<!--
	Title: A History of Computer Games
	Author: Johnny L. Wilson
	Source: Computer Gaming World, v11(11)
	Date: November 1991
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<figure class="float-right-half center">
<img src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/kotok-russell-graetz.jpg" alt="Alan Kotok, Steve Russell, and Shag Graetz">
<figcaption><em>Alan Kotok, Steve Russell and Shag Gaetz reminisce over</em> Spacewar!
	<em>on the Boston Computer Museum's DEC PDP-1.</em></figcaption>
</figure>

In a very real sense, it all began with a model railroad set. Students at M.I.T.
were fascinated with all the ways various switches could be integrated into their
master layout in order to enhance the quality of operations. Later, when they finally
got their chance to interface directly with the TX-0 and DEC PDP-1 computers, their
previous work in binary (model railroad switching) put them in good stead to make
maximum use of the computers.

## B.C.G.W.

Steve "Slug" Russell was one of the members of M.I.T.'s "Hi-Tech Model Railroad
Club." A wizard at LISP programming, he was working in the summer of 1961 at
Harvard's Littauer Statistical Laboratory when he and some friends hit upon an idea
for bringing E.E. "Doc" Smith's pulp science fiction novels (*The Lensman*
novels and *Skylark*) to the computer. In 1962, Steve developed the program on the
PDP-1 (the very console that rests in Boston's Computer Museum at the present
day) at M.I.T.

In *Spacewar* (as the program came to be known), two "B" movie-style computerized
rocket ships (one shaped like a fat cigar and the other as a long slender tube) could
fly across a computer-generated section of space. Players could flick toggle switches in
order to make the ships change direction, in much the same way coin-op and Atari
game machine players were later to control the ships in *Asteroids*' zero-gravity environment.
Each ship had an inventory of 31 torpedoes. So, as they flew across the computerized
sector, a player could fire a dot from his rocket's nose in the direction of
the other ship. If the dot managed to actually intersect the shape of the other ship, the
program ruled that the torpedo had successfully hit its target and the other ship "exploded."
Actually, the other ship disappeared from the screen and was replaced
by a mad scramble of dots which represented the debris of the destroyed ship.

Naturally, the community of hackers could not be satisfied with the status-quo of
any program, no matter how entertaining or functional. So, changes were inevitable.
One friend, Peter Samson, was not satisfied with the random dot starmap which Russell
had originally placed in the game. He took a celestial atlas and managed to program
our actual galaxy, all the way down to fifth magnitude stars. Another student added a
gravity option and another added a hyperspace escape option, complete with a nifty
stress signature to show where the ship left the system.

Even Slug made some changes. Knowing that real torpedoes do not have a 100% success
rate, Slug decided to give the space torpedoes a certain failure rate and to add
randomality to their respective trajectories and time of detonation. His friends hated
the new version because they wanted the same kind of dependability they were getting
from their experiences at computer programming. Slug changed things back
and, before anyone realized what had happened, *Spacewar!* was a fixture on college
mainframes all over the country.

In fact, *Spacewar!* had become such a fixture by the mid-'60s that Nolan Bushnell,
the founding father of Atari Corporation, became addicted to the game while he was attending
the University of Utah. By 1970, Bushnell had built his own machine (using
185 integrated circuits) to connect to a television set and perform one function.
That one function was to play *Computer Space*, a coin-op variant of *Spacewar!* in
which a rocket fought flying saucers instead of another rocket ship.

But *Spacewar!* wasn't the only predecessor of commercialized computer games to
appear on college mainframes. Some anonymous hacker started playing around
with a *Star Trek* game in the '60s. No one knows who hacked the first such game
(and he would probably be sued if anyone did), but the games were in college computers
nationwide by 1969.

The game itself was not very elaborate. It had grid maps to allow starships to travel
from point to point, used ASCII letters to identify the ships, provided shield information
in numerical percentages and allowed for both faster-than-light and sub-lightspeed
travel. The Klingons were fast and numerous and the Romulans had cloaking
devices.

If the game sounds familiar, that is because almost every home computer system
had some type of *Trek* game available for it by the mid-'70s and there was an IBM
game based on this program in the early '80s. The IBM game was called *Star Fleet I*.
It was published by Interstel (originally Cygnus) and featured Krellans in place of Klingons
and Zaldrons in place of Romulans. The game was basically the same, though.

Also around the turn of the decade (1970), a mathematician named John Horton
Conway began to experiment with a game wherein the player would design rules
for how cell structures could be put together. Then, they would allow the program
to run and watch all the permutations that their life-forms went through, based on
following their rules sets. The game was known as *Life*. It was a crude version of
what we now call cellular automata and might have been the first "software toy" (in
the sense of a *SimCity* or *SimEarth*, where playing is more important than winning).
The program received considerable attention in *Scientific American* and spawned
considerable discussion about the possibility of coding artificial life.

