A History of Computer Games

Johnny L. Wilson

In a very real sense, it all began with a model railroad set. Students at M.I.T. were fascinated with all the ways various switches could be integrated into their master layout in order to enhance the quality of operations. Later, when they finally got their chance to interface directly with the TX-0 and DEC PDP-1 computers, their previous work in binary (model railroad switching) put them in good stead to make maximum use of the computers.

B.C.G.W.

Steve "Slug" Russell was one of the members of M.I.T.'s "Hi-Tech Model Railroad Club." A wizard at LISP programming, he was working in the summer of 1961 at Harvard's Littauer Statistical Laboratory when he and some friends hit upon an idea for bringing E.E. "Doc" Smith's pulp science fiction novels (The Lensman novels and Skylark) to the computer. In 1962, Steve developed the program on the PDP-1 (the very console that rests in Boston's Computer Museum at the present day) at M.I.T.

In Spacewar (as the program came to be known), two "B" movie-style computerized rocket ships (one shaped like a fat cigar and the other as a long slender tube) could fly across a computer-generated section of space. Players could flick toggle switches in order to make the ships change direction, in much the same way coin-op and Atari game machine players were later to control the ships in Asteroids' zero-gravity environment. Each ship had an inventory of 31 torpedoes. So, as they flew across the computerized sector, a player could fire a dot from his rocket's nose in the direction of the other ship. If the dot managed to actually intersect the shape of the other ship, the program ruled that the torpedo had successfully hit its target and the other ship "exploded." Actually, the other ship disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a mad scramble of dots which represented the debris of the destroyed ship.

Naturally, the community of hackers could not be satisfied with the status-quo of any program, no matter how entertaining or functional. So, changes were inevitable. One friend, Peter Samson, was not satisfied with the random dot starmap which Russell had originally placed in the game. He took a celestial atlas and managed to program our actual galaxy, all the way down to fifth magnitude stars. Another student added a gravity option and another added a hyperspace escape option, complete with a nifty stress signature to show where the ship left the system.

Even Slug made some changes. Knowing that real torpedoes do not have a 100% success rate, Slug decided to give the space torpedoes a certain failure rate and to add randomality to their respective trajectories and time of detonation. His friends hated the new version because they wanted the same kind of dependability they were getting from their experiences at computer programming. Slug changed things back and, before anyone realized what had happened, Spacewar! was a fixture on college mainframes all over the country.

In fact, Spacewar! had become such a fixture by the mid-'60s that Nolan Bushnell, the founding father of Atari Corporation, became addicted to the game while he was attending the University of Utah. By 1970, Bushnell had built his own machine (using 185 integrated circuits) to connect to a television set and perform one function. That one function was to play Computer Space, a coin-op variant of Spacewar! in which a rocket fought flying saucers instead of another rocket ship.

But Spacewar! wasn't the only predecessor of commercialized computer games to appear on college mainframes. Some anonymous hacker started playing around with a Star Trek game in the '60s. No one knows who hacked the first such game (and he would probably be sued if anyone did), but the games were in college computers nationwide by 1969.

The game itself was not very elaborate. It had grid maps to allow starships to travel from point to point, used ASCII letters to identify the ships, provided shield information in numerical percentages and allowed for both faster-than-light and sub-lightspeed travel. The Klingons were fast and numerous and the Romulans had cloaking devices.

If the game sounds familiar, that is because almost every home computer system had some type of Trek game available for it by the mid-'70s and there was an IBM game based on this program in the early '80s. The IBM game was called Star Fleet I. It was published by Interstel (originally Cygnus) and featured Krellans in place of Klingons and Zaldrons in place of Romulans. The game was basically the same, though.

Also around the turn of the decade (1970), a mathematician named John Horton Conway began to experiment with a game wherein the player would design rules for how cell structures could be put together. Then, they would allow the program to run and watch all the permutations that their life-forms went through, based on following their rules sets. The game was known as Life. It was a crude version of what we now call cellular automata and might have been the first "software toy" (in the sense of a SimCity or SimEarth, where playing is more important than winning). The program received considerable attention in Scientific American and spawned considerable discussion about the possibility of coding artificial life.

