How a laboratory pastime turned into an industry

Two things had to meet before a business could exist, and they met in 1971. The laboratory tradition supplied a game that people demonstrably wanted to play, and the amusement trade supplied a way to charge for it. Both attempts that year were versions of the same space duel. One was a single hand-built installation in a university student union, paid for out of its builders' own pockets and never replicated. The other was a manufactured cabinet produced in modest numbers for the coin-operated market, and it sold poorly. Its controls asked far too much of a stranger holding a coin, and the lesson that a paying player will not read instructions was learned immediately and permanently.

The correction came a year later from a new California company whose founders had watched that failure closely. A ball, two paddles, a score, no manual. Tested in a tavern and then built in quantity, it worked in exactly the way the coin-operated trade already understood: high turnover, short sessions, and an audience that included people who had never touched such a machine before. Because the distributors, route operators and location owners were all in place, the format spread with startling speed, and so did imitations from nearly every manufacturer in Chicago. It also drew a patent claim from the company that had licensed those earlier television prototypes, which was settled by taking a license.

Getting into the living room took longer and was harder to explain to buyers. The first home system, sold through a television maker's dealer network, came with plastic overlays, plug-in circuit cards, dice and score pads, and it suffered from a widespread and entirely wrong belief that it worked only with that company's television sets. Three years later a dedicated ball-and-paddle box sold through a national department store chain proved the household market was real, at which point the deeper problem became obvious. Dedicated hardware can only ever play what it is wired to play. Interchangeable cartridges and a general-purpose processor answered that, and within a year the industry had copied the idea wholesale.

The microprocessor is the technical hinge of the decade. Before it, a game was a circuit, laid out by hand and impossible to revise cheaply. After it, a game was a set of instructions, and identical hardware could sell an unlimited number of different products. Development got faster, ambitions got larger, and a job appeared that had never had a name outside research laboratories. The same components made small computers possible, and in 1977 three complete machines aimed at ordinary buyers reached American stores at once. Their owners traded programs on cassette tapes through user groups and magazines, building a second software market with no gatekeeper of any kind.

Where the money came from changed too. A media conglomerate bought the leading American company midway through the decade, supplying the capital for cartridge hardware and signalling that entertainment executives now saw games as a category rather than a fad. Machines were everywhere by then: bowling alleys, pizza parlors, laundromats, and the shopping malls of the new suburbs. That visibility brought the first national argument about content, when a driving game that ran over figures on the screen reached network news. Late in the decade an alien-shooting cabinet from Japan tipped the trade's balance eastward, and four programmers who wanted credit for their work invented third-party publishing.