About the same time, a Stanford hacker named Donald Woods was nosing about
the Xerox research computer and found a prototype computer game. This game's parser
used two-word commands to communicate with the game and featured a
Tolkienesque milieu. The name of the game was *Adventure* and the name of its
designer was Will Crowther. Not only did *Adventure* introduce a number of people to
the genre of computer adventure games, but it became a commercial game in its
own right. It not only became the packaged game *Colossal Cave*, but it inspired some
classic adventure series.

One such inspirational event was when Ken Williams brought home a terminal
which only printed hardcopy. Roberta Williams played the original *Adventure* on that
terminal, anxiously waiting for the mainframe to print out the results of her
last command, and credits the playing experience as providing part of the inspiration
for her games. In addition, a group of M.I.T. hackers (including Marc Blanc, Joel Berez
and others) began to create a text adventure called *Zork* which owed its original inspiration
to *Adventure* and went its mentor one better by creating a parser that could
understand complete sentences. *Zork* was not actually available on a home computer
until 1981 when the hackers' new company, Infocom, released the game for the
Apple II.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/infocom.png" alt="Infocom">

By the mid-seventies, gamers were popping up nearly anywhere there were computers.
In 1975, boardgame publisher SPI used their in-house business computer to
test the economic model for their upcoming monster game, *War in the East*. *War in
the East* was not a computer game, but it anticipated the origin of computer wargames
on home computers by functioning as something of a computer assistance program.
Indeed, by 1979, SPI was advertising for independent submissions of such computer
assistance programs to help players handle the prodigious bookkeeping necessary
to play the company's massive and complex boardgames.

At CalTech in 1976, Walter Bright started using FORTRAN-10 to write the original *Empire*,
a relatively simple wargame dealing with conquering the surface territory of entire
planets. Later, Mark Baldwin updated the program (writing it in C) and added
some features like destroyer escorts and a mouse-driven interface. Then it was published
by Interstel as a best-selling game for personal computers.

During the same period, Chris Crawford was teaching physics at a small community
college in Nebraska. In 1976, he took some maps from Avalon Hill's *Panzer Leader*,
some lead miniatures of armored vehicles and some of his own FORTRAN code and
created a tank game for the school's IBM 1130. With typical Crawford humor, he
called the game *Wargy* and unveiled it at a wargame convention during the winter
months. That program also spawned a commercial version, Avalon Hill's *Tanktics* — a
computer-assisted boardgame.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/avalon-hill.png" alt="Avalon Hill">

So, by 1979 and 1980, a revolution was about to begin. Jon Freeman and
Automated Simulations (eventually to become Epyx) published *Starship: Orion* in
'79 and began work on *The Temple of Apshai*, a role-playing game in the tradition of
the *Dungeons & Dragons* pen-and-paper game. The same year saw Richard Garriott
(soon to become Lord British) sell zip-lock packages of *Akalabeth*, a predecessor to
the *Ultima* series and Scott Adams unleash a torrent of text adventures on the market.
In fact, *Akalabeth* sold so well that Garriott started writing the initial *Ultima* in the fall
of 1979, while still a freshman at the University of Texas.

Other companies, like now-defunct Quality Software, produced games like
*Beneath Apple Manor*, a low-resolution maze game in which players looked for a
golden apple hidden in the basement of an old mansion, and Joel Billings, founder of
Strategic Simulations, Inc., tried to sell the idea for a computer wargame to both
Avalon Hill and newly-founded Automated Simulations.

Ironically, Billings was to found his own company, publish *Computer Bismarck* and
become involved with Avalon Hill in a legal dispute over how close *Computer Bismarck*
actually was to Avalon Hill's own *Bismarck* boardgame. Nevertheless, Billings'
venture must have struck a nerve, since Avalon Hill was publishing a full line of computer
games by 1980.

Another interesting fact about *Computer Bismarck* is that Joel borrowed a Northstar
computer from Amdahl Corporation (where he worked) and expected that he and John
Lyon would program the game on the Northstar. At that time, Trip Hawkins (who
was then a marketing executive at Apple) convinced Joel and John that the Apple II
had better graphics potential and would reach more customers than the Northstar
could. The irony is that Trip Hawkins is now the chairman of the board of
Electronic Arts and Electronic Arts both owns interest in and distributes the
products of SSI.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/ssi.png" alt="SSI">

By 1980, when Billings and Lyon were developing *Computer Bismarck*, Ken and
Roberta Williams laid the foundations for a new genre, the graphic adventure game.
The first hi-res adventure was *Mystery House*. Roberta was inspired by Agatha
Christie's *Ten Little Indians* (as well as the game *Clue*) and decided to bring the experience
to the computer. Ken had purchased a graphics tablet that allowed Roberta
to draw images on the pad and save them as graphic files. Then, after Roberta
drew the pictures, Ken figured out how to pack seventy images per diskette (using a
draw-and-fill technique). The game sold well enough that Ken and Roberta parlayed the
profits into three more successful games: *The Wizard and the Princess*, *Mission:
Asteroid* and *Time Zone*.

