34
Pac-Man Fever
On May 9, 1977, a new eatery opened on Winchester Boulevard in San Jose called Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater. The establishment catered to younger children and featured three main attractions: pizza, a robot stage show, and a large arcade. The organization behind Pizza Time was the Restaurant Operating Division of Atari, Inc.
Nolan Bushnell truly believed in the video game as a new entertainment medium for men, women, and children of all ages, but all age groups did not have equal access to coin-operated games in the 1970s. When Pong launched in 1972, the prime venue was the working-class bar, which served a predominantly adult male clientele. When Jules Millman pioneered the shopping mall arcade, teenagers now had a place to play too, but younger children were still left out. As Atari considered expanding its arcade operations in the mid-1970s, Bushnell decided creating a family-friendly space would be the way to go.
Because arcades still suffered from a sleazy reputation and were not considered appropriate venues for young children, Bushnell decided to present his new operation to the public as a restaurant. Families would come to eat the food, and while they waited, their kids could hit the arcade games. Logically, the best food to serve would be something that takes time to prepare to maximize the time spent in the arcade, so Bushnell settled on pizza. Bushnell was also guided toward a pizzeria after eating at a chain called Pizza and Pipes that featured live music played on an old Wurlitzer movie organ. Bushnell thought a floor show would be a good way to lure in parents and keep them entertained while the kids were in the arcade, but he did not want to use live musicians.1 Inspired by the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, in which animatronic birds appeared to sing prerecorded music, he decided to craft a show around a robotic band.2
Bushnell figured Cyan Engineering would be able to design the animatronics easily enough, but no one in the company had the artistic skills to develop the characters. Atari President Joe Keenan found what he thought was a perfect model when he attended the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) trade show in Atlanta in 1974 and saw a vendor peddling what he believed to be an animal mascot suit in the style of the Warner Brothers cartoon character Wile E. Coyote. At the end of the show, Keenan bought the suit and brought it back to Grass Valley as a model for the animatronics. When he later called to check on the progress with the “coyote,” the engineers at Cyan told him it was a rat.3
To develop his pizza arcade concept, Bushnell tapped former National Semiconductor executive Gene Landrum. After Landrum consulted on the VCS, Bushnell brought him into Atari with the intent of giving him a high-level position in the company’s new consumer electronics division, but with the VCS still a year away from launch, he asked Landrum to do a business plan for the restaurant-arcade combination in the meantime. When Landrum presented the plan, Bushnell and Keenan were so impressed that they asked him to open the first location. Landrum protested because he had no experience in the restaurant or arcade fields, but he ultimately accepted a position as general manager of the new Restaurant Operating Division.4
Landrum was responsible for developing the entire concept for the venue from the floor plan to the stage show to the type of crust to use on the pizza.5 His first major task was corralling the mascot. Keenan’s rat costume had been lingering around the company for some time and even showed up in random Atari publicity photos such as the June 1976 groundbreaking ceremony for the company’s new headquarters building in the Moffet Park district of Sunnyvale.6 Landrum did not feel a rat was an appropriate mascot for the arcade, not only because of the negative connotation of rats and food, but also because they are predatory creatures. A mouse would work much better, but Disney already had the market for mice mascots cornered. Therefore Landrum worked with an artist named Harold Goldbranson to develop a hybrid mascot with characteristics of both animals. When it came time to name the new creature, Landrum suggested a three-syllable name with a similar patter to Mickey Mouse. He ultimately chose Chuck E. Cheese.7
Another important consideration in developing the space was how to keep it kid friendly by excluding older teenagers. Landrum’s solution was not to allow anyone over a certain age into the establishment without an adult. For teenagers, the thought of having a parent present as they played coin-operated games would not be palatable at all, and they were sure to look elsewhere. Landrum had signs posted declaring that 16-year-olds were not allowed without a parent. At first, Bushnell was nonplussed at the turning away of potential customers, but he eventually came around on Landrum’s idea and expanded on it by ordering the signs changed to exclude all teens without adult supervision.8
When Pizza Time opened in May 1977, it proved an immediate success. Warner Communications, however, was not impressed. The conglomerate bought Atari as a video game company not as a restaurant operator, and Manny Gerard believed getting too involved in this sideline would be an unprofitable distraction. When Bushnell asked for permission to open a second location, Gerard turned him down. Bushnell kept lobbying to expand the operation, so in 1978, Warner agreed to sell the business to him for $500,000. Bushnell incorporated it as Pizza Time Theater, Inc. and served as chairman and CEO of the company while retaining his positions at Atari. Landrum left Atari to become president and COO of Pizza Time. In fall 1978, they opened a second, much larger, location in San Jose with a massive two-story arcade.
