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Chicago Company Is America's Last Arcade Hope (Part II)
by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
In 1972, a young entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell turned the arcade industry on its ear with an electronic tennis game called Pong. Before long, coin-operated game manufacturers were scrambling to break into video games. Williams Games was one of the last companies to enter that race.
While Atari, Bushnll's company, remained the biggest name in video games, a pinball manufacturer named Midway Games emerged as a strong second. Midway scored early hits with Gun Fight (the first game with a microprocessor) and Sea Wolf, then broke the industry wide open when it licensed Space Invaders from a Japanese company called Taito.
Though Atari was best known for making video games, it dabbled in other forms of entertainment too. One of these experiments was a short-lived pinball division that closed after manufacturing five pinball machines (including three with "double-wide" tables).
Eugene Jarvis, who had worked on all five tables, moved to Chicago and began working for Williams Games. His first project was Firepower, one of the first pinball machines to include speech and a microprocessor.
In 1980, Jarvis teamed up with Larry DeMar and began work on Defender-Williams' first and most successful video game. Defender was about protecting a planet from an alien invasion. Players flew a space ship around a small planet looking for aliens dropping out of the sky.
Jarvis believed games should be hard to beat. His trademark style was to make games verged on unplayable. Defender came out around the same time as Pac-Man, when the most popular games had one button and a joystick. Defender had buttons for firing weapons and smart bombs, reversing direction, jumping into hyperspace, and firing thrusters.
"I came into an arcade on a Friday night and there was a crowd of people four deep around this [Defender] game, putting in their quarters and lasting maybe 35, 40 seconds" says DeMar. "Defender was a very ferocious game--very difficult controls."
Getting a high score on Defender was prestigious. When 15- year-old Steve Juraszek of Arlington Heights, Illinois, scored 15,963,100 in a 16-hour epic game of Defender on one quarter, he got his name on the news and his face in Time magazine. He was also placed on detention-his game began during school hours.
Jarvis and DeMar teamed up to do several more games, including Robotron 2084, all of which were nearly unplayable for the average gamer and extremely popular with the talented few who managed to master them.
During the mid-eighties, Jarvis worked on a game called N.A.R.C., which expanded the use of digital images in video games. Though N.A.R.C. was a popular game in its day, its biggest contribution was that it opened the way for Williams to do more games using digital technology.
In 1992, Williams designers John Tobias and Ed Boone combined digital images and secret button codes for launching outlandish attacks to the newly popular fighting game genre to create Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat was more about stylized violence than fighting. Instead of cartoon characters, it had digitized video images of actors dressed in garish costumes performing ridiculous and often heinous moves. A character named Sub Zero, for instance, dressed like a ninja and froze with his breath. One of his best moves was freezing enemies in mid air then shattering them with a punch or a kick.
The most outrageous part of the Mortal Kombat games, however, was its "Fatalities." At the end of each fight, the loser would stand helplessly as a voice commanded the winner to "finish him." If the winning player knew the right button combination, he could perform a decapitating "fatality" such as pulling out the opponent's heart or yanking off his head and spine.
Arcade goers loved Mortal Kombat, but U. S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D- Connecticut) missed the humor in its digital decapitations. Lieberman singled Mortal Kombat out as one of two particularly offensive games during the 1993 Senate investigation of the effects of video game violence.
Seeing irony in a generally serious situation, Boone and Tobias not only made Mortal Kombat II more violent, they also included "friendship" moves for people who preferred humor to gore. While they could still rip out opponents' entrails, players could now present fallen foes with birthday cakes and other presents.
With Mortal Kombat, Williams designers shifted their focus from authenticity to attitude.
In 1993, a Williams designer named Mark Turmell applied this theory to basketball and created NBA Jam, a two-on-two basketball game that let players control digitized images of top NBA stars in a free-for-all that included unlimited fouling without referee interference.
Like Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam contained secret codes for outlandish tricks. Players who mastered the game could perform amazing feats such as jumping at half court, doing flips, airing the ball to the rim, and slamming it into the basket.
NBA Jam became the most successful arcade sports game of all time. Turmell applied his NBA Jam experience to football last year and created NFL Blitz, another high- scoring, high-attitude sports game that scored exceptionally well with arcade goers.
Williams games may be doing well with the people who go to arcades, but that is a shrinking group. The arcade business reached its peak in 1981 and has been shrinking steadily ever since.
As far as the American arcade industry is going, all of the top companies have either left the field or been bought out by Williams Games. Williams took over the amusement game division of Bally/Midway from Bally Manufacturing Corporation in 1988, then purchased Atari Games in 1996. All of the other top competitors in the industry are based in Japan.
The arcade business is in a slump from which it shows only some possibility of recovering, but as the sole American company left in the industry, Williams is still doing steady business. The company scored hits with Cruise 'N USA and Cruise 'N World, a couple of driving games created by Jarvis, and Turmell's NFL Blitz.
In the meantime, Williams has established a successful home products division using its Atari and Midway Games labels. America's last hope in the arcades isn't doing badly with the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation either.