While On-Line Systems (Sierra's original name) was just beginning to take off,
another major player was establishing itself. Attorney Doug Carlston had become
burned out on practicing law and was becoming enamored with his TRS-80 computer.
He designed a space opera-style game called *Galactic Saga* in which many
of the locations had African names (Afrikaans, Swahili, etc.). There was a
group of merchants in the game known as the "Broederbond," Afrikaans for "association
of brothers." When Doug's brother Gary started successfully hawking the
game from computer store to computer store, they immediately thought of emphasizing
the family aspect of the business.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/broderbund.png" alt="Broderbund">

That's when Broderbund got its start. However, since Doug had spent some time in
South Africa (in fact, was once ousted because he dared to teach at an integrated
school in Botswana); there was actually a group known in South Africa as the
"broederbond" (who were not especially good guys) and Doug and Gary felt that
using the Afrikaans spelling would have implied support for the repressive South
African regime, they adopted the variant spelling "Broderbund," which is still in use.

By the summer of 1980, a familiar name in wargaming circles had entered the
microcomputer arena. It was at the Origins National Game Convention held in Chester,
Pennsylvania that the **Avalon Hill Game Company** (publishers of boardgame-style
wargames since 1958) unveiled its initial five titles: *B-1 Nuclear Bomber*, *Midway
Campaign*, *North Atlantic Convoy Raiders*, *Nukewar* and *Planet Miners*.

Although *Zork* did not arrive on the Apple II until 1981, its birth was more properly
part of the '70s. In the mid-1970s, **Infocom's** eventual braintrust (Marc Blank,
Joel Berez and Dave Lebling) met at M.I.T.'s Laboratory of Computer Science. Inspired
by the original *Adventure*, Blank and Lebling designed a mainframe adventure
game.

It wasn't just *any* adventure game, however. The goal of the game's designers was
to allow the computer to understand more typical English sentences than the simplistic
and often infuriating two-word parser of previous adventure games. So, Marc Blank
applied his artificial intelligence work and created ZIL (Zork Interactive Language), a
"parser" which allowed the program to find associations between sentences and, hence,
better understand what the player wanted to do.

Students at M.I.T. responded so favorably to the mainframe version of *Zork* that a
professor at the institute, Al Vezza, encouraged the group to form a corporation.
On June 22, 1979, the professor and his star pupils (Berez, Blank and Lebling)
formed **Infocom** for the express purpose of developing *Zork* for the personal computer
market. Its success was followed by *Starcross* (a science fiction adventure
which came packaged in its own flying saucer) and two *Zork* sequels (*Zork II* and
*Zork III*).

At first, the company seemed very focused on producing quality interactive fiction
and designers like Stu Galley, Steve Meretzky and Brian Moriarty were added to
the cast. Games like *Deadline*, *Planetfall*, *Suspended* and *Witness* followed (1983).
Yet, Blank, Berez and Vezza had a hidden agenda that was already beginning to
foreshadow changes at the company. Their goal was to move from games to productivity
tools.

Actually, many people do not realize that the founders of Infocom were not entirely interested
in computer games. Most did not even like personal computers. Instead, they
were business-oriented and hoped to "make it big" like their friends and classmates who
founded **Lotus Development**. The idea of producing a business-oriented database became
an obsession, as did the later move to luxury accommodations in Cambridge.
Vezza was determined to out-Lotus **Lotus**. What this obsession did to **Infocom** in the
latter part of the '80s can be read later in this article.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/sir-tech.png" alt="Sir-Tech">

In 1981, another entertainment software company appeared, almost by magic.
When Robert Woodhead was hired fresh out of Cornell by a New York-and-Canadian-based
concrete business, he was not hired to write computer games. He was
hired to computerize the accounting system of Fred Sirotek's construction company. He
proved himself to be such a hot programmer that he was able to convince Fred to
underwrite the publication of a fantasy roleplaying game to be designed by himself
and his friend, Andrew Greenberg. In 1981, **Sir-Tech Software** (a pun on the Sirotek
family name, the medieval era that their flagship products are based in and an abbreviation
for technology) published *Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad
Overlord*. The publication was a tremendous success and the *Wizardry* series
remains, along with the *Ultima* series, one of the benchmarks of computer role-playing.
(Both series are ready to birth their seventh installments at the time of this writing.)