About the same time, a Stanford hacker named Donald Woods was nosing about the Xerox research computer and found a prototype computer game. This game's parser used two-word commands to communicate with the game and featured a Tolkienesque milieu. The name of the game was Adventure and the name of its designer was Will Crowther. Not only did Adventure introduce a number of people to the genre of computer adventure games, but it became a commercial game in its own right. It not only became the packaged game Colossal Cave, but it inspired some classic adventure series.

One such inspirational event was when Ken Williams brought home a terminal which only printed hardcopy. Roberta Williams played the original Adventure on that terminal, anxiously waiting for the mainframe to print out the results of her last command, and credits the playing experience as providing part of the inspiration for her games. In addition, a group of M.I.T. hackers (including Marc Blanc, Joel Berez and others) began to create a text adventure called Zork which owed its original inspiration to Adventure and went its mentor one better by creating a parser that could understand complete sentences. Zork was not actually available on a home computer until 1981 when the hackers' new company, Infocom, released the game for the Apple II.

By the mid-seventies, gamers were popping up nearly anywhere there were computers. In 1975, boardgame publisher SPI used their in-house business computer to test the economic model for their upcoming monster game, War in the East. War in the East was not a computer game, but it anticipated the origin of computer wargames on home computers by functioning as something of a computer assistance program. Indeed, by 1979, SPI was advertising for independent submissions of such computer assistance programs to help players handle the prodigious bookkeeping necessary to play the company's massive and complex boardgames.

At CalTech in 1976, Walter Bright started using FORTRAN-10 to write the original Empire, a relatively simple wargame dealing with conquering the surface territory of entire planets. Later, Mark Baldwin updated the program (writing it in C) and added some features like destroyer escorts and a mouse-driven interface. Then it was published by Interstel as a best-selling game for personal computers.

During the same period, Chris Crawford was teaching physics at a small community college in Nebraska. In 1976, he took some maps from Avalon Hill's Panzer Leader, some lead miniatures of armored vehicles and some of his own FORTRAN code and created a tank game for the school's IBM 1130. With typical Crawford humor, he called the game Wargy and unveiled it at a wargame convention during the winter months. That program also spawned a commercial version, Avalon Hill's Tanktics — a computer-assisted boardgame.

So, by 1979 and 1980, a revolution was about to begin. Jon Freeman and Automated Simulations (eventually to become Epyx) published Starship: Orion in '79 and began work on The Temple of Apshai, a role-playing game in the tradition of the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper game. The same year saw Richard Garriott (soon to become Lord British) sell zip-lock packages of Akalabeth, a predecessor to the Ultima series and Scott Adams unleash a torrent of text adventures on the market. In fact, Akalabeth sold so well that Garriott started writing the initial Ultima in the fall of 1979, while still a freshman at the University of Texas.

Other companies, like now-defunct Quality Software, produced games like Beneath Apple Manor, a low-resolution maze game in which players looked for a golden apple hidden in the basement of an old mansion, and Joel Billings, founder of Strategic Simulations, Inc., tried to sell the idea for a computer wargame to both Avalon Hill and newly-founded Automated Simulations.

Ironically, Billings was to found his own company, publish Computer Bismarck and become involved with Avalon Hill in a legal dispute over how close Computer Bismarck actually was to Avalon Hill's own Bismarck boardgame. Nevertheless, Billings' venture must have struck a nerve, since Avalon Hill was publishing a full line of computer games by 1980.

Another interesting fact about Computer Bismarck is that Joel borrowed a Northstar computer from Amdahl Corporation (where he worked) and expected that he and John Lyon would program the game on the Northstar. At that time, Trip Hawkins (who was then a marketing executive at Apple) convinced Joel and John that the Apple II had better graphics potential and would reach more customers than the Northstar could. The irony is that Trip Hawkins is now the chairman of the board of Electronic Arts and Electronic Arts both owns interest in and distributes the products of SSI.

By 1980, when Billings and Lyon were developing Computer Bismarck, Ken and Roberta Williams laid the foundations for a new genre, the graphic adventure game. The first hi-res adventure was Mystery House. Roberta was inspired by Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (as well as the game Clue) and decided to bring the experience to the computer. Ken had purchased a graphics tablet that allowed Roberta to draw images on the pad and save them as graphic files. Then, after Roberta drew the pictures, Ken figured out how to pack seventy images per diskette (using a draw-and-fill technique). The game sold well enough that Ken and Roberta parlayed the profits into three more successful games: The Wizard and the Princess, Mission: Asteroid and Time Zone.

