How Video Games Invaded The Home TV Set – Chapter 19

Tracking Video Game Activity In The Field

In the spring of 1974 I had attended an Music Operators of America show of coin-op/arcade games in Chicago. It was the first of many MOA shows which I would attend over the years. The object was to collect information on infringing games, which is exactly what I did. I would look at, or play whatever games were accessible and then make detailed notes from memory while ducking inconspicuously behind a column away from the display area … I felt like a gum shoe but it was fun and I got the information we were looking for! That data was later passed along to Magnavox. I considered this activity to be part of my continuing attempts to get them off their duff and finally start going after infringers in a serious way.

When I came back from the MOA show, Royden Sanders, our president, asked for a briefing. After finishing my verbal report, I ran through some of the arcade video game business numbers for him. That prompted him to ask me something like: „Why aren’t we in that business if it’s so lucrative?“. Since this meant getting into the commercial product manufacturing business about which Sanders knew zip, I ducked and I weaved but to no avail. Obviously couldn’t avoid coming up with a detailed answer to Sandy’s question. So I did.

I sat down and generated a preliminary paper design of a coin-op machine. That design used what we had come to call Rusch’s „de/dt“ velocity sensitive circuit functions (de/dt being the derivative of the change in voltage with respect to time) … methods for controlling the motion of the ball in a hockey game, for example, which gave the puck realistic velocity – and direction – control. Bill Harrison and I had built an attachment to the Brown Box in 1968 which demonstrated the power of that method. We were able to play a very realistic hockey game back then which was far superior to arcade games that came on the market as much as 7 or 8 years later.

In addition to the design, I came up with a business plan for producing what we later called our Skate-N-Score and our Pro-Soccer arcade games. I was half hoping that would put an end to this trail. Instead, the plan turned out persuasive enough to get a go ahead from Sandy. Some initial funding came from Herb Campman’s R&D office, and about $50k was kicked in by Gene Rubin out of some kitty he had for R&D. He just liked the idea of Sanders doing something out of the ordinary with a fair chance of success. Gene was a gutsy guy … a lot of us thought that he should have become president of Sanders in the 1980s but never got the chance.

I gathered a group of engineers and technicians in a fair sized lab room located in the rear mill building behind the main Canal Street building. There we designed two versions of sports games. Within a few months we finished building ten complete arcade games, five of each type. All of the electronics were located on a single, one foot square PC board. That was attached to the inside of the hinged door. When you opened up the door, the whole works was in front of you, readily accessible for servicing along with the coin mechanism box. It was a good design and played like gang busters. While on test at an arcade location in New Hampshire it beat most other Atari and Midway coin-op games there by a factor of 2 to 1 … not too shabby! This looked promising.

Then the fun began at Sanders: I made appropriate demos to Sandy and others and presented my latest, detailed business plan on how to get into the arcade game business. One component of my presentation was the request to set up shop in a small, nearly empty building we owned about a mile distant from our Canal Street facility, right off the Everitt Parkway and Route 101 in Nashua. A second component was my stipulation that nobody from Sanders military operation be transferred or have anything to do with this proposed consumer products operation. Having lived on both sides of the fence – in consumer product manufacturing and defense electronics – I knew only too well how incompatible these two activities are. I wanted to hire a new crew from scratch.

That proposal seemed to cast a pall over the whole project … but I was insistent: We could not afford to have Sanders gold plated military production methods and personnel associated with this venture … it was a different animal.

The typical big company scenario evolved: Instead of making a decision, management gave me some unasked for and successively higher powered accounting type help to produce several additional versions of increasingly fancy business plans. The end result was predictable: The whole thing just went away quietly. For better or for worse … we’ll never know.

A couple of years later I had my tech build me one of our Skate-N-Score boards into a large wooden box with four joysticks for two or four player game playing. We displayed this hockey game on a 6 foot wide Kloss front projection TV screen … what a great game that was! I took the game unit home to my basement lab along with the Kloss projection TV set and it stayed there for a few months. We played it with the kids and visiting friends. For its time, it was an exciting multiplayer sports game!

Back To Living With Magnavox … Also: WPI & Warner Cable

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