## A.C.G.W.

By the Winter of 1981, computer gaming had become a full-fledged hobby when no
less than three magazines were launched in order to provide information for the burgeoning
industry: *Softline* magazine (associated with both *Softalk* magazine and
On-Line Systems — now Sierra — and partially funded with Margot Tommervik's winnings
from an appearance on the Password television show), *Electronic Games* and
*Computer Entertainment* (published by Reese Publications out of New York City)
and *Computer Gaming World* (founded by Russell Sipe and funded by a closely held
group of visionary shareholders). Eventually, *Softline* was to die along with its parent
magazine *Softalk* and *Electronic Games* (which emphasized the action games associated
with video cartridge systems as much as it emphasized computer games)
was to suffer from the cartridge industry's decline. *Computer Gaming World* is now
the world's oldest computer game magazine and has managed to weather the
video game market crash (when Atari VCS owners became bored with the capabilities
of their machines because all the games had become the same) because Sipe took
a more conservative approach that combined a focus on the floppy disk-based computer
game market with its more adult (and stable) consumer base and cautious distribution
aimed at strategic outlets. Steven Levy (author of the best-selling *Hackers*) once
described *CGW* as a "staid publication" that "eschews flash for substance." Indeed, it is
probably this serious approach to a hobby that many would deem frivolous that accounts
for *Computer Gaming World*'s survival when more "colorful" publications
were dying.

Speaking of colorful, unbeknownst to *CGW* staffers, a significant encounter took
place in the summer of 1982 that was to cause considerable waves in the entertainment
software industry. Neither "Wild Bill" Stealey, a strategic planner for a major Baltimore
corporation, nor Sid Meier, a computer systems analyst for the same firm,
knew of each other. However, during a break in a company meeting at the (then)
MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, the two met over a coin-op game called "Red
Baron" (no relation to the game of the same name from **Sierra/Dynamix**).

The coin-op game used wire-framed graphics to depict World War I aircraft and
the player sat in a console cabinet as he tried to shoot down the enemy planes with
his unlimited ammunition supply. As a former fighter pilot, "Wild Bill" was challenging
all comers.

Imagine Major Bill's (now, Lt. Col. Bill's) chagrin when a mere programmer came
along and beat the fighter veteran's high scores. Imagine his interest when Sid Meier,
said programmer, began to explain the game's rudimentary programming and
showed how to predict the simple moves used regularly by the game's enemy pilots.
Then Sid boldly said that he could design a better game in *one week* on his home computer.

Anyone who knows Bill Stealey knows that he is not the kind of person to let a
challenge go unanswered. So Bill said he could sell the game if Sid could write it. As
it turns out, it took two months for Sid to come up with a game he was happy with,
but by the time Bill completed his *first* sales call, *Hellcat Ace* was a success. The
first store Bill stopped at purchased 50 copies. Becoming a full-Fledged publisher
was inevitable.

When the company started, toward the end of 1982, it was not originally slated to
be named MicroProse. One idea was to call it "Smugger's Software," in deference to Sid
as an oblique reference to a S.M.U.G. (Sid Meier's Users Group). They finally agreed
on MicroProse with the intent of making a double pun. The company was to publish
the work of micro-professionals and their art was to be comparable to excellent prose.

In 1987, **MicroProse** agreed to change its name to avoid legal difficulties with
**Micro-Pro International**, the publisher of *Wordstar*. They were given two years to
change the name and, just before the name change was required, **MicroPro** identified
themselves more closely with their flagship product, changing their name to **Wordstar
International**. By the turn of the decade, MicroProse would claim two other labels:
**Microplay** and **Medalist**.

The 1982 encounter between Sid Meier and Bill Stealey spawned MicroProse, but
the 1982 San Francisco Applefest was to birth an even larger West Coast publisher.
Originally slated to be "Amazing Software," this company took on the more appropriate
appellation Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts didn't even have a booth at the 1982 Applefest,
but they put on the best "show." A special bus took industry professionals to
the Stanford Court Hotel where "The Woz" (then an EA board member) was holding
court as the main speaker, a rock band was thundering forth with dance music and
coin-op arcade machines had been rigged for unlimited play.

Russell Sipe, as both editor and publisher of *CGW*, and Al and Margot Tommervik,
founders of *Softalk* and *Softline*, shared a taxi to the party (talk about friendly competition)
and originally thought that the social event was bigger than it was. It seems
the brain trust of computer game journalism had to circumvent a Nob Hill
rally/parade which was staged in preparation for the Cal-Stanford game to be held
on the following afternoon. Regardless, the party created an image that was consistent
with the vision which was to drive Electronic Arts: success, entertainment and
technology.