While On-Line Systems (Sierra's original name) was just beginning to take off, another major player was establishing itself. Attorney Doug Carlston had become burned out on practicing law and was becoming enamored with his TRS-80 computer. He designed a space opera-style game called Galactic Saga in which many of the locations had African names (Afrikaans, Swahili, etc.). There was a group of merchants in the game known as the "Broederbond," Afrikaans for "association of brothers." When Doug's brother Gary started successfully hawking the game from computer store to computer store, they immediately thought of emphasizing the family aspect of the business.

That's when Broderbund got its start. However, since Doug had spent some time in South Africa (in fact, was once ousted because he dared to teach at an integrated school in Botswana); there was actually a group known in South Africa as the "broederbond" (who were not especially good guys) and Doug and Gary felt that using the Afrikaans spelling would have implied support for the repressive South African regime, they adopted the variant spelling "Broderbund," which is still in use.

By the summer of 1980, a familiar name in wargaming circles had entered the microcomputer arena. It was at the Origins National Game Convention held in Chester, Pennsylvania that the Avalon Hill Game Company (publishers of boardgame-style wargames since 1958) unveiled its initial five titles: B-1 Nuclear Bomber, Midway Campaign, North Atlantic Convoy Raiders, Nukewar and Planet Miners.

Although Zork did not arrive on the Apple II until 1981, its birth was more properly part of the '70s. In the mid-1970s, Infocom's eventual braintrust (Marc Blank, Joel Berez and Dave Lebling) met at M.I.T.'s Laboratory of Computer Science. Inspired by the original Adventure, Blank and Lebling designed a mainframe adventure game.

It wasn't just any adventure game, however. The goal of the game's designers was to allow the computer to understand more typical English sentences than the simplistic and often infuriating two-word parser of previous adventure games. So, Marc Blank applied his artificial intelligence work and created ZIL (Zork Interactive Language), a "parser" which allowed the program to find associations between sentences and, hence, better understand what the player wanted to do.

Students at M.I.T. responded so favorably to the mainframe version of Zork that a professor at the institute, Al Vezza, encouraged the group to form a corporation. On June 22, 1979, the professor and his star pupils (Berez, Blank and Lebling) formed Infocom for the express purpose of developing Zork for the personal computer market. Its success was followed by Starcross (a science fiction adventure which came packaged in its own flying saucer) and two Zork sequels (Zork II and Zork III).

At first, the company seemed very focused on producing quality interactive fiction and designers like Stu Galley, Steve Meretzky and Brian Moriarty were added to the cast. Games like Deadline, Planetfall, Suspended and Witness followed (1983). Yet, Blank, Berez and Vezza had a hidden agenda that was already beginning to foreshadow changes at the company. Their goal was to move from games to productivity tools.

Actually, many people do not realize that the founders of Infocom were not entirely interested in computer games. Most did not even like personal computers. Instead, they were business-oriented and hoped to "make it big" like their friends and classmates who founded Lotus Development. The idea of producing a business-oriented database became an obsession, as did the later move to luxury accommodations in Cambridge. Vezza was determined to out-Lotus Lotus. What this obsession did to Infocom in the latter part of the '80s can be read later in this article.

In 1981, another entertainment software company appeared, almost by magic. When Robert Woodhead was hired fresh out of Cornell by a New York-and-Canadian-based concrete business, he was not hired to write computer games. He was hired to computerize the accounting system of Fred Sirotek's construction company. He proved himself to be such a hot programmer that he was able to convince Fred to underwrite the publication of a fantasy roleplaying game to be designed by himself and his friend, Andrew Greenberg. In 1981, Sir-Tech Software (a pun on the Sirotek family name, the medieval era that their flagship products are based in and an abbreviation for technology) published Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. The publication was a tremendous success and the Wizardry series remains, along with the Ultima series, one of the benchmarks of computer role-playing. (Both series are ready to birth their seventh installments at the time of this writing.)

A.C.G.W.

