The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (35 page)

Nintendo’s counterclaims did not go to court until May 20, 1985. On July 29, 1985, Judge Sweet ordered Universal to pay Nintendo $1.8 million for legal fees, photocopying expenses, costs incurred creating graphs and charts, and lost revenues.

By the time the case was concluded, the video-game industry had nearly vanished and Coleco had entered the doll business.

The Fall

No one realized that the arcade business had begun to collapse in 1982. Arcade owners, still believing that all it would take to set the business right was a few good games, watched for hits and tried to rebuild their businesses. And some of the best games of all time came out between the end of 1982 and the middle of 1983.

Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar left Williams shortly after completing
Defender
, the first game Jarvis created as an independent consultant. They started a consulting firm called Vid Kidz that designed games for Williams. Then, in 1981, Jarvis crashed his MGB and broke his right hand.

Jarvis’s arm was still in a cast when he and DeMar began their next project. As they had with
Defender
, Jarvis and DeMar started by fleshing out a story about the game. They decided the game would be about an Orwellian world. Since 1984 was only three years away, it was obvious that the world was not in sync with Orwell’s timetable, so they set their game in 2084 to give mankind an extra century to create a viable Big Brother.

Mankind had created a race of robots to use as servants in Jarvis and DeMar’s story, but the robots had evolved to the point when they no longer needed humans, so they took over the world.

When
Robotron 2084
begins, robots have conquered the world. Players cannot hope to restore mankind. The game has no end; it simply repeats until the player runs out of lives.

Players control a tiny hero with a large head and thick glasses, whom Jarvis thought looked like Elton John. The hero and his family are the last humans, and the robots, according to Jarvis, want to catch them and put them in a zoo.

As usual, Jarvis wanted a game in which players were surrounded by enemies. He prided himself on creating games with nearly unwinnable circumstances. In this case, every scene in the game began with the hero and his family completely surrounded by robots. In order to survive, players had to help the hero dodge and shoot the robots and save family members, while avoiding mines and projectiles. The game moved at a frantic pace.

Jarvis’s car accident played an important role in the designing of
Robotron 2084.
With his hand in a cast, Jarvis was laid up in bed for a few days. While trapped in bed, he thought about a popular game from Stern Electronics, in which players helped a man run through a maze while shooting slow-moving robots. Jarvis loved the game but hated its joystick-button configuration because the same joystick was used for moving the character and aiming his shots.

When Jarvis returned to work, his cast made him unable to handle the standard joystick and button configuration used with most games, so he and DeMar rigged a two-joystick controller by attaching two Atari 2600 controllers to a panel. In this configuration, one joystick controlled the hero and the other aimed his gun.

Williams sold less than 20,000
Robotron 2084
machines and considered it a success. In later years,
Robotron 2084
would become one of the most highly esteemed trophies among video-game collectors.

D. Gottlieb & Company, the group that helped found the coin-operated amusement industry with
Baffle Ball
, entered the video-game industry late. Columbia Pictures owned Gottlieb & Company by the time Gottlieb produced
Reactor.
Coca-Cola owned Columbia Pictures, so some Gottlieb employees joked that Coca-Cola was their boss.

Gottlieb had only one hit video game—a quirky little title named
Q*Bert.
The project began when an artist named Jeff Lee drew a stack of cubes on his computer screen in a tribute to M. C. Escher.

Lee created an Escher-like pyramid of blocks and a two-legged character with no arms who hopped along the blocks and shot enemies with projectiles that he fired from his hose-like nose. He called the game “Snots and Boogers.”

Gottlieb had recently hired a programmer from Bell Laboratories named Warren Davis. Though he was assigned to a game called
Protector
, Davis sometimes roamed around the office, hoping to try his hand at other projects as well. One night Jeff Lee’s 3D blocks caught his eye.

Davis’s biggest contribution to the game was changing its theme from shooting to strategy. Davis eliminated the nose-gun and changed the goal of the game to saving the main character rather than killing enemies.

One night a Gottlieb employee named Ron Waxman saw the game and told Davis that the blocks should change color whenever the armless character jumped on them. With that suggestion, the game finally had a clear goal: changing all of the blocks to a particular color while avoiding enemies.
*

During a meeting, another Gottlieb employee named Richard Tracy suggested that the game and its main character be named Q*Bert, a name that he derived from the words “Cube” and “Hubert.”
²

The game began taking shape. Q*Bert’s enemies became more ludicrous than menacing. They were comic animals that included a bouncing snake named “Coily,” a mop-headed gremlin named “Ugg,” and a tiny hood in shades named “Wrongway.” Lee suggested creating two rather harmless imps named “Slick” and “Sam,” who made extra work for Q*Bert by changing the blocks he had touched back to their original colors.

Lee and a sound engineer named Dave Thiel came up with a humorous device for giving Q*Bert a distinctive personality. They set the game up so
that when Coily, Ugg, or Wrongway caught him, or when players ran Q*Bert over the edge of the blocks, he gives a trailing-away scream followed by a sickening thud. At other times he muttered angry gibberish words and a word balloon appeared above his head with messages like “@!#@!”