Trip Hawkins, former Director of Marketing for Apple's LISA, had a vision of gathering
artists together and following a new paradigm in developing entertainment
software. Originally, the paradigm seemed more based on the recording industry (even
the album-jacketed products offered this subliminal suggestion) where artists worked
on their own creative agendas, signed contracts for specific products and received
technological and marketing assistance from the "studio." The vision was underscored
in one of the company's earliest advertisements. The banner headline was "We
See Farther." The first line of copy was "Software Artists?" In one image-making advertisement,
Trip Hawkins molded his vision around computer game designers as
performing artists.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/electronic-arts.png" alt="Electronic Arts">

The Electronic Arts mystique convinced many of the early professionals: Dan Bunten
(*M.U.L.E.* and *Seven Cities of Gold*), Bill Budge (*Pinball Construction Set*), Jon
Freeman, Anne Westfall and Paul Reiche III (*Archon* and *Murder on the Zinderneuf*)
and Chris Crawford (*Patton vs. Rommel*), as well as many of the early developers
who became successful publishers in their own rights (Dynamix, Interplay and Lucasfilm).

Later, Trip Hawkins unveiled the metaphor that underscores the studio era
which has pervaded not only Electronic Arts, but the entire entertainment software
industry to the present day. Hawkins believed (and believes) that the entertainment
software industry is "The New Hollywood." Even as film studios become
enamored with technology (special effects, new sound techniques and film sizes), targets
(positioning, packaging and distributing), talent (box office recognition), trends
(fads and topicality) and themes (story), software publishers must be concerned with
hardware trends and capability, marketing, artistic growth, consumer interest and
playability/credibility. The tensions between art and commercial success are just as
prevalent in the computer game industry as they are in film, recording or broadcast
media.

Today, the software publishers that are having the most impact on the market are
those publishers that understand themselves as entertainment studios and perceive
the various talents they have assembled around projects as part of a creative team.
As of this writing, "The New Hollywood" is almost as literal as it is figurative in that
many talents in screenwriting, animation, musical composition and even acting have
moved into the computer game industry.

## Crash Go the Carts

In 1983, there were 25 million videogame machines in the United States (mostly Atari
VCS). In early 1983, the coin-op arcade market experienced an inexplicable slump.
In three short months, the "coin eaters" went on a consumer-enforced diet that cut
the market by almost 90%. By 1984, even the home videogame market was dead.

Before the crash, however, **Atari** made a grant that was to have significant impact on
computer game history. At the height of **Atari's** power, the company underwrote the
founding of **Lucasfilm** Games. Although the grant was presented in 1982, it took
two years of development for the new company to bring its first two products, *Rescue
on Fractalus* and *Ballblazer*, to the point of release.

Peter Langston was very well known in the computer division of Lucasfilm as their
UNIX guru and he instantly became head of the games group. He was the logical choice
to head the new games division, since he believed in the future of computer entertainment,
but he was not the kind of market-driven executive that was likely to hurry the
products to market. In fact, the entire division was more technologically oriented
than game-oriented because they saw all the game work as being primarily research
and development. By 1984, however, profitability had become a primary concern
and the company hired Steve Arnold, then an Atari V.P., to help the company learn to
pull its own weight.

Unfortunately, just as *Ballblazer* and *Rescue on Fractalus* were nearing release as
cartridge games, Sam Tramiel purchased Atari. Since Atari had planned to publish
the games, these events put Lucasfilm's marketing plans on hold. Home cartridge
systems and cartridge games were in the bargain bins for next to nothing, so there
did not seem to be any compelling reason to publish the games.

Indeed, the computer game industry was caught in the confusion of the cartridge
crash. As a smaller industry, though, it did not have as far to fall as **Colecovision**, **Intellivision**
and **Atari VCS** manufacturers and publishers. The major disk-based
software publishers managed to survive, but many smaller players who simply published
computer versions of cartridge games disappeared.

Lucasfilm Games managed to translate *Ballblazer* and *Rescue on Fractalus* to the
Atari 400/800 for 1985 release from **Epyx**. This gave programmers like David Fox the
time to accomplish some of the most intricate finishing touches ever in a computer
game. He videotaped transition screens from Fractalus in order to correct a flicker
he had detected in the game by viewing it frame-by-frame.

Today, Lucasfilm Games is one of the legacies of the early era of home cartridge
games. In 1984, a group of ex-cartridge designers decided to form another, **Accolade**.
Bob Whitehead and Alan Miller were unhappy with the direction **Activision**
had been going since it went public on June 14, 1983. Alan and Bob were quickly
tiring of the corporate games and decided to form their own company, a company
founded by programmers *for* programmers.

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/accolade.png" alt="Accolade">

When the company was officially formed in December of 1984, Al Miller wanted to
make sure that the name of the new company would come before Activision whenever
the two companies were listed in alphabetical order. So he searched the dictionary
to find a name which would precede Activision. They became enamored with **Accolade**
because the idea of applause and approval appealed to their artistic natures.
The truth was, neither Whitehead nor Miller wanted to be president of the company. So
they began a search for a suitable president with high-tech experience.