By the Winter of 1981, computer gaming had become a full-fledged hobby when no less than three magazines were launched in order to provide information for the burgeoning industry: Softline magazine (associated with both Softalk magazine and On-Line Systems — now Sierra — and partially funded with Margot Tommervik's winnings from an appearance on the Password television show), Electronic Games and Computer Entertainment (published by Reese Publications out of New York City) and Computer Gaming World (founded by Russell Sipe and funded by a closely held group of visionary shareholders). Eventually, Softline was to die along with its parent magazine Softalk and Electronic Games (which emphasized the action games associated with video cartridge systems as much as it emphasized computer games) was to suffer from the cartridge industry's decline. Computer Gaming World is now the world's oldest computer game magazine and has managed to weather the video game market crash (when Atari VCS owners became bored with the capabilities of their machines because all the games had become the same) because Sipe took a more conservative approach that combined a focus on the floppy disk-based computer game market with its more adult (and stable) consumer base and cautious distribution aimed at strategic outlets. Steven Levy (author of the best-selling Hackers) once described CGW as a "staid publication" that "eschews flash for substance." Indeed, it is probably this serious approach to a hobby that many would deem frivolous that accounts for Computer Gaming World's survival when more "colorful" publications were dying.

Speaking of colorful, unbeknownst to CGW staffers, a significant encounter took place in the summer of 1982 that was to cause considerable waves in the entertainment software industry. Neither "Wild Bill" Stealey, a strategic planner for a major Baltimore corporation, nor Sid Meier, a computer systems analyst for the same firm, knew of each other. However, during a break in a company meeting at the (then) MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, the two met over a coin-op game called "Red Baron" (no relation to the game of the same name from Sierra/Dynamix).

The coin-op game used wire-framed graphics to depict World War I aircraft and the player sat in a console cabinet as he tried to shoot down the enemy planes with his unlimited ammunition supply. As a former fighter pilot, "Wild Bill" was challenging all comers.

Imagine Major Bill's (now, Lt. Col. Bill's) chagrin when a mere programmer came along and beat the fighter veteran's high scores. Imagine his interest when Sid Meier, said programmer, began to explain the game's rudimentary programming and showed how to predict the simple moves used regularly by the game's enemy pilots. Then Sid boldly said that he could design a better game in one week on his home computer.

Anyone who knows Bill Stealey knows that he is not the kind of person to let a challenge go unanswered. So Bill said he could sell the game if Sid could write it. As it turns out, it took two months for Sid to come up with a game he was happy with, but by the time Bill completed his first sales call, Hellcat Ace was a success. The first store Bill stopped at purchased 50 copies. Becoming a full-Fledged publisher was inevitable.

When the company started, toward the end of 1982, it was not originally slated to be named MicroProse. One idea was to call it "Smugger's Software," in deference to Sid as an oblique reference to a S.M.U.G. (Sid Meier's Users Group). They finally agreed on MicroProse with the intent of making a double pun. The company was to publish the work of micro-professionals and their art was to be comparable to excellent prose.

In 1987, MicroProse agreed to change its name to avoid legal difficulties with Micro-Pro International, the publisher of Wordstar. They were given two years to change the name and, just before the name change was required, MicroPro identified themselves more closely with their flagship product, changing their name to Wordstar International. By the turn of the decade, MicroProse would claim two other labels: Microplay and Medalist.

The 1982 encounter between Sid Meier and Bill Stealey spawned MicroProse, but the 1982 San Francisco Applefest was to birth an even larger West Coast publisher. Originally slated to be "Amazing Software," this company took on the more appropriate appellation Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts didn't even have a booth at the 1982 Applefest, but they put on the best "show." A special bus took industry professionals to the Stanford Court Hotel where "The Woz" (then an EA board member) was holding court as the main speaker, a rock band was thundering forth with dance music and coin-op arcade machines had been rigged for unlimited play.

Russell Sipe, as both editor and publisher of CGW, and Al and Margot Tommervik, founders of Softalk and Softline, shared a taxi to the party (talk about friendly competition) and originally thought that the social event was bigger than it was. It seems the brain trust of computer game journalism had to circumvent a Nob Hill rally/parade which was staged in preparation for the Cal-Stanford game to be held on the following afternoon. Regardless, the party created an image that was consistent with the vision which was to drive Electronic Arts: success, entertainment and technology.

