaker 1: inclined to purchase an arcade machine from that same company
Speaker 1: in the future because they got burned. So the reputation
Speaker 1: of the companies was dependent upon the fact that people
Speaker 1: would want to play the game and be willing to
Speaker 1: keep plugging quarters in over time. So companies like Williams
Speaker 1: and Midway would frequently deploy a game under development at
Speaker 1: a couple of controlled spots in town before they would
Speaker 1: go into full production. They would install the game into
Speaker 1: like an arcade that they kind of they had friends
Speaker 1: who ran it, and they would keep it high on
Speaker 1: players to see how much money that arcade machine would
Speaker 1: bring in by the end of a week, to figure
Speaker 1: out if they were on the right track or if
Speaker 1: they might have to make changes before they go into production.
Speaker 1: A target figure was between seven eight hundred dollars in
Speaker 1: a week by the time you get to the late
Speaker 1: eighties and early nineties, So this was different from the
Speaker 1: home market. At the home market, you wanted a game
Speaker 1: that people wanted to play, and it wasn't so important
Speaker 1: that the game experience only last a few seconds because
Speaker 1: you only sell that cartridge once. You're not collecting over time.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can actually compare arcade games to micro
Speaker 1: transactions and mobile games in a lot of ways, but
Speaker 1: with home games, it was very different. You sold the cartridge,
Speaker 1: you're done, So the game developers were more concentrated on
Speaker 1: making experiences that players really enjoyed, that they could play
Speaker 1: for a while, because that would be reflected in reviews
Speaker 1: for the game, which then could help drive sales. So
Speaker 1: very different approach to video game development from the arcade
Speaker 1: versus the home market. All right back to arcade games,
Speaker 1: because those games were programmed onto wrong chips, making changes
Speaker 1: was a pretty big deal. You were actually creating new hardware,
Speaker 1: new rong chips in order to do it. So in
Speaker 1: some cases the arcade machines circuit board might allow for
Speaker 1: easy swapping of ROM chips or adding a new wrong chip,
Speaker 1: but in others it would mean having to create new
Speaker 1: circuit boards with the games physically programmed onto these chips
Speaker 1: and then redeployed for testing. If a company couldn't demonstrate
Speaker 1: that their game was going to be popular, it would
Speaker 1: be very hard to move units, and the process of
Speaker 1: developing producing arcade games wasn't cheap, so there was a
Speaker 1: lot of pressure to make games that could have a
Speaker 1: proven success rate. All right, let's get back to our story.
Speaker 1: So Bally Midway was making a lot of arcade games,
Speaker 1: including a ton of you know, games that were licensed
Speaker 1: from other gamemakers in Japan, so they were really distributing those,
Speaker 1: not making them. Some of those games, though, were truly iconic.
Speaker 1: Spy Hunter remains one of my favorite arcade games from
Speaker 1: my childhood, particularly the versions that were in a cockpit style.
Speaker 1: Cabinet Tapper was a really big hit that featured the
Speaker 1: player taking control of a bartender serving up drinks root
Speaker 1: beer in a lot of family friendly locations, and you're
Speaker 1: serving them to various patrons who are moving slowly across
Speaker 1: the screen down a bar, and you're trying to keep
Speaker 1: them from getting to the end and throwing you out.
Speaker 1: Tron and Discs of Tron were two licensed arcade games
Speaker 1: based off the Tron motion picture and I loved both
Speaker 1: of those games. And then there were the games from
Speaker 1: Japan that Bally Midway distributed here in America, like pac
Speaker 1: Man and Galagha and Galaxion. Midway also created Rampage, a
Speaker 1: game in which players took control of one of three
Speaker 1: giant monsters going on a a rampage through various cities.
