Little game tapes, unknown memories

Although the game cassette looks just a small, simple and durable plastic box, but the unexpected place is practical, can plug and play.

If you've played it, you need to thank two people: Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel. More than 40 years ago, they invented game tapes while working for a small, uncertain company. Later, a team from Xian-Tong Semiconductor streamlined its programming system, make it become a product of the market-----------Fairy boy F wave, this pioneering work has changed the basic business model of home video game forever, greatly enhanced the flexibility of new technology, paved the way for its large-scale industry growth, and promoted the birth of new media.

Even about 20 years ago, cassette technology was slowly replaced by cheaper distributed gaming software technology (i.e., optical media and the Internet), and the business model pioneered by Kirschner,haskel and Cyclamen engineers still occupies a critical position. Until now, their legendary stories are still unknown.

The Secret History of the cassette game, however, was unexpectedly originated in amf--, a highly acclaimed manufacturer of bowling equipment.

In the 1960s, AMF has a research and development department in Stanford City, Connecticut, which is mainly responsible for the innovation of age-preserving technology. In 1968, they developed an automatic scoring system that tracked the scores of specific players and showed them on the display on the ceiling of the bowling alley.

For about 1969 years, AMF decided to move its research and development department to North Carolina State. In this context, the Department of Norman Alpert led a few research and development engineers decided to resign their business. Soon after the new company was born, Alpert named it Alpex Computer Corporation according to his name.

Initially, Alpex with the mailing equipment giant Pitney Bowes to develop electronic registers. But this partnership ended hastily at the end of 1973, under intense pressure from IBM and NCR.

Since then, Alpex no goods to sell, the company into a dilemma, had to lay off to tide over the difficulties. In desperation, Alpex decided to develop new markets. According to Wallace Kirschner, a former AMF engineer who followed Norm Alpert to Alpex, the company decided to enter the emerging video game market. In the 1972, Atari's Arcade Pong and Magnavox's Odyssey family consoles were listed, and video games were on fire in just two years.

However, at that time, all the video games on the market were based on discrete-purpose logic circuits rather than computers. The Odyssey was developed by a team of engineers from the defense contractor, Sanders Associates, using technology from the middle of the 60, with no computer technology at all. Similarly, in 1969, although the Atari founder had originally planned to develop the game into software form, it was a pity that the project had been aborted by exorbitant costs.

In 1971, Intel released 4004 microprocessors, and things began to turn. Each microprocessor only has a fingernails size, and the computing function is comparable to that of a large circuit board. In 1972 and 1974, Intel released 8008 and 8080 microprocessors, each with a stronger performance than the previous one. Other semiconductor companies, such as cyclamen, National Semiconductor and RCA, have also started to develop microprocessors, but all the world's engineers are still proud of using Intel's new chips.

This craze makes Wallace Kirschner aware that complex video games can be run as software on a small computer with a bitmap display without the use of dedicated hardware.

Kirschner's ideas were recognised by the company at the beginning of 1974, but the company realised they had to do it first and hired Lawrence Haskel. Lawrence Haskel has worked in AMF and Pitney Bowes-alpex with Kirschner, and is very proficient in software, and is also a game enthusiast.

The company plans to kirschner hardware development, by the Haskel responsible for software programming, together to create a user will be free to change the game in accordance with their own home video game consoles.

There was only one family game on the American market, the Odyssey. People control it through a jumper card and can only play a game called "Ping-Pong." Even though plastic coils, physical panels and card game appliances appear to make Osseide more rich, people can only control the point on the screen to play games, very boring. In addition, the type of game is very limited.

In early 1974, Kirschner and Haskel began developing their own game consoles. They named the new plan "RAVEN", meaning "the Great journey of video Entertainment". At the beginning, the two chose Intel's 8-bit microprocessor 8008 as the core of the system. Kirschner around it creates a device that generates 128*64 Black-and-white images, and uses expensive 8kb of memory to store the bitmap of the image.