Trip Hawkins, former Director of Marketing for Apple's LISA, had a vision of gathering artists together and following a new paradigm in developing entertainment software. Originally, the paradigm seemed more based on the recording industry (even the album-jacketed products offered this subliminal suggestion) where artists worked on their own creative agendas, signed contracts for specific products and received technological and marketing assistance from the "studio." The vision was underscored in one of the company's earliest advertisements. The banner headline was "We See Farther." The first line of copy was "Software Artists?" In one image-making advertisement, Trip Hawkins molded his vision around computer game designers as performing artists.

The Electronic Arts mystique convinced many of the early professionals: Dan Bunten (M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold), Bill Budge (Pinball Construction Set), Jon Freeman, Anne Westfall and Paul Reiche III (Archon and Murder on the Zinderneuf) and Chris Crawford (Patton vs. Rommel), as well as many of the early developers who became successful publishers in their own rights (Dynamix, Interplay and Lucasfilm).

Later, Trip Hawkins unveiled the metaphor that underscores the studio era which has pervaded not only Electronic Arts, but the entire entertainment software industry to the present day. Hawkins believed (and believes) that the entertainment software industry is "The New Hollywood." Even as film studios become enamored with technology (special effects, new sound techniques and film sizes), targets (positioning, packaging and distributing), talent (box office recognition), trends (fads and topicality) and themes (story), software publishers must be concerned with hardware trends and capability, marketing, artistic growth, consumer interest and playability/credibility. The tensions between art and commercial success are just as prevalent in the computer game industry as they are in film, recording or broadcast media.

Today, the software publishers that are having the most impact on the market are those publishers that understand themselves as entertainment studios and perceive the various talents they have assembled around projects as part of a creative team. As of this writing, "The New Hollywood" is almost as literal as it is figurative in that many talents in screenwriting, animation, musical composition and even acting have moved into the computer game industry.

Crash Go the Carts

In 1983, there were 25 million videogame machines in the United States (mostly Atari VCS). In early 1983, the coin-op arcade market experienced an inexplicable slump. In three short months, the "coin eaters" went on a consumer-enforced diet that cut the market by almost 90%. By 1984, even the home videogame market was dead.

Before the crash, however, Atari made a grant that was to have significant impact on computer game history. At the height of Atari's power, the company underwrote the founding of Lucasfilm Games. Although the grant was presented in 1982, it took two years of development for the new company to bring its first two products, Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer, to the point of release.

Peter Langston was very well known in the computer division of Lucasfilm as their UNIX guru and he instantly became head of the games group. He was the logical choice to head the new games division, since he believed in the future of computer entertainment, but he was not the kind of market-driven executive that was likely to hurry the products to market. In fact, the entire division was more technologically oriented than game-oriented because they saw all the game work as being primarily research and development. By 1984, however, profitability had become a primary concern and the company hired Steve Arnold, then an Atari V.P., to help the company learn to pull its own weight.

Unfortunately, just as Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus were nearing release as cartridge games, Sam Tramiel purchased Atari. Since Atari had planned to publish the games, these events put Lucasfilm's marketing plans on hold. Home cartridge systems and cartridge games were in the bargain bins for next to nothing, so there did not seem to be any compelling reason to publish the games.

Indeed, the computer game industry was caught in the confusion of the cartridge crash. As a smaller industry, though, it did not have as far to fall as Colecovision, Intellivision and Atari VCS manufacturers and publishers. The major disk-based software publishers managed to survive, but many smaller players who simply published computer versions of cartridge games disappeared.

Lucasfilm Games managed to translate Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus to the Atari 400/800 for 1985 release from Epyx. This gave programmers like David Fox the time to accomplish some of the most intricate finishing touches ever in a computer game. He videotaped transition screens from Fractalus in order to correct a flicker he had detected in the game by viewing it frame-by-frame.

Today, Lucasfilm Games is one of the legacies of the early era of home cartridge games. In 1984, a group of ex-cartridge designers decided to form another, Accolade. Bob Whitehead and Alan Miller were unhappy with the direction Activision had been going since it went public on June 14, 1983. Alan and Bob were quickly tiring of the corporate games and decided to form their own company, a company founded by programmers for programmers.

