The Centronics/Gamex Interlude … Beware The Mafia!
Late in January 1975, I am sitting at my desk in our video game development lab at Sanders, having just recently returned from an MOA show in Chicago. In the late afternoon the phone rings: At the other end is the president of Centronics, Bob Howard.
Now, Centronics was then – and was for many years afterwards – a household word in the nascent computer printer business. Centronics had a substantial, modern plant in Hudson, New Hampshire, where they assembled large quantities of printers. Their basic engines (printer mechanisms) were imported from Japan but Centronics developed and fabricated all of the electronics needed to interface printers and computers efficiently. Their engineers created the Centronics interface hardware, connector and software standards that are in use to this day. They were running a very successful operation. Conveniently for me, that plant was no more than about five miles from my Canal Street office in Nashua.
Bob Howard told me that he had just returned from England where he had attended a video arcade game show. When he got back, he had his lawyers look into who owned patents in that business, because he had a specific interest in the subject. His lawyers told him call down the street because a quick search of the patent files brought up Sanders/Baer, Baer, Baer et al in all the relevant patents. „Could I come to his office the next morning?“ – „Of course, I’ll be there with bells on bright and early!“
When I showed up at Centronics the next morning, I learned from Bob Howard that the company was also involved in a small subsidiary apply named Gamex. That company’s objective was to introduce electronics, specifically computer controlled games into Las Vegas. Bob Howard informed me that he wanted to build an all electronic „21“ machine for a start. Would Sanders be interested in extending the necessary licenses and would we help design this machine? The answer was, naturally, yes, we would.
The next day, Lenny Cope and I went back to Centronics to meet with several of their engineers and discussed the details of the machine they were looking for. Then we wrote a proposal, submitted it and in short order, got the job of doing the display portion of the game. Bingo! We were in the video game consulting engineering business.
To keep the cost down, we designed the game around a 12″ B&W monitor and used a transparent vinyl color overlay to create the illusion of a full color presentation. That worked out very well. Several engineers at Centronics designed the software that responded to the player button presses and interfaced with our display hardware. The result was a slick machine that played flawlessly, had the required adjustability of the odds for use by the casino operators and was potentially cheaper and far more reliable that its mechanical counterpart.
Later in 1975, Bob Howard extended our contract to cover the design of a horse racing game. Again Lenny Cope and I designed the graphics portion of the job. What the player saw was a perspective view of the race track as from a camera above and to the side of the straightaway. Animated horses ran from left to right, with a picket fence zipping by behind them. We allowed the player to make his horse change lanes and to try and affect the outcome of the race by squeezing out other horses. There was a toteboard showing the horses‘ numbers, the odds, bets and the winner. It all looked very realistic and might have become an exciting game except for a minor glitch.
Early in 1976, just about the time we finished the first pass of the graphic display hardware for „Photofinish“, we got the word from Centronics to stop all work! It seemed that certain (Mafia?) elements in the gambling business let it be known that Gamex was to „get the hell out of this business!“. The next thing we knew, the lead engineer at Centronics on the Gamex project was leaving the company; he was moving to Bally in Chicago. A set of drawings, schematics, the hardware and all the code that had been written for the two games presumably went with him.
That appeared to be the end of our foray into the gambling world.
Years later, in the mid Eighties, I would engineer an arrangement between Sanders and Marvin Glass and Associates (the US‘ best known independent toy and game designers in Chicago) which allowed us to get together on the design of a two player video game which we called „Monday Nite Football“. That effort had a Mafia sequel, too.