Haskel said it was important to play the game's imagination at that time because the system's imaging capabilities and software complexity were limited, with each game being below 2kb (or 256 bytes). In contrast, this text needs to occupy 384 bytes.

That era of the video game market mainly sports-oriented games, such as the Odyssey-led table tennis games and Atari main push arcade Pong. These games have had a big impact on Haskel, and his first project has followed the trend closely. Until now, Haskel can vividly recall the first time he saw Odyssey.

"I was going to the department store to look at the furniture and there was a kid playing odyssey on the road." I sat down and played with him for an hour. "It's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life, and I'm totally obsessed with it," Haskel recalls. ”

When developing the first project, Haskel did not use the popular table tennis game, but chose the northeastern United States of traditional sports hockey. Every winter, the pond behind his house freezes, and he plays hockey with his family on the ice.

Haskel's hockey video game version looks a bit like pong at first glance, on the screen is a view of the entire hockey field, with two sticks and a ball, as well as scoring and timing tools. The bat can rotate to control the direction in which the ball deviates. The main bat can also move back and forth. Haskel even added a goalkeeper bat that can be independently controlled by the player.

' You have to be very flexible with your hands when you play the game, Haskel says. The player is free to control the direction of the ball stick movement, up and down move also line, clockwise, counterclockwise rotation can also move up and down the goalkeeper ball stick. Each action is controlled by a button.

"Until today, I think it's the most challenging game I've ever played," he said. "Kirschner said.

Haskel then developed Tic-Tac-Toe (a simple video game), Shooting Gallery (shooting game) and Doodle (original drawing game).

Requirements: switchable software

As the game continues to grow in variety, designing a system that allows players to switch freely between games at low cost is getting louder. In this way, the player only need to buy a relatively expensive game machine, want to play different game replacement software.

At that time, the interactive functions of computer software had to be realized through a series of removable storage devices (such as paper tape, tape or a whole set of rotatable disks), which greatly increased the cost of hardware. However, the development of the Intel 8080 microprocessor makes the EPROM chip (cloud-Hunting Network Editor Note: You can erase programmable read-only registers, allowing multiple erasure and write programs to speed up the development process) easier to use. Kirschner and Haskel also found a better way to solve the problem.

In general, once an EPROM is programmed, the hardware engineer either weld it to the printed circuit board or do inline processing. Kirschner soberly realizes that for the consumer, the game memory usability is the most important. So Alpex's engineers decided to weld the fragile memory chips to the circuit board while connecting the pins of the chips to the plug-and-pull connectors.

This is the process of the birth of the game cassette.

"We went to RadioShack (the famous American electronic retailer) to buy back these little plastic boxes," Kirschner recalls, "in a game box fitted with a connector beforehand." He remembers that the Raven game cassette is about 5 inches wide, 3 inches tall, and a few inches long. Each cassette's circuit board is equipped with a memory chip containing video game code.

The memory module of the cassette is connected to the Raven game machine through a prominent 25-pin connector on the box. Although the connector is more durable than a typical storage slot, its 25-pin design is not suitable for use by consumers. Alpex has not been able to solve the problem. It was not until the second round of innovation that the answer was found by another company.

As if all the key issues were resolved, Kirschner and Haskel to show their work to the board of Directors of Norm Alpert and Alpex. Alpert also knows that it does not have enough money to promote the game, looking for a partner who is financially strong.

Because Raven is mainly based on ordinary home TV as a monitor, Alpert first set the American TV manufacturer as a potential partner. In early 1975, they contacted Sylvania, Zenith, RCA, and Motorola (once produced televisions) and displayed their consoles under a confidentiality agreement. "But they are not interested in game consoles," Kirschner said, "Just out of the vacuum tube era, they have buried their heads in the sand like ostriches, and they have not done transistor electronic design." That's why they disappeared later. ”

About Us

Alpex 16*16*5 inch metal consoles are full of circuit boards, ball game modules and complex input keyboards, and it's hard to think of how to turn it into a simple, attractive product. Only with outstanding creativity, rich knowledge of electronic design and marketing skills to achieve this goal.