They initially offered the presidency to Tom Lopez, an Activision veteran who eventually
founded the **Microsoft** CD-ROM division and, after he declined the position,
to Allen Epstein, an ex-**Activision** employee who was working in venture capital.
Epstein is the current president and CEO, but he originally passed on taking the
position, as well. So **Accolade's** first president came from one of Nolan Bushnell's
**Catalyst** companies.

Tom Frisina stepped directly from his responsibilities at a company developing
robots for consumers to the management of Accolade's business affairs. It seemed
like a natural for a robotics president to run a company founded by the author of
Activision's *Robot Tank* cartridge, but differences in management style between the
conservative founders of the company and an executive linked with Bushnell's "U.S.
Government" approach to problem-solving -- throw money at the problem—seemed inevitable.

Actual operations began in February of 1985 with the C-64 as the company's target
machine. The original strategy was to form an internal product development team,
based on the work of Bob, Al and Mike Lorenzen (another Activision veteran who
decided to leave the corporate rat race). Miller decided to do *Law of the West*, a
point-of-view horse opera in which the player was the lawman described in the
title; Whitehead elected to program *Hardball*, the action-oriented baseball game
that became a mega-hit and eventually became a movie star (the game was the first
image seen in *The Princess Bride*); and Lorenzen determined to develop *Psi-5 Trading
Company*, a space trading game.

Frisina did not believe that internal development alone could generate the kind
of revenue a new, fledgling company would need to survive, however. So, he began a
search for outside developers. Through Sydney Development Company, a Canadian
developer of mainframe products, he not only discovered two game designers based
in Ottawa, Rick Banks and Michael Bate, but he was also introduced to an
18-year-old prodigy (no relation to IBM or Sears) from British Columbia named Don Mattrick.
Banks and Bate had programmed *B.C.'s Quest for Tires* for another company and
wanted to do their own titles. As **Artech**, a development company sub-contracted to
**Accolade**, they produced *Dambusters*, *Fight Night* and *Desert Fox* during
Accolade's first year. The first two did well, but *Desert Fox* was not released until the
company formed the **Vantage** bargain line of software during a period of retail shelf
wars. Mattrick was initially hired to program the Apple conversions of *Dambusters* and
*Fight Night*.

Interestingly enough, both **Artech** and Mattrick's company **Distinctive Software**
have gone on to exclusive relationships with other publishers. **Artech** develops solely
for **Three-Sixty Pacific** and **Distinctive Software** was recently purchased by
**Electronic Arts**, with Mattrick becoming EA's youngest vice-president. Before the
out-of-house developers left, however, each was to contribute significant hits to
**Accolade's** line: **Artech's** *Ace of Aces* and **Distinctive's** *Test Drive*. The latter was
conceived after Mattrick purchased his first Lotus Esprit and decided that "everyone"
would like to drive a hot car.

In 1985, Accolade had revenue totaling $1.5 million, but this expanded to $5 million
in 1986 as hits like *Ace of Aces*, *Mean 18* and *Test Drive* pointed the way to a successful
future. 1985 also brought a new player on the scene from the other side of
the arcade crash, the coin-op connection. **Data East** had been functioning as a coin-op
company since 1979. In 1985, the company formed its consumer division to convert
the coin-op hits into cartridge and home-computer games.

"Cartridge games?" the weary reader asks. "I thought they were dead in 1984."
Conventional wisdom certainly would have said as much, but conventional wisdom is
rarely *true* wisdom. When **Nintendo** showed up on the scene at the January
CES in 1985, Roger Buoy of **Mindscape** is reputed to have said, "Hasn't anyone told
them that the videogame industry is dead?" Nevertheless, **Nintendo** was to prove that a
gigantic phoenix can rise from industrial ashes if it controls the vertical (production)
and the horizontal (marketing). So **Data East** was one of the early licensees to see
the opportunity in video games and exploit that opportunity. The company hedged
their bet, however, with floppy-based products.

## Infocomplications

1986 also brought the red ink of *Cornerstone*, the only Infocom product
without a plot. *Cornerstone* was a database that rocked the corporate structure of Infocom
rather than bringing the desired stability. Instead, it brought trouble.

Of course, it didn't look like trouble, at first. It looked (as it does in many corporate
acquisitions) like a "White Knight" riding to the rescue. James Levy, (then) CEO of
(then) **Activision**, was a true fan of **Infocom** games. He perceived the corporate
weakness brought about by *Cornerstone* as an opportunity to acquire a software jewel
and began putting the deal in motion that was finalized on Feb. 19, 1986.