When Nolan was removed from Atari, he redoubled his efforts to grow Pizza Time Theater and incentivized Gene Landrum to open as many stores as possible.9 In 1979, the company opened three additional locations. Growing much larger would require an influx of capital from investors, so in October 1979, Bushnell lured Joe Keenan away from his largely ceremonial position as chairman of Atari to serve as president of Pizza Time because the seasoned executive would be more capable of attracting investment than Landrum.10 Landrum remained with the firm as executive vice president and continued to oversee the firm’s expansion into new locations. In 1980, he opened another 20. Then, the company decided to offer franchises to accelerate its expansion and to engage in co-op advertising with franchisees to increase the profile of the business nationwide. By the end of 1981, there were over 90 locations.
Pizza Time Theater represented the first serious attempt to expand coin-operated video games beyond their traditional male teenage audience. While a sound idea in principle, this approach was not necessarily destined for success as the Space Invaders boom took hold in the arcades. Because score chasing became a prime motivator during the boom, manufacturers released a string of increasingly more difficult shooting games that threatened to alienate all but the most hardcore players of video games. By 1981, however, Pizza Time was an unqualified success as video arcade games became a mainstream entertainment medium embraced by children and adults of both sexes and diverse socio-economic backgrounds. This apex for the industry spawned largely from a single game introduced by Namco and its North American manufacturing partner Midway.
***
As Namco designer Toru Iwatani began work on his next game in 1979 following Gee Bee and its sequels, he set himself two primary goals. Stung by the failure of Gee Bee, which he put down to its difficulty, he planned to develop a simpler game that could gain more traction.11 He also noticed that game centers and Invader houses were largely dominated by men, with women only entering if they were with a boyfriend or a larger mixed group. As the centers were dark and noisy, he did not believe they were palatable to girls and wanted to create a game that couples could enjoy together or that girls might even want to play on their own.12
Iwatani started the design process by narrowing down the game concept through focusing on what he felt were prime activities enjoyed by women. Examples he came up with included fashion, fortune telling, going on dates, and eating.13 As tabletop machines were common in cafés at the time, Iwatani homed in on the latter activity and shaped his concept around the verb “to eat” (taberu) by creating a character that would move around the screen devouring food.14 Because he wanted the game to appeal to both sexes, Iwatani decided not to create a realistic character but to embrace instead the aesthetic of a social movement popular among girls in Japan at the time called kawaii.15
The term kawaii, which roughly encapsulates the concept of “cuteness,” derives from the phrase kawayushi, which literally translates as “one’s face is aglow” and denotes the concept of blushing. In Japanese culture, there is a connotation between blushing and being small, vulnerable, and loveable, hence the association of the term with being “cute.” The kawaii movement originated in the 1970s as part of a larger rebellion by students and young people against traditional Japanese culture with its strictly defined roles and stern aesthetics and involved teenage girls embracing styles of dress, makeup, and presentation that emphasized a childlike demeanor and innocence. In kawaii art, this translated into deformed characters, often with large heads out of proportion with their bodies, giant, innocent eyes, and bright visuals.16
Kawaii transformed from a social movement into a lucrative business through the intervention of a company established in 1960 by Shintaro Tsuji called the Yamanishi Silk Company. In 1962, Tsuji began producing rubber sandals with flowers painted on them and soon realized that his cutest designs became his best sellers. He started hiring cartoonists to create adorable characters to adorn his merchandise. In 1973, Tsuji changed the name of his company to Sanrio,17 a combination of sanri, an alternate reading of the kanji for Yamanishi, and the characters for “ou,” which in Japan can represent the sound a person makes when excited. In 1974, an artist named Yuko Shimizu created an anthropomorphic white kitten wearing a blue dress and a red bow for Sanrio called Hello Kitty. First appearing on a clear plastic purse, Hello Kitty arrived at the height of the kawaii movement and gained instant popularity. Similar cute characters followed as Sanrio successfully commercialized kawaii.
