Introduction

In 2005, Erkki Huhtamo lamented that video game scholarship was stuck in what he called the “chronicle era,” in which authors were more concerned with amassing data than analyzing it.¹ More than a decade on, the situation is much improved, but there is still a fundamental problem with much of the fine analytical work being done today: it is based on a faulty chronicle. Journal articles and monographs are still largely drawing from the same narrative sources developed 10–20 years ago, which can largely be divided into two categories: works of journalists who approach their monographs in much the same way as they might an in-depth magazine cover story and works of enthusiasts who are passionate about their area of focus but not necessarily trained in researching it. The result has been a body of well-meaning and often commendable literature that nevertheless often falls down on accuracy through lack of research and context.

This volume and the two projected to follow aim to fix this deficiency through careful examination of the available contemporaneous sources. As the video game industry is still young and most of its key pioneers are still alive, there are not yet many archival collections of corporate documents or personal papers available for study, but there is a wealth of secondary source material penned in close proximity to the events in question that has never been fully evaluated. Trade publications like RePlay, Play Meter, Playthings, Merchandising, and Weekly Television Digest with Consumer Electronics documented the emerging video game medium in the 1970s and 1980s week by week and month by month, while several pioneers provided accounts of their endeavors under oath in depositions and trial testimony recorded just a few years after the fact. These sources have often been ignored in favor of participant recollections imparted decades after the fact. In some cases, this has distorted our view of history.

¹ Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming,” in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 1—21.

They Create Worlds is a comprehensive examination of early video game development in all its major commercial facets. This book gives equal attention to significant milestones in the coin-operated amusement industry, the home console industry, and the home computer industry from their inception until the initial high-water mark of the medium in early 1982, right before the collapse of the North American console market. It strives for a global scope by covering events not just in the United States, but also in Japan, the United Kingdom, and Continental Europe. It does not, however, strive to be a complete account of how every individual market reacted to the emergence of the video game: the thrust of this book is examining the forces that shaped the global industry, and it therefore only covers those developments that are significant in that context.

As the work is the first of a projected three volumes covering the history of interactive entertainment through 2005, not all the narrative threads end in exactly the same place. Though the subtitle speaks of progressing through 1982, in truth only the coverage of the home console industries touches upon that date, and then only slightly. The coin-operated amusement narrative ends in 1981, which is when video games in the arcade reached their own apex before sales ground to a halt in the middle of 1982 and the industry experienced a crash separate from that which the console and cartridge companies would feel just a few months later. The home computer narrative ends earliest of all: progressing only to the beginning of 1979. This is largely for practical reasons, for if this book were to progress further, it would need to introduce another dozen software makers and a good 150 pages would be added to its already prodigious length.

Even these timelines are not hard and fast. Readers may notice a favored game (Star Castle, Donkey Kong) or a favored subject (early Japanese consoles, the beginning of the British microcomputer industry) mysteriously absent. Rest assured, all these topics and more will be coming in volume two. They are only omitted here either because their inclusion did not fit thematically into any chapter or would open a new avenue of exploration that fits better within the context of events occurring deeper into the 1980s.

This book and its successors chart the coalescence and expansion of the video game industry. As such, the focus is on technological and business development rather than on cultural or social history or impact. While these areas are not completely ignored, exploring the full ramifications of video gaming in these spheres must be left to others. The goal is to provide a foundational work upon which future scholars may construct their own arguments and to help ensure they will no longer be constrained by an incomplete or inaccurate recounting of events.

While much of the work unfolds in a narrative style, it does not function solely as a chronicle, as it does put events into some context and examines “whys” and “hows” alongside “whats” and “whos.” However, it is less interested in advancing a focused thesis than in setting the record straight. If one were to ascribe a common theme to the chapters of this book, it might be that the “video game industry” did not really exist as such in the 1970s and early 1980s (and indeed probably not until the mid 1990s, but that is a subject for another volume). Instead, there emerged a repeating pattern of a group of individuals discovering new technology, experimenting with it for their own edification, and then forcing their way into an existing manufacturing/publishing/distribution infrastructure to bring a product to market. Sometimes this was the coin-operated amusement industry, other times the toy or consumer electronics industries, and yet other times even more wide-ranging fields such as sporting goods, book publishing, or the record industry. Invariably, the video game would prove a disruptive new force in the established industry and proceed through a series of rapid boom-bust cycles driven largely by improving technology and cheaper products before ultimately burning out in spectacular fashion in a burst of oversaturation. It is a testament to the pull of interactive entertainment that new programmers and entrepreneurs continued to rush into the void left by the collapse of those that came before.

A Note on Sales Figures

Unlike in the movie and music industries, there is not and has never been comprehensive retail tracking in the video game industry. Except in those rare cases that companies have reported their own sales figures (and not exaggerated them) or internal company documents have surfaced that reveal unit sales, every sales figure that has been reported in secondary sources is based on estimates of varying quality. This book gives unit and dollar sales figures for individual games and market segments wherever possible, but as these are generally estimates from tracking groups and market research companies, they may not be accurate in all cases and might even conflict with each other from time to time. At the very least, these figures are useful for identifying general trends and relative performance.

One special note on the coin-op industry. Starting in the late 1970s, the principal trade publications for coin-operated amusements, RePlay and Play Meter, began running operator polls in which they asked subscribers to reveal the top earning games at their locations. The magazines published the results of these polls on a monthly basis. These rankings are not based on hard and fast figures, sophisticated formulas, or even necessarily on broad canvassing of all types of locations that housed coin-operated games. Instead, they reflect the opinions of the respondents as to which games they felt were earning particularly well. As such, they do not necessarily reflect a precise ranking of which games were bringing in the most money, and the polls in the two publications often ranked games differently from each other. This book uses these charts to gauge the relative performance of various coin-operated games on a monthly basis. Wherever the popularity of a coin-operated game is indicated without a specific citation, it is safe to assume the information was derived from these charts.