When the company was officially formed in December of 1984, Al Miller wanted to make sure that the name of the new company would come before Activision whenever the two companies were listed in alphabetical order. So he searched the dictionary to find a name which would precede Activision. They became enamored with Accolade because the idea of applause and approval appealed to their artistic natures. The truth was, neither Whitehead nor Miller wanted to be president of the company. So they began a search for a suitable president with high-tech experience.

They initially offered the presidency to Tom Lopez, an Activision veteran who eventually founded the Microsoft CD-ROM division and, after he declined the position, to Allen Epstein, an ex-Activision employee who was working in venture capital. Epstein is the current president and CEO, but he originally passed on taking the position, as well. So Accolade's first president came from one of Nolan Bushnell's Catalyst companies.

Tom Frisina stepped directly from his responsibilities at a company developing robots for consumers to the management of Accolade's business affairs. It seemed like a natural for a robotics president to run a company founded by the author of Activision's Robot Tank cartridge, but differences in management style between the conservative founders of the company and an executive linked with Bushnell's "U.S. Government" approach to problem-solving -- throw money at the problem—seemed inevitable.

Actual operations began in February of 1985 with the C-64 as the company's target machine. The original strategy was to form an internal product development team, based on the work of Bob, Al and Mike Lorenzen (another Activision veteran who decided to leave the corporate rat race). Miller decided to do Law of the West, a point-of-view horse opera in which the player was the lawman described in the title; Whitehead elected to program Hardball, the action-oriented baseball game that became a mega-hit and eventually became a movie star (the game was the first image seen in The Princess Bride); and Lorenzen determined to develop Psi-5 Trading Company, a space trading game.

Frisina did not believe that internal development alone could generate the kind of revenue a new, fledgling company would need to survive, however. So, he began a search for outside developers. Through Sydney Development Company, a Canadian developer of mainframe products, he not only discovered two game designers based in Ottawa, Rick Banks and Michael Bate, but he was also introduced to an 18-year-old prodigy (no relation to IBM or Sears) from British Columbia named Don Mattrick. Banks and Bate had programmed B.C.'s Quest for Tires for another company and wanted to do their own titles. As Artech, a development company sub-contracted to Accolade, they produced Dambusters, Fight Night and Desert Fox during Accolade's first year. The first two did well, but Desert Fox was not released until the company formed the Vantage bargain line of software during a period of retail shelf wars. Mattrick was initially hired to program the Apple conversions of Dambusters and Fight Night.

Interestingly enough, both Artech and Mattrick's company Distinctive Software have gone on to exclusive relationships with other publishers. Artech develops solely for Three-Sixty Pacific and Distinctive Software was recently purchased by Electronic Arts, with Mattrick becoming EA's youngest vice-president. Before the out-of-house developers left, however, each was to contribute significant hits to Accolade's line: Artech's Ace of Aces and Distinctive's Test Drive. The latter was conceived after Mattrick purchased his first Lotus Esprit and decided that "everyone" would like to drive a hot car.

In 1985, Accolade had revenue totaling $1.5 million, but this expanded to $5 million in 1986 as hits like Ace of Aces, Mean 18 and Test Drive pointed the way to a successful future. 1985 also brought a new player on the scene from the other side of the arcade crash, the coin-op connection. Data East had been functioning as a coin-op company since 1979. In 1985, the company formed its consumer division to convert the coin-op hits into cartridge and home-computer games.

"Cartridge games?" the weary reader asks. "I thought they were dead in 1984." Conventional wisdom certainly would have said as much, but conventional wisdom is rarely true wisdom. When Nintendo showed up on the scene at the January CES in 1985, Roger Buoy of Mindscape is reputed to have said, "Hasn't anyone told them that the videogame industry is dead?" Nevertheless, Nintendo was to prove that a gigantic phoenix can rise from industrial ashes if it controls the vertical (production) and the horizontal (marketing). So Data East was one of the early licensees to see the opportunity in video games and exploit that opportunity. The company hedged their bet, however, with floppy-based products.

Infocomplications

1986 also brought the red ink of Cornerstone, the only Infocom product without a plot. Cornerstone was a database that rocked the corporate structure of Infocom rather than bringing the desired stability. Instead, it brought trouble.

Of course, it didn't look like trouble, at first. It looked (as it does in many corporate acquisitions) like a "White Knight" riding to the rescue. James Levy, (then) CEO of (then) Activision, was a true fan of Infocom games. He perceived the corporate weakness brought about by Cornerstone as an opportunity to acquire a software jewel and began putting the deal in motion that was finalized on Feb. 19, 1986.