In his new game, Iwatani incorporated kawaii styling by rendering the main character as a cartoony version of a mouth. The kanji for mouth, kuchi, is shaped like a square, which informed the basic design for the character, but Iwatani ultimately rounded out his design after being struck by the image of a pizza with one slice removed.18 The team discussed adding additional facial features like eyes to the design, but Iwatani decided that simplicity was the best course of action. He named both the character and the game Puckman to evoke the onomatopoeia for the sound a person makes while eating, which in Japanese is “paku-paku.”19
Once he had a character, Iwatani surrounded him with food to eat, but this did not make for much of a game. At this point, Iwatani almost certainly observed Head On with its lanes and dot collecting, for he added structure to his game by placing the character in a maze stocked with pellets to eat. The game remained uninteresting with nothing to do other than moving around and collecting pellets, so Iwatani livened up the action by adding antagonists.20 To keep with the kawaii aesthetic, these were cute ghosts like the main character in a manga Iwatani enjoyed as a child called Little Ghost Q-Taro and rendered in four different bright colors to enhance their appeal to women.21
To retain the simplicity and casual appeal central to his game concept, Iwatani ordered programmer Shigeo Funaki to program each ghost to follow a set pattern and to advance and retreat in waves so the game would not become overwhelmingly stressful. The red ghost always chases behind the player; the pink ghost always tries to position himself in front; the blue ghost switches between those two modes of attack and sometimes retreats from the player; and the orange ghost chases behind the player but retreats if he gets too close.22
Several other features were added to enhance the basic game. To break up the monotony of gathering pellets, Iwatani included bonus items that appear briefly near the center of the maze and can be collected for additional points. To allow the player to feel powerful from time to time, four “power pellets” were placed in the maze that when eaten turn the ghosts blue and allow the player to eat them and temporarily remove them from the playfield. This feature was inspired by the titular character of the King Features Popeye cartoons, who gained strength by consuming a can of spinach.23 Finally, to give the player the occasional respite, Iwatani and Funaki created a series of three “intermissions,” funny little animated vignettes that play occasionally after the player clears the maze of dots.24
Iwatani and a team of five people that included Funaki, sound designer Toshiro Kai, and hardware engineer Shigeichi Ishimura, spent roughly 17 months developing Puckman. This unusually long development cycle stemmed from the trial-and-error approach the team employed to lock down the feature set, the difficulty of creating the algorithms for the ghost attack patterns, and the trying process of perfecting the intermissions. On May 22, 1980, the game finally went out on test at a movie theater in Shibuya to a muted response. While couples and casual players enjoyed the game, the core game center audience did not. As the casual players only engaged with the game for short stints, Puckman looked to be a minor hit at best.25
Puckman went on sale in Japan in July 1980 and did acceptable, but not spectacular, business.26 As Puckman featured simple controls – a joystick to move the title character around the maze was the only input – and overly cute characters out of step with currently popular products in the United States and Europe, Iwatani doubted the game would be released internationally. In the end, Namco offered the game to its North American partners alongside three others: an update on Atari’s Tank called Tank Battalion, a cutesy Galaxian derivative called King & Balloon, and a driving game called Rally-X.
Namco felt Rally-X held the most promise for foreign markets. Like Puckman, the gameplay is clearly derived from Head On, but instead of collecting many dots the player must gather a small number of flags contained within a multi-screen maze while avoiding other cars – two at first and up to eight in later rounds. Play is regulated by lives, but the car only has a limited amount of fuel and slows to a virtual halt if it runs out. The player can deploy a smokescreen to temporarily stun the chasing computer opponents at the expense of additional fuel. At a time when games were largely set against black backgrounds and sported limited sound, Rally-X featured a full-color playfield that scrolled in four directions and a continuous musical accompaniment more complex than the four repeating notes in Space Invaders. With stellar audiovisual presentation and challenging gameplay, Namco thought the game would appeal to American score chasers more than cutesy, casual Puckman.