Aware of this, Alpex began to engage the semiconductor business. These semiconductors have just launched their own consumer electronics products, usually some of the first generation of electronic clocks, first-generation pocket calculators or early digital watches and other gadgets.

At Alpex's early point of sale, a fairy-child sales representative named Shawn Fogarty to sell them various components. In early 1975, Fogarty received a vague phone call from Alpert inviting him to visit Alpert. Curious about the purpose of Alpert, Fogarty agreed to their invitation. "It's a bunch of smart guys," he says, "and they're capable of turning ideas into reality." ”

Fogarty was happy with what he saw and told the vice president of the consumer goods department, Greg Reyes. Reyes also impressed with the game, so he told the news to the Fairy Child's CEO Wilf Corrigan. Video games seem to be the next major position for the fairy child chip.

Corrigan asked the former leader of National Semiconductor consumer products, Gene Landrum, to perform a technical evaluation of Alpert's gaming consoles and to make a feasibility analysis from the perspective of marketing and business prospects. Landrum recalls the mission and said, "Corrigan told me he wanted me to go to Connecticut with a guy named Lawson and see if we should buy that game." ”

The guy named Lawson is Jerry Lawson, an electronics expert from Queens, New York, and one of the few African-American electronics Engineers in Silicon Valley. In 1973, he created a video game himself. In the 1975, his work experience in the field of video games has been quite rich. Understanding the origins of Lawson and video games, Reyes that he is the best engineer to lead the development of video games for fairy children.

"My mission is mysterious," Lawson told me in an interview in 2009, "Even the boss doesn't know what I'm doing." I reported the budget directly to the vice president of Xian Tong. ”

Alpex's prototype uses the 8080-type CPU of the child's competitor, Intel (switched to the 8080-chip in 1974). Later, Kirschner and Haskel two people with the support of Lawson to use the Fairy child F8 chip. Lawson is also committed to Haskel's hockey game by clumsy keyboard operations into a slightly more sophisticated joystick operation. In addition, an industrial designer named Nicholas Talesfore also designed an artistic profile for gaming consoles and hand controls, adding dramatic visual impact to the Landrum report.

November 26, 1975, Gene Landrum completed his report "Business Opportunity Analysis: Alpex video game", with Lawson Controller prototype sketch, Talesfore hand control and game console initial design schematic, and called the project "STRATOS". "This video game is designed to be a aftermarket market for home TV," says a paragraph in the report. It wants to increase the selectivity of the game through a ' unique ' (or potentially patented) cassette technology that eliminates the possibility of game obsolescence. ”

Through a large number of data statistics and analysis, Landrum is expected by 1978 Stratos game can sell 5.5 million units, occupy 22% of the market share, at the same time the total revenue reached 220 million U.S. dollars. In fact, this estimate is too optimistic, and this has never happened. But what he said was what the Corrigan executives wanted to hear, and he gave the children a license to enter the video game industry. The new video game is called the Kirschner and Haskel, the VES (later renamed "The Fairy Boy F wave").

The new project, Lawson, is responsible for electronic engineering and software design, and Talesfore is responsible for industrial design. The Working Group began streamlining the prototype of the Alpex to fit in a box of the right size (the size can be comfortably placed on the TV in the living room). Soon they realized that it would take a professional knowledge to realize the mobility of the game software module. Talesfore happened to know a man who could do the job, Ron Smith, a mechanical engineer and his colleague at National Semiconductor.

Just a year ago, Smith successfully developed the world's first pocket computer prototype, Novus 7100, using Removable Storage modules while working on National Semiconductor. But before Novus 7100 was pushed to market, National Semiconductor changed its decision and eventually shut down its consumer-goods sector.

But Smith has thus become the only person in the world who has the experience of designing consumer-ROM enclosures. The new project is in dire need of such talent, and in the early 1976, Cyclamen hired him as head of mechanical engineering for the project.