Speaker 1: That game was developed by Brian Collen and Jeff Nauman,
Speaker 1: who set out to make a cartoonish fun game at
Speaker 1: which there was no specific set way to play. You
Speaker 1: just had fun smashing stuff up while puny humans tried
Speaker 1: to stop you, and if you took enough damage, your
Speaker 1: game was over. But it was a big success for
Speaker 1: Bally Midway. Williams meanwhile, was struggling a bit in the
Speaker 1: arcade game department. It's arcade video game division was effectively
Speaker 1: shuttered after the home video game market crash of the
Speaker 1: early eighties. They had encountered difficulty getting their units sold
Speaker 1: into different arcades, so they kind of put it on
Speaker 1: the back burner. The overall company had cash, but it
Speaker 1: was finding it difficult to get traction in the video
Speaker 1: game market again, so Williams acquired Bally Midway from Bally Proper,
Speaker 1: the parent company. Bally was getting out of the coin
Speaker 1: op entertainment arcade business, focusing on other stuff like gambling
Speaker 1: machines and the like. According to the documentary Insert Coin,
Speaker 1: the acquisition was just for five million dollars. Williams would
Speaker 1: get the rights to the Bally Midway name for arcade
Speaker 1: machines and pinball machines that sort of thing, and they
Speaker 1: would continue to release pinball machines branded under Bally because
Speaker 1: of how well known that brand was in pinball. But
Speaker 1: this meant that Williams, Bally, and Midway we're all the
Speaker 1: same company, at least when it came to coin operated
Speaker 1: entertainment devices, and Williams even changed its name to Midway
Speaker 1: effectively for video games. Uh, and they relocated Midway operations
Speaker 1: to Chicago in the process. The Midway name had a
Speaker 1: stronger presence in the arcade world, but Williams still used
Speaker 1: its own name for pinball machine. So it gets really confusing.
Speaker 1: And now all the folks who had been working on
Speaker 1: Williams games became Midway game designers, which they kind of resented.
Speaker 1: As for the folks from Midway, the teams that were
Speaker 1: working on coin operated devices, most of them did not
Speaker 1: go with this acquisition. A lot of those designers quit.
Speaker 1: There's a famous photograph, the Waiving Goodbye photograph, where they're
Speaker 1: not really waving goodbye, they're holding up a single digit
Speaker 1: each a very rude gesture. I think you can see
Speaker 1: where I'm going anyway. Well, two of the designers actually
Speaker 1: did make the move over to Williams, that being and
Speaker 1: Colon and Jeff Nouman, the guys who made Rampage. They
Speaker 1: came over to Williams now Midway. But some of the managers,
Speaker 1: also from the old Valley Midway days, made their way
Speaker 1: over to Williams as well. So now you had Williams
Speaker 1: designers who were reporting to Midway managers. And so the
Speaker 1: Midway of the late eighties and early nineties was really
Speaker 1: a mishmash of Williams employees, Midway managers, and some folks
Speaker 1: who had come up from the older coin not days.
Speaker 1: One of the people working in the pinball division at
Speaker 1: Williams was a man named Ed Boone. Heck Boon made
Speaker 1: a contribution to one of my favorite pinball games of
Speaker 1: all time. It's a pinball game called fun House. In
Speaker 1: that game, there is an element on the playing field,
Speaker 1: a ventriloquist dummy head named Rudy, and Rudy heckel's you
Speaker 1: as you play. Rudy has a moving mouth and his
Speaker 1: head's right there on the playfield, and with the right
Speaker 1: timing and angle, you could shoot the pinball right into
Speaker 1: his mouth make him cough. It was fun anyway. Boone
Speaker 1: was the voice for Rudy. Midway also added a few
Speaker 1: new developers and artists to its roster that would shape
Speaker 1: the evolution of video games and caused quite a bit
Speaker 1: of controversy in the process. One of those was Mark Termel,
Speaker 1: who had designed games for Activision back in the early eighties.
Speaker 1: He joined Williams Slash Midway in nine and got to
Speaker 1: work on a game called Smash TV. The control system
Speaker 1: was a pair of joysticks inspired by the classic arcade
Speaker 1: game Robotron. One joystick controlled character movement and the other
Speaker 1: controlled which direction you were firing in the game had
Speaker 1: a cheeky sense of humor, styled as a violent game show.
Speaker 1: In the vein of Running Man, players would go through
Speaker 1: a maze of room after room that would become flooded
Speaker 1: with enemies and pickups or the occasional boss fight, and
Speaker 1: you weren't likely to survive for too long, which meant
Speaker 1: players would keep feeding quarters into the machine. The game
Speaker 1: promised players that if they got to the end, they
Speaker 1: would be awarded with a run in the Pleasure Dome,
Speaker 1: but turned out that this was originally an empty promise
Speaker 1: because there was no pleasure dome in the original game.