Namco looked to license its four new games to multiple companies and met with Atari, Midway, and a small pinball company looking to break into video called Game Plan.27 Namco offered Puckman to Atari first, but the two firms were not on the best of terms at that moment, and Asteroids production was still going strong, so Gene Lipkin turned it down.28 At that point, Namco decided to offer Midway and Game Plan two games each. Ken Anderson of Game Plan and David Marofske of Midway flipped a coin to decide who would pick first. Anderson won and took Tank Battalion and King & Balloon; Marofske was saddled with Puckman.29
Before Midway released Puckman, Namco changed the name after Namco America employee Satish Bhutani pointed out vandals could easily change the “P” in the title to an “F” on the cabinet marquee with unfortunate results.30 To keep with the “paku-paku” inspiration, the company called the North American release Pac-Man. Midway debuted both Pac-Man and Rally-X at the 1980 AMOA show, where the same buyers that declared Defender too hard declared Pac-Man too cutesy.31 As with Defender, the prognosticators were wrong.
If Space Invaders was a phenomenon, then Pac-Man was an apotheosis. While Defender brought the hardcore players into the arcade in record numbers and became the top earning game of 1981 in traditional locations, Pac-Man brought in everyone else and opened new locations. With its simple controls, colorful characters, and addictive gameplay, the game appealed to children, young professionals, and women turned off by the violence and/or intense difficulty of a Missile Command or a Defender. Midway and Atari started the push into convenience stores with Space Invaders and Asteroids, but Pac-Man cemented a place for video games in those locations and led a coin-op video invasion of supermarkets, movie theaters, fast food joints, ice cream parlors, newsstands, and dozens of other establishments with a few square feet of floor space to spare.32 Arcades were not immune to the game’s charm either and usually hosted five or six Pac-Man cabinets, if not more.33
Midway sold 96,000 Pac-Man cabinets in North America, shattering the record for the bestselling coin-operated amusement in the United States.34 In a time when the average coin-op video game was taking in $186 a week, the average Pac-Man game was raking in around $240 and not experiencing the typical drop-off in earnings after a few weeks on location. In prime locations, the game could earn as much as $500 a week.35 While still a score-chasing game in the vein of a Space Invaders or Defender, the game represented a paradigm shift in video game presentation. While games featuring spaceships blasting aliens would continue to be a significant presence in the coming years, Pac-Man demonstrated there was also a place for cartoony graphics, distinctive protagonists, and gameplay based on dodging obstacles and collecting items rather than just blowing up everything in sight.
While Pac-Man’s simplicity and colorful characters helped bridge the gap between women and coin-operated video games, once they started playing, they often enjoyed a variety of games.36 While the complex controls of Defender may have been a turn off for many, the right combination of pleasing visual aesthetic, deep gameplay with strategic and problem-solving elements, and elegant control systems could attract women to just about any genre. No game proved that point better than Atari’s big 1981 hit: Centipede.