"They were already working on the machine," Smith recalls (referring to the process of making metal models for the plastic casing of the game machine), "They want to make a game-shell model without a cassette, and then figure out what's going on." ”

Smith vetoed the process and hired additional engineers to ensure that the basic internal mechanisms were in place before the game's industrial design was completed. He recalls: "I said, ' Guys, you should design from inside out, not from outside." ’”

In short, the key part of the system is still missing, the cassette itself.

Alpex originally through the plug-in module to achieve the exchange of games, but the plug-in module is fragile and not good, fairy children have to use a more appropriate way to package them. The task was mainly done by Nick Talesfore, an industrial designer.

Previously, the insertion and removal of embedded electronic components was accomplished primarily by well-trained technicians, engineers and military personnel, because it was sensitive. Turning a circuit board into a consumer product is also difficult, and consumers may step on it, throw it in the toilet, or expose it to the sun, which can cause damage. Obviously, such a circuit board requires a protective sleeve.

8-Track inspiration

Talesfore immediately thought of the familiar 8-track tapes. Compared with the exquisite vinyl record, the 8-track tape has good seismic resistance, can be inserted by single hand to remove the operation, easy to use in the car, so the sales surge, in the 1970s a great success. He designed the size and shape of the game cassette with a model of 8-track tapes. In addition, he added rib design around the box to facilitate grip, and the use of bright yellow plastic as a shell material to make it more eye-catching.

Talesfore invited an artist Tom Kamifuji, who he had met at National Semiconductor, to label the cassette. Tom Kamifuji is famous for his exaggerated style, and the label he designed has become the target of other companies to imitate.

At that time, the games are numbered from Videocart-1, each game has a corresponding number, which is also convenient to count the number of games in the cassette (the Fairy's final number is Videocart-26). In retrospect, such numbering systems also reflected confusion, and no one knew how many tapes were needed in a game-machine, or how long a system like F-wave could survive in the market, and no one could have anticipated the subsequent emergence of third-party gaming chambers that would increase the number of games.

As Talesfore for the system analysis of the cassette and for the design of the industrial design, the mechanical engineer Ron Smith also found a real sore spot in the cassette problem: How to insert the cassette and unplug the game?

When I interviewed Lawson in 2009, he and I talked about the tremendous pressure that the F-wave team was able to take to design a cassette circuit that was capable of anti-seismic, plugging, and even anti-static. Without protection, static electricity can easily destroy semiconductor chips.

"We're worried because we don't have any data on the test, and we don't know what to do," he said. This kind of test has never been done, "Lawson said," I mean, who's going to plug in the storage module as many times as you use everyday consumer goods? No one. ”

Ron Smith designed a spring-supported plastic door for the cassette. When you are not working, this door protects a row of 22 gold-plated contacts in the plastic casing. Once the game is plugged in, the door opens and the contact is exposed. At the same time the flexible special connector of the game machine will rotate out, connect with the cassette and connect the circuit. This design also avoids the corrosive damage caused by manual operation.

Smith did a lot of memorizing when he worked, including the slots that the game consoles used to support the cassette.

In addition, there is a separate device in the console that can hold the cassette, so that they do not loose at work. The device is controlled by a button in front of the socket. This considerate operating experience also ensures that consumers will not be bored to pull the cassette from the game machine many times. Like 8-track tapes, the cassette's plug-and-pull operation can be done on a single hand.

Smith and Talesfore later applied for a patent for their work and became a model of cassette game design later in the year.

Here are some patent drawings for the F Wave Project:

Official debut

The first public appearance at the Consumer Electronics Fair, held in Chicago in June 1976. But at that time the company exhibited only an empty shell, and did not cause widespread media attention. A few weeks later, an article in the industry magazine, called the "Smart Machine Revolution", reported it, using cars and watches as an example to illustrate the potential of microprocessors in the everyday consumer world.