Activision purchased Infocom for $7.5 million (although much of the settlement price
was in Activision common stock and may have had a different value by the final payment
on June 13, 1986). This meant that Marc Blanc lost his bet with *Cornerstone* coauthor
Brian "Spike" Berkowitz that Infocom stock would top $20.00 per share by
'87 or Blanc would buy Spike dinner in Paris. Infocom sold for *much* less than $20
per share and the last *CGW* heard, the bet had still not been paid off and Blanc was
trying to change the venue to Tokyo.

The acquisition was not received well at Infocom. The company newsletter, once
known as the *New Zork Times* but soon to be known as *The Status Line*, joked about
graphics in interactive fiction stories and better parsers in *Little Computer People* (one
of Activision's big hits of the era), but printed one phrase that, in retrospect, offers
a melancholic ring: "We'll still be the Infocom you know and love." At first, it
looked like this might be true. From 1985's low of three interactive fiction titles, 1986
saw five *new* titles.

The humor at Infocom never really stopped until the latter days. When the
*New York Times* complained about their newsletter's original name (*New Zork
Times*), they ran a contest to rename the publication and first prize was a subscription
to the *New York Times*. Their in-house (great underground?) paper *InfoDope*
joked that Levy wanted them to do simulations, cynically suggesting titles like *Tugboat
Simulator* and *Empire State Elevator Operator*. Less-than-kind remarks accused
Activision superstar Steve Cartwright (designer of *Alien* and *Ghostbusters*) of being
able to turn out action games in an afternoon.

Yet harmless jokes about Levy turned to cynical anger at Levy's successor, Bruce
Davis. Insiders claim Activision's new CEO had been against the Infocom buy-out from
the start and that he immediately raised the ante on some anticipated losses that were
to have been indemnified by Infocom shareholders from $300,000 to $900,000
with no accounting. The shareholders filed a preemptive suit and managed to stave off
the "required" payment.

Morale began to deteriorate, with Infocom personnel feeling like Davis was foisting off
all the programs which should have been still-born in development onto Infocom.
They detested *lnfocomics*, the **Tom Snyder Productions** attempt to use the
computer as an interactive comic book (the idea was to produce $12 products in a continuing
series that would appeal to the comics crowd), never believing in the concept
but noting that all the development costs were being charged against their budget. A
brutal (underground) memo urged Infocommies to join the "Bruce Youth" movement,
casting the CEO in a classic bad guy role as he requested Infocom personnel to "turn
in" their fellow employees whenever said Infocommies would murmur "a discouraging
word."

Activision gradually dismantled Infocom. First, sales and manufacturing were absorbed.
This seemed logical, but by the time the great *Infocomics* experiment failed
in 1988, public relations and customer support were also absorbed. In 1989, development
was moved to the West Coast, but those who built the Great Underground Empire
elected not to move or were not invited to do so. As *Arthur*, *BattleTech*, *Journey*
and *Shogun* reached the market, Infocom was no longer a distinctive publisher, it was
only a label.

At approximately the same time as Infocom was fading into the woodwork,
**Spectrum HoloByte** was ready to spring upon an unsuspecting **Sphere**. That is, the
existing company called **Spectrum HoloByte** merged with **Nexa Corporation** to
create **Sphere**. The latter, in turn, was purchased by a division of Robert Maxwell's
multi-national publishing empire. **Sphere's** publication of *Tetris* not only captured the
imagination of the ordinary computer consumer, but ensnared the attention of the
general media, as well.

## Commitment to the Amiga?

By the mid-1980s, **Electronic Arts** had already staked out territory as one of the
most prolific domestic publishers of Commodore Amiga software. As Vice-President
Bing Gordon once observed, the company "likes neat stuff" and can be "seduced by
new hardware." EA called their Amiga line a "Commitment to the Amiga."

<figure class="float-right-half center">
<img src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/carlston-garriott.jpg" alt="Gary Carlston and Richard Garriott">
<figcaption>Gary Carlston and Robert Garriott at Origin's graduation -- Summer CES, 1989.</figcaption>
</figure>

Early on, **Electronic Arts** even bundled a cute little digitized program called *Kaleidoscope*
and a slide show, depicting their product line, with the Amiga systems disks
for the Amiga 1000. The company originally envisioned the Amiga as a Macintosh
killer. The reason was simple. Amigas were available at a much more affordable price
than the steep entry price for Macs. As it worked out, however, Macs ended up in
businesses while Amigas ended up in homes and graphics houses.

As late as June of 1987, Bing Gordon was touting **EA's** goal as the publication of at
least one Amiga product per month and "...hoping it will be the premier home computer."
Before such an event could occur, however, the price wars on MS-DOS
machines drove the IBM compatible to its current apex as the dominant home computer.