***
Centipede began life as “Bug Shooter,” a concept in a book full of game ideas for which no one has ever taken credit. The book contained all the designs of merit that emerged from the periodic brainstorming sessions the Atari Coin-Op Division held at Pajaro Dunes and other off-site locations at which anyone could present a concept. These could be simple themes, more concrete proposals with some sketches backing them up, or even occasionally a fully thought out project with hardware, controls, and other features already defined. The large group would split into smaller groups to debate about and improve on various concepts, and the best would be immortalized in the book for potential further development.37
The Bug Shooter concept excited one of Atari’s newest employees, Dona Bailey. While not particularly good at math, Bailey possessed both a faculty with language and an artistic sensibility. As a psychology major at the University of Arkansas, Bailey discovered programming while working with a calculator in a statistics class and found the discipline fascinating not for its mathematical dimensions, but for the need to adapt a language to solve puzzles. After graduation, Bailey pursued programming through 18 months of graduate work in statistics and three years as a researcher. Seeking nicer weather, she moved to California in 1978 and worked for General Motors as a programmer for the cruise control system on the 1981 Cadillac Seville. She did not find the work fulfilling.38
In 1980, Bailey heard the song Space Invader from the debut album of The Pretenders, which sampled the sound effects from Space Invaders. Bailey asked a friend where the name of the song came from and ended up in a dive bar playing the tabletop version of the game. Bailey realized that programming a video game was like her current work except with a greater artistic element and decided to break into the business. Atari hired her in June 1980. She was the only female engineer in the coin-op division.39
Bailey was assigned to the team managed by Ed Logg, who had been promoted since completing Asteroids. Logg turned her loose on the brainstorming book to pick an idea for her first game. Most of the games revolved around the space shooters prevalent at the time, which did not interest Bailey, but her eye was drawn to the bug shooter concept, which was described as a multi-segmented creature that the player shoots at.40 Because this would be her first project, Logg defined the basic parameters of the game, which consisted of a centipede snaking its way back and forth across the screen from top to bottom, where the player was situated as in Space Invaders. Scattered across the screen would be blocks – later changed to mushrooms – that would cause the centipede to change direction and drop one line closer to the player. As in Asteroids, Logg also added a second object that would pose a more direct threat to the player to keep him moving, in this case a spider.41 He also adapted the multi-button control scheme of that product for the game.42
Once Logg completed the game design, Bailey began programming. As the arcade hardware was less capable than the massive computers she had worked with at GM, she found the project difficult at times. Logg ended up programming about half the game himself after ditching his management position to get back into the trenches. The game proved uninteresting at first until director of engineering Dave van Elderen suggested that the player be able to shoot the mushrooms. This added a new layer of strategy to the game, especially after Logg used the excuse to introduce two more bugs: a flea that adds more mushrooms to the playfield in a random distribution and a scorpion that poisons the mushrooms.43 If the centipede collides with a poison mushroom, it abandons its usual movement pattern to make a beeline for the player.
In addition to programming roughly half of Centipede, Bailey contributed two significant design wrinkles of her own. The first was a change in control scheme. As she was not an adept game player, she had difficulty adapting to Logg’s multi-button controls. When engineer Steve Calfee noticed this, he suggested swapping in a joystick for movement in place of buttons. While this was an improvement, Bailey did not think joystick control was that fun. Next, they tried a trackball, which Bailey felt worked perfectly.44 Her other major contribution was the color scheme for the graphics. Bailey wanted the bugs and mushrooms to really pop against the black background of the game and felt the standard color palette used in most coin-operated games did not do the trick. She asked her technician to fiddle with the hardware to look for alternatives and had him stop when he hit upon a striking set of pastels. Bailey then proceeded to create multi-colored insects and mushrooms that featured two complimentary colors, one for the outline and one to fill in the shape.45 The result was some of the most vibrant visuals seen in an early 1980s arcade.
Released in June 1981, Centipede was the perfect complement to Pac-Man. Once the easier game lured a broader segment of the population to the arcade and hooked them on video games, Centipede came along with its amazing visuals and strategic mushroom management to keep them coming back for more. Not only was Centipede recognized as just the second coin-operated video game to entice women in large numbers, but it also became the second best-selling arcade game Atari released, topping out at over 50,000 units.46 Within weeks of its debut, it was one of the top-five earning games on location. By November, it had passed Pac-Man and sat just behind Defender in the number two position.
With Centipede leading the way, Atari captured nearly 25% of the coin-operated video game market in 1981 by unit sales, lagging only Midway, which cornered roughly 30% of the market with its Pac-Man juggernaut. Williams had the third largest market share on the strength of Defender alone at 11%. Between them, these top three companies cornered 66% of the market.47 Just as Pac-Man cemented Bally’s place at the top of the coin-operated world, so too would the game have the same impact on Atari’s fortunes in the home.