Speaker 1: I think that just makes it more in line with
Speaker 1: properties like Running Man Now. It turned out that some
Speaker 1: players were complaining about this, so Turmel actually created an
Speaker 1: updated wrong chip that could be installed into Smash TV
Speaker 1: cabinets to include the pleasure Dome, which was a room
Speaker 1: filled with an icon of a woman in a swimsuit,
Speaker 1: like just a whole bunch of this icons of the
Speaker 1: same woman, which then you could collect like coins or cash,
Speaker 1: which is kind of gross. So maybe a tiny bit
Speaker 1: of a downer there. But one of the artists who
Speaker 1: worked on Termel's Smash TV was a guy named John Tobias.
Speaker 1: He had joined Williams in the late eades and decided
Speaker 1: to work on art in the video game industry. He
Speaker 1: had graduated from art school and this is what he
Speaker 1: wanted to do. So when we come back, we'll find
Speaker 1: out how Smash TV and the meeting of Tobias and
Speaker 1: Boone would lead to the development of Mortal Kombat. But
Speaker 1: first let's take another break. So Smash TV and another
Speaker 1: earlier Williams game called Narc helped set the stage for
Speaker 1: Mortal Kombat. Both of those games featured over the top violence.
Speaker 1: Narc also made use of actors. Williams The company would
Speaker 1: bring in actors and film them against a backdrop doing
Speaker 1: stuff like, you know, just walking on a treadmill or
Speaker 1: other simple actions, and the team would take that footage
Speaker 1: to create in game animation and make it more realistic.
Speaker 1: The company began to develop a small video unit dedicated
Speaker 1: to getting the sort of reference material which would later
Speaker 1: be used to create digitized content for games like Mortal
Speaker 1: Kombat and NBA JAM. Narc caught a lot of flak
Speaker 1: for being an incredibly violent game. In it, you played
Speaker 1: as one of two characters who had great names. There
Speaker 1: was Max Force and there was hit Man. These two
Speaker 1: characters progressed through levels, taking out various drug dealers and
Speaker 1: junkies with what can only be described as extreme prejudice.
Speaker 1: Both characters had rocket launchers and machine guns, downed enemies,
Speaker 1: practically exploded in blood and limbs, but the whole thing
Speaker 1: was still kind of cartoony, so it was violent but
Speaker 1: not realistic, so cartoony and violent. That was enough to
Speaker 1: get a lot of concerned parental types upset at the game.
Speaker 1: But the company Midway, kind of corded this attention because
Speaker 1: the publicity just drove up interest in the games, and
Speaker 1: so Midway was able to sell more cabinets to arcades
Speaker 1: and movie theaters and the like because customers really wanted
Speaker 1: to play this controversial game. So for them it was
Speaker 1: a good thing. They were not upset being called UH
Speaker 1: and criticized for violence. It just made them more money.
Speaker 1: So they started to have this uh, this culture change
Speaker 1: over at Midway, one that started to embrace over the
Speaker 1: top violence and gore, and that set the stage for
Speaker 1: John Tobias and ed Boon to pitch their own game,
Speaker 1: though they did not intend for it to be a
Speaker 1: super gory game when they first set out, and it
Speaker 1: all really came about because there was going to be
Speaker 1: a production gap in the in the actual manufacturing facilities
Speaker 1: that were coming up in like six months, So Midway
Speaker 1: had to take production runs into consideration when it was
Speaker 1: rolling out games, because it's one thing to design and
Speaker 1: program a game, it's another to produce thousands of copies
Speaker 1: of that game. Particular early when you remember you're talking
Speaker 1: about arcade machines, these are big, heavy things with monitors
Speaker 1: and circuit boards and meters and meters of wiring in them.
Speaker 1: So in this case, the company had a gap of
Speaker 1: three months between production runs. One game was going to
Speaker 1: come to the end of its production run, the next
Speaker 1: game wasn't going to be ready for another three months,
Speaker 1: so Boone and Tobias were essentially given the chance to
Speaker 1: develop a fighting game that would fit in that gap.
Speaker 1: To the executives at Midway, this was a no brainer.