Activision purchased Infocom for $7.5 million (although much of the settlement price was in Activision common stock and may have had a different value by the final payment on June 13, 1986). This meant that Marc Blanc lost his bet with Cornerstone coauthor Brian "Spike" Berkowitz that Infocom stock would top $20.00 per share by '87 or Blanc would buy Spike dinner in Paris. Infocom sold for much less than $20 per share and the last CGW heard, the bet had still not been paid off and Blanc was trying to change the venue to Tokyo.

The acquisition was not received well at Infocom. The company newsletter, once known as the New Zork Times but soon to be known as The Status Line, joked about graphics in interactive fiction stories and better parsers in Little Computer People (one of Activision's big hits of the era), but printed one phrase that, in retrospect, offers a melancholic ring: "We'll still be the Infocom you know and love." At first, it looked like this might be true. From 1985's low of three interactive fiction titles, 1986 saw five new titles.

The humor at Infocom never really stopped until the latter days. When the New York Times complained about their newsletter's original name (New Zork Times), they ran a contest to rename the publication and first prize was a subscription to the New York Times. Their in-house (great underground?) paper InfoDope joked that Levy wanted them to do simulations, cynically suggesting titles like Tugboat Simulator and Empire State Elevator Operator. Less-than-kind remarks accused Activision superstar Steve Cartwright (designer of Alien and Ghostbusters) of being able to turn out action games in an afternoon.

Yet harmless jokes about Levy turned to cynical anger at Levy's successor, Bruce Davis. Insiders claim Activision's new CEO had been against the Infocom buy-out from the start and that he immediately raised the ante on some anticipated losses that were to have been indemnified by Infocom shareholders from $300,000 to $900,000 with no accounting. The shareholders filed a preemptive suit and managed to stave off the "required" payment.

Morale began to deteriorate, with Infocom personnel feeling like Davis was foisting off all the programs which should have been still-born in development onto Infocom. They detested lnfocomics, the Tom Snyder Productions attempt to use the computer as an interactive comic book (the idea was to produce $12 products in a continuing series that would appeal to the comics crowd), never believing in the concept but noting that all the development costs were being charged against their budget. A brutal (underground) memo urged Infocommies to join the "Bruce Youth" movement, casting the CEO in a classic bad guy role as he requested Infocom personnel to "turn in" their fellow employees whenever said Infocommies would murmur "a discouraging word."

Activision gradually dismantled Infocom. First, sales and manufacturing were absorbed. This seemed logical, but by the time the great Infocomics experiment failed in 1988, public relations and customer support were also absorbed. In 1989, development was moved to the West Coast, but those who built the Great Underground Empire elected not to move or were not invited to do so. As Arthur, BattleTech, Journey and Shogun reached the market, Infocom was no longer a distinctive publisher, it was only a label.

At approximately the same time as Infocom was fading into the woodwork, Spectrum HoloByte was ready to spring upon an unsuspecting Sphere. That is, the existing company called Spectrum HoloByte merged with Nexa Corporation to create Sphere. The latter, in turn, was purchased by a division of Robert Maxwell's multi-national publishing empire. Sphere's publication of Tetris not only captured the imagination of the ordinary computer consumer, but ensnared the attention of the general media, as well.

Commitment to the Amiga?

By the mid-1980s, Electronic Arts had already staked out territory as one of the most prolific domestic publishers of Commodore Amiga software. As Vice-President Bing Gordon once observed, the company "likes neat stuff" and can be "seduced by new hardware." EA called their Amiga line a "Commitment to the Amiga."

Early on, Electronic Arts even bundled a cute little digitized program called Kaleidoscope and a slide show, depicting their product line, with the Amiga systems disks for the Amiga 1000. The company originally envisioned the Amiga as a Macintosh killer. The reason was simple. Amigas were available at a much more affordable price than the steep entry price for Macs. As it worked out, however, Macs ended up in businesses while Amigas ended up in homes and graphics houses.

As late as June of 1987, Bing Gordon was touting EA's goal as the publication of at least one Amiga product per month and "...hoping it will be the premier home computer." Before such an event could occur, however, the price wars on MS-DOS machines drove the IBM compatible to its current apex as the dominant home computer.