According to the article, the concept behind the Fairy Boy F wave will cause a sensation in the home video game industry. The video gaming industry was facing an oversupply problem, with almost everywhere replicas of Atari arcade Pong. The game machine/cassette system created by Cyclamen brings a new business model-businesses can get high profits from game tapes, and Low-margin gaming machines are no longer the focus of the industry. Revenue forecasts for the video gaming industry are also expected to rise sharply.

Most importantly, the advent of the fairy-boy F wave has sounded a wake-up call for companies that have also developed cassette game consoles. RCA is one of them, and its Studio II is developed almost simultaneously with F wave. William Bachman, one of the tape-associated inventors of Studio II, confirmed in an interview that their system was completed at least in May 1976, before the fairy-child game was released.

Atari has also been working on the concept of programming game consoles, and has obtained the inspiration from a familiar place for the design of physical cassettes. In 1976, on Smith hired Doug Hardy to assist him in designing the cassette structure of f-wave. But before the mission was completed, Hardy Job-hopping to Atari. A year later, Hardy and other engineers designed the enclosure and internal mechanism of the Atari VCS (later renamed Atari 2600) and officially listed in October 1977. But to avoid patent disputes, its internal structure is completely different from that of the Fairy boy F wave.

Shortly before the listing, Cyclamen changed the name of the game machine from the VES to F wave, with the full name "Channel Fun". Unfortunately, even if the first listing, the Fairy child in the market does not occupy any advantage. Even after the introduction of the math Quiz,video blackjack,mind Reader,maze, and Acey-deucey, the situation has not improved. "In Atari, we learned that no one would like your game if you can't focus on the capture of a particular category of consumers and interest." "I don't quite agree with that, but it does," said John Ellis, former vice president of Atari Consumer Engineering. ”

RSA also learned that taking an academic route is bad for the company. The original studio II (only two months later than the F Wave) was based on the slow movement of simple educational games and bowling (arguably the best game). But only a year after the listing is over, because its game is really boring, even after the image of the improvement, Still can't arouse people's interest.

The first year of F Wave's market performance is really good compared to the previous dedicated game consoles. But Atari 2600, with its vibrant action games and the home version of the arcade, quickly came out and completely overshadowed its popularity.

In the 1978, the Cyclamen redesigned the F wave in order to be able to confront Atari 2600. F Wave second-generation has a stylish look, removable hand control, and even real button operation. But it was too late, and its sales were limited, and finally had to sell the technology to zircon Analysys in 1979.

In the Fairy age, the F wave probably sold only 350,000 units in total, while Atari sold millions of 2600 and game cassettes during the same period.

Game companies beat Chip companies

Why Atari can beat the Fairy and RCA? Because it specializes in games. It can entertain people in vivid, exaggerated, and sincere ways. Its arcade experience has enabled it to know what is attractive to consumers, and its laid-back management has greatly stimulated grassroots creativity, making its performance explode in the 1970s.

For Cyclamen and RCA, semiconductor chips are their dominant business. Entertainment is never the focus of top management.

As a result, F wave was seriously dragged down by the internal manipulation of the enterprise. All of its chips are from Xian-Tong Semiconductor, and even the Cyclamen forces Exetron (F Wave's Consumer goods division) to buy chips at a fixed price (sometimes even higher than the price offered to other companies) to make a profit.

Atari can choose the lowest market price for its chips in various suppliers. Because no need to please the semiconductor overlord, Atari can accelerate the pace of development, as far as possible to reduce costs, thereby gaining a competitive advantage.

All in all, this software-borne model allows businesses to sell game consoles at a low price or even at a loss in order to increase market share and then sell a lot of low-cost software to make up for losses and gain profits. Even today, 40 years later, the business model of video games remains unchanged.

Today, the creators of cassette games are no longer involved in the industry, but their contribution opens a new era in which the game is freed of hardware and makes video games a new medium with unlimited potential. In this sense, cassette is also a great technological revolution.