Smile – You’re On Camera!
Years later, Chicago located Bally Midway turned into a very professionally run video arcade game company. In 1985 we had better luck licensing them under my patents for a game system which uses a TV camera to take a picture of the player’s face for use in the game and in the score credits. I had come up with that idea and built a simple demo. When I had that working well, I took it to Chicago.
Howard Morrison invited John Peserb, one time major league baseball player and now chief engineer at Bally Midway. He came to look at my demo at Marvin Glass‘ impressive studios on North LaSalle Street. The demo went off fine. John liked the concept and immediately began to negotiate for a license.
I went home to New Hampshire and designed and built another, more complex board full of TTL IC logic to implement the concept more completely. I wanted to do a better job of digitizing faces – specifically, to provider higher resolution and gray scale. When I had it working well, I shipped that board to John Peserb and Bally’s own engineers took it from there. A year later I got the board back and converted it to a scanner for passport size photos. Never waste a nice piece of electronics.
Once Glass and Bally had programmed a game using the camera concept, the machine went on trial at a Chicago arcade where it started out working well. Within a day, however, some idiot got up on a chair, dropped his pants in front of the camera … and that was the end of the concept of using a TV camera in a coin-op game … it takes all kinds to make a world.