Speaker 1: The manufacturing line was going to be idle, and so
Speaker 1: it was better to have a potential revenue generator going
Speaker 1: into production than to do nothing at all. But half
Speaker 1: a year is a very short time to design a game.
Speaker 1: The original idea was to create a fighting game based
Speaker 1: on Geenclaude Van Dem, the martial artist and actor. Van Dam, however,
Speaker 1: passed on the pitch, which freed up Boone and Tobias
Speaker 1: to come up with their own characters and designs. They
Speaker 1: added John Vogel and Dan Ford in to their team
Speaker 1: to help in the development, with Ford and really focusing
Speaker 1: on sound design. Tobias called up a friend he knew
Speaker 1: from childhood, Daniel Posina. Pasina was into martial arts, and
Speaker 1: Tobias wanted Possina to come in and be part of
Speaker 1: the team and allow them to get some video footage
Speaker 1: of Possina doing stuff like walking, kicking, punching, falling down,
Speaker 1: and this footage would be digitized, so Mortal Kombat was
Speaker 1: to be a fighting game in which the figures were
Speaker 1: actual people rather than animated cartoon characters. Passina would go
Speaker 1: on to portray not just Johnny Cage, who is in
Speaker 1: the game a martial arts action star clearly inspired by
Speaker 1: Van Down, but he also played the ninja characters Scorpion
Speaker 1: and sub Zero in those early video capture sessions to
Speaker 1: Bias and Boone had to tell Passina to move more
Speaker 1: slowly than he normally would. Passina, being trained in martial arts,
Speaker 1: naturally would throw punches and kicks much faster than the
Speaker 1: studio camera was able to handle because the resulting footage
Speaker 1: would end up being really blurry, so he had to
Speaker 1: do everything at a more methodical pace. However, this proved
Speaker 1: to be difficult for a certain moves. At one such
Speaker 1: move in Moral Kombat sees Johnny Cage do this flying
Speaker 1: kick which can go a pretty good distance, but turns
Speaker 1: out it's really hard to jump and hover in mid air,
Speaker 1: and so the solution was to use various surfaces, like
Speaker 1: a portable set of steps, so that the actors could
Speaker 1: make a pose and hold it in mid air being
Speaker 1: supported by this stuff, and then that would all be
Speaker 1: removed once the video game was going into production, and
Speaker 1: you're just left with the digitized image of someone doing
Speaker 1: this incredible kick that just suspends in mid air. Boone
Speaker 1: and Tobias put together an early version of the fighting
Speaker 1: game something to show off to the executives at midway
Speaker 1: to kind of give up progress. Update. It wasn't the
Speaker 1: full game didn't have the full roster of characters. A
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that would make it into the final
Speaker 1: version wasn't included yet, but what they showed off impressed
Speaker 1: the executives so much that they decided to make a
Speaker 1: drastic change rather than have the game be a gap
Speaker 1: filler from midway, something that was just thrown together without
Speaker 1: much thought or effort at at the management level. At
Speaker 1: least now it was going to become a fully fleshed
Speaker 1: out project. The development team got more resources so they
Speaker 1: could put more into it, and now the game that
Speaker 1: would become Mortal Kombat would no longer be rushed through
Speaker 1: to production midway. Since that they had a real money
Speaker 1: maker on their hands. Boone and Tobias brought in more actors,
Speaker 1: creating more characters, fleshing out their back stories a bit.
Speaker 1: Each character had his or her own reason for being
Speaker 1: in this tournament. They created the conflict between the Earth Realm,
Speaker 1: which was a version of our reality, and the out world,
Speaker 1: where a lot of batties lived. The lore has since
Speaker 1: been fleshed out much much further, and I don't even
Speaker 1: want to go into it because this would turn into
Speaker 1: a fan cast about Moral Kombat. Plus I'd have to
Speaker 1: try and make sense of some of the contradictions that
Speaker 1: have popped up in the storyline as more versions of
Speaker 1: the game have come out. During the development process, the
Speaker 1: team gradually began to make the game more violent and
Speaker 1: more graphic. According to Tobias and Boone, this was never
Speaker 1: part of the original idea just came about as the
Speaker 1: team began to incorporate more fanciful and magical elements into
Speaker 1: the game. So sub Zero got ice powers, Scorpion had
Speaker 1: his famous harpoon on a rope, lu Kane could shoot
Speaker 1: fireballs from his hands, and so on. And then the
Speaker 1: team also decided to mock a common practice a common
Speaker 1: mechanic in fighting games at the time. So a lot
Speaker 1: of fighting games incorporate a dizzy ing or stunning effect,
Speaker 1: meaning that when your character gets hit by a powerful
Speaker 1: move or you end up on the receiving end of
Speaker 1: a few moves, you get stunned and you can't respond.
