In 1987 Taito approached Midway to distribute a new arcade game. The game was called “Space Invaders”. In the beginning the game was not very welcomed in Japan, but within three years of its production the game started showing signs of life. Within one year the game has become a phenomenon. There was no way to beat Space Invaders, people would play until they gave up or they were killed. In October 1978 the game was introduce in the U.S. American audiences adapted to it immediately. In 1978, Cinematronics released Space Wars. Cinematronics was founded by Jim Pierce, Dennis Parte, and Gary Garrison in El Cajon, California in 1975. The company and its games went unnoticed until MIT graduate Larry Rosenthal joined the company. He convinced his boss’s to manufacture a game based on Spacewar using his processing technology and the game was called Space Wars. His vector graphic technology gave him an advantage over other designers who were still using raster-scan screens. Rosenthal believed that he wasn’t being paid enough so he left Cinematronics and tried to make his processing technology with him. He was sued by Pierce and Stroud and he had to sell his technology to the company. In 1981, Cinematronics released Tail Gunner, the first video game to feature 3-dimensional animated objects. In 1980, an Atari engineer named Howie Delman created a powerful vector-graphics generated for coin-op games. The first game to use this technology was Lunar Lander. Even though it was never particularly successful, its vector-graphics generator was the best of its time. In 1981, 15-year old Steve Juraszek of Arlington Heights, Illinois scored 15,963,100 points on a game of Defender that lasted 6-hours. That was a world record and he became a celebrity with his picture in Time magazine. Nintendo, a 100-year old company wasn’t able to break through to the American market. By 1980, Hiroshi Yamauchi the president of Nintendo Company Limited decided that his company needed a U.S. office if it was going to get through to the public. He hired his son in law, Minoru Arakawa, but none of the games being designed was helping. In 1979 Yamauchi asked Shigeru Miyamoto to his office to ask him to design an arcade game and Miyamoto excitedly said yes. He designed the famous videogame “Donkey Kong”. It was a big hit and couldn’t have come out to market in a better time because other companies were failing.
Quote:
"In the late 1970s and early 1980s, our main competitor was Atari. I always looked at it as we had a hit, they had a hit, etc. It was great because we were creating a constant interest out there" (Kent 137).
Response:
This quote was said by David Marofske who was a former president of Midway Games. I am not surprised by what he said because without competition people/industries wouldn't work hard to achieve the best product they could. If it wasn't for competition, a product would be created, and even if there were problems with it the producers wouldn't do anything to change tat because there is nobody there to challenge them and work hard to get the best product they can.
No comments:
Post a Comment