## Years of Movement and Litigation

1981 was also a year of significant corporate and legal events. **Broderbund** was
particularly active on these fronts. First, the company announced, then withdrew their initial
public offering after observing **Activision's** weak profits and stock performance.
In addition, **Origin** moved from **Electronic Arts Distribution** to **Broderbund**
as their distributor. At the same time, **Broderbund** settled a "look and feel" suit
with **Kyocera Unison** over similarities between the former's *Print Shop* and the
latter's *PrintMaster* when **Kyocera** made a substantial payment to **Broderbund**.

**Data East** won a U.S. District Court judgment against **Epyx** over similarities between
the former's *Karate Champ* game and the latter's *World Karate Championship*.
The 1987 ruling was overturned by an appeals court on November 30, 1988. **SSI**
filed a breach of contract suit against the *Questron* development team for producing
*Legacy of the Ancients* for **Electronic Arts** prior to fulfilling their agreement to
produce *Questron II* for **SSI**. This dispute was settled out of court.

At the same time as the previous litigations were underway, **MicroProse** was settling
their famous name imbroglio with **MicroPro International** and appealing the
placement of *F-15 Strike Eagle*, *Gunship* and *Silent Service* on (then) West
Germany's *Youth Dangerous Publications List*. After a vigorous appeal, the West German
National Examination Board allowed the products to be sold and modified their
initial finding that the products were "...morally corruptive and coarsening for
the young user."

1988 was also an important year of movement in the computer game industry. **Interplay**
and **Lucasfilm** left the fold as **EA** developers in order to become "Affiliated
Publishers" at **Activision**. **Dynamix** became predominantly an **Activision**
developer and later (actually in 1989), became an affiliated publisher, as well. After
then vice-president of Activision Dick Lehrberg had added **New World Computing**
and **Microillusions** to a seeming amazing line-up of affiliates, the company inexplicably
softened on the idea and eventually lost all of them. It was the first of many
mind changes by **Activision** management. They changed their minds on Hypercard
products, Apple IIGS products and even their own name (changing the name to
**Mediagenic** in order to capture some high-tech sizzle among investors who remembered
**Activision** all too well from the days of the cartridge crash).

**Origin** announced that it had adopted a brand new logo and corporate strategy by
the latter portion of the summer. By June of 1988, **EA** was back on track by signing
**Strategic Simulations, Inc.** as their newest "Affiliated Label." Indeed, it was not
to be long (1989) before **Lucasfilm** elected to return to **EA Distribution** and **New
World** was to join the **EA** team for the first time. Another **EA** affiliate, **Software Toolworks**,
began a round of expansions by acquiring **Intellicreations** and setting the
stage for future acquisitions such as that of action game publisher **Mindscape** (approved
by both boards of directors in March of 1990).

The Japanese "invaded" with the establishment of **Koei Corporation's** U.S. operations
and eleven Japanese software companies attempted a now-aborted joint venture
with **Broderbund**. Perhaps even bigger news was the initial public offering of **Sierra**
stock in August of 1988, netting close to $10 million.

In 1989, **Origin** announced that it had "graduated" from **Broderbund** at Summer
CES and **Broderbund** simultaneously announced an agreement with **Distinctive
Software** (now wholly owned by **Electronic Arts**) to publish entertainment
products which would enhance their line. 1989 was also the year that **Electronic
Arts** shook the entertainment software world by simultaneously announcing its initial
public offering and determination to develop video game software. Perhaps the
biggest story of 1989, however, was the massive layoff of more than half the work
force of Epyx that preceded by a matter of weeks the Chapter 11 bankruptcy that signalled
the end of the **Epyx** era. (**Epyx** still develops a minimal number of titles for the
**Atari Lynx** and recently released an IBM version of *California Games II*.)

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cgw-history-of-computer-games/origin.png" alt="Origin">

March of 1990 was an incredibly eventful month for entertainment software companies.
In addition to the **Mindscape** acquisition (already mentioned), **Sierra** purchased
**Dynamix** on March 27th and NEC purchased a minority stake in
**Cinemaware** on the 14th of the same month. Such business arrangements underscored
the cash-hungry nature of an industry in consolidation phase.

The increased amount of litigation continued to mount in the entertainment
software industry. **Microsoft** and designer Bruce Artwick both filed suit against **SubLogic**
over the technology used in *Flight Simulator III* while **Beyond Software** filed
a $20 million dollar libel suit against **Cinemaware** over alleged delays and contractual
breaches in *TV Sports: Baseball*.

## 1991 and Beyond

There are several worthy computer game publishers who, for one reason or another,
did not fit into the limited scheme used to develop this history. For those omissions,
we apologize, but suggest that we had to keep something in reserve for that inevitable
*20th Anniversary Issue* when we present Part II of *The History of Computer
Games*.