Speaker 1: That gives your opponent the chance to land additional hits
Speaker 1: on you can't really do anything about it. Boon and
Speaker 1: Tobias were not big fans of this, but they decided
Speaker 1: to incorporate it in a different way. Instead of happening
Speaker 1: in the middle of a match. They decided that at
Speaker 1: the deciding match, because moral comments set up to be
Speaker 1: a best two out of three per match between two fighters,
Speaker 1: at the deciding match, the losing character would be stunned
Speaker 1: at the end, and this was mostly just an excuse
Speaker 1: for the winning player to be able to land a
Speaker 1: big upper cut on the loser, and the upper cut
Speaker 1: always resulted in an exaggerated move that would throw the
Speaker 1: opponent up into the air and that would be the
Speaker 1: final blow. But that led the team to consider alternatives
Speaker 1: that they could do. Instead of just letting you do
Speaker 1: a big upper cut or kick or whatever. What if
Speaker 1: they hid a few really over the top moves that
Speaker 1: could be pulled off at the end of a match.
Speaker 1: Players would have to execute a series of joystick moves
Speaker 1: and button presses to pull off these maneuvers. They would
Speaker 1: be finishers or fatalities that would show one character killing
Speaker 1: another on screen. They did this sort of for fun
Speaker 1: and initially got a very shocked reaction from within the
Speaker 1: company and the actors portraying the characters. They kept saying,
Speaker 1: we can't do this, and the developer said, why can't
Speaker 1: we do it? No one ever comes in to check
Speaker 1: on us, I think we're okay, And sure enough people
Speaker 1: thought about it, and soon dollar signs were kind of
Speaker 1: appearing all over the place, and they thought this could
Speaker 1: be a really big part of the experience of playing
Speaker 1: the game. Players could discover the correct combinations and then
Speaker 1: show off to friends who would go ape at seeing
Speaker 1: one character rip the heart out of another or decapitating
Speaker 1: them with an uppercut or whatever. So it went into
Speaker 1: the game. In the end, Mortal Kombat would be a violent,
Speaker 1: bloody and cheeky game. It didn't take itself too seriously,
Speaker 1: and when the company tested out the game and its
Speaker 1: locations around Chicago, it was immediately clear they had produced
Speaker 1: a huge hit. Orders poured in for the game. More
Speaker 1: than twenty five thousand units were sold. Players were going
Speaker 1: crazy finding out how to pull off fatalities, and the
Speaker 1: game's practice of loser pays, winner stays was really popular too,
Speaker 1: meaning if you were facing off against another human player
Speaker 1: and you won, you got to keep playing, but if
Speaker 1: you lost, then you had to put in another coin
Speaker 1: or make way for the next person. This encouraged people
Speaker 1: to line their quarters or tokens up on the arcade
Speaker 1: machine in order to call next, and you had lines
Speaker 1: of challengers forming to play against the current local hot shot.
Speaker 1: The arcade machine just kept collecting coins, so it was
Speaker 1: a really effective product for Midway. It was a huge success.
Speaker 1: Now we've been going for a while and I've got
Speaker 1: a lot more to say about Mortal Kombat and Midway.
Speaker 1: I want to talk more about how the game progressed
Speaker 1: and changed over the years, the pressures that the developers
Speaker 1: found themselves under and things that that led to them
Speaker 1: deciding to try something different, as well as the demise
Speaker 1: of Midway and the continuing success of Mortal Kombat. But
Speaker 1: all of that's gonna have to wait for another episode,
Speaker 1: So tune in later this week for part two of
Speaker 1: this and we will pick up to talk about the consequences,
Speaker 1: perhaps with a k of Mortal Kombat coming out. If
Speaker 1: you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, let me know on Twitter where
Speaker 1: our handle is text Stuff hs W, and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows. H