Years of Movement and Litigation

1981 was also a year of significant corporate and legal events. Broderbund was particularly active on these fronts. First, the company announced, then withdrew their initial public offering after observing Activision's weak profits and stock performance. In addition, Origin moved from Electronic Arts Distribution to Broderbund as their distributor. At the same time, Broderbund settled a "look and feel" suit with Kyocera Unison over similarities between the former's Print Shop and the latter's PrintMaster when Kyocera made a substantial payment to Broderbund.

Data East won a U.S. District Court judgment against Epyx over similarities between the former's Karate Champ game and the latter's World Karate Championship. The 1987 ruling was overturned by an appeals court on November 30, 1988. SSI filed a breach of contract suit against the Questron development team for producing Legacy of the Ancients for Electronic Arts prior to fulfilling their agreement to produce Questron II for SSI. This dispute was settled out of court.

At the same time as the previous litigations were underway, MicroProse was settling their famous name imbroglio with MicroPro International and appealing the placement of F-15 Strike Eagle, Gunship and Silent Service on (then) West Germany's Youth Dangerous Publications List. After a vigorous appeal, the West German National Examination Board allowed the products to be sold and modified their initial finding that the products were "...morally corruptive and coarsening for the young user."

1988 was also an important year of movement in the computer game industry. Interplay and Lucasfilm left the fold as EA developers in order to become "Affiliated Publishers" at Activision. Dynamix became predominantly an Activision developer and later (actually in 1989), became an affiliated publisher, as well. After then vice-president of Activision Dick Lehrberg had added New World Computing and Microillusions to a seeming amazing line-up of affiliates, the company inexplicably softened on the idea and eventually lost all of them. It was the first of many mind changes by Activision management. They changed their minds on Hypercard products, Apple IIGS products and even their own name (changing the name to Mediagenic in order to capture some high-tech sizzle among investors who remembered Activision all too well from the days of the cartridge crash).

Origin announced that it had adopted a brand new logo and corporate strategy by the latter portion of the summer. By June of 1988, EA was back on track by signing Strategic Simulations, Inc. as their newest "Affiliated Label." Indeed, it was not to be long (1989) before Lucasfilm elected to return to EA Distribution and New World was to join the EA team for the first time. Another EA affiliate, Software Toolworks, began a round of expansions by acquiring Intellicreations and setting the stage for future acquisitions such as that of action game publisher Mindscape (approved by both boards of directors in March of 1990).

The Japanese "invaded" with the establishment of Koei Corporation's U.S. operations and eleven Japanese software companies attempted a now-aborted joint venture with Broderbund. Perhaps even bigger news was the initial public offering of Sierra stock in August of 1988, netting close to $10 million.

In 1989, Origin announced that it had "graduated" from Broderbund at Summer CES and Broderbund simultaneously announced an agreement with Distinctive Software (now wholly owned by Electronic Arts) to publish entertainment products which would enhance their line. 1989 was also the year that Electronic Arts shook the entertainment software world by simultaneously announcing its initial public offering and determination to develop video game software. Perhaps the biggest story of 1989, however, was the massive layoff of more than half the work force of Epyx that preceded by a matter of weeks the Chapter 11 bankruptcy that signalled the end of the Epyx era. (Epyx still develops a minimal number of titles for the Atari Lynx and recently released an IBM version of California Games II.)

March of 1990 was an incredibly eventful month for entertainment software companies. In addition to the Mindscape acquisition (already mentioned), Sierra purchased Dynamix on March 27th and NEC purchased a minority stake in Cinemaware on the 14th of the same month. Such business arrangements underscored the cash-hungry nature of an industry in consolidation phase.

The increased amount of litigation continued to mount in the entertainment software industry. Microsoft and designer Bruce Artwick both filed suit against SubLogic over the technology used in Flight Simulator III while Beyond Software filed a $20 million dollar libel suit against Cinemaware over alleged delays and contractual breaches in TV Sports: Baseball.

1991 and Beyond

There are several worthy computer game publishers who, for one reason or another, did not fit into the limited scheme used to develop this history. For those omissions, we apologize, but suggest that we had to keep something in reserve for that inevitable 20th Anniversary Issue when we present Part II of The History of Computer Games.

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