"Inside Electronic Game Design" By Arnie Katz with Laurie Yates Copyright 1996 Bally/Astrocade-related excerpt from pages 12-16 of "Inside Electronic Game Design." The "Nice Try" Programmables To the untrained eye, video game technology inched ahead at a glacial pace during the first half of the seventies. Behind the scenes, developments unfolded with the suddenness of a mid-winter blizzard. Development of more powerful microprocessors and more efficient memory storage units gave pioneering electronic gamemakers the tools they needed. Everyone in the industry could see that hardwired games were a dead end. A cartridge system boasted more flexibility at a lower retail price. Consumers might be willing to buy one Pong machine, but they would never buy a new machine every time they wanted a different game. The beauty of a cartridge system is that consumers buy the hardware once, instead of purchasing it anew for each game. Though the Odyssey's programmability was a wonderful feature, the unit itself didn't have the graphics or data-crunching power to do much with it. In this one respect did single console games like Pong have an advantage. But hardware engineers believed they knew the answer: Put the operating system and other permanent code into the console and put only the specific instructions for the game in the plug-in cartridge. RCA's programmable console reached market first, around 1975, but it made no dent. Black-and-white graphics and a collection of games little better than Pong kept the RCA Studio from developing a following. Fairchild's Channel F, which made its debut in 1976, had improved color graphics and smaller controllers, but their games were also not very good. The company wasn't very experienced with this sort of entertainment, so Channel F, too, couldn't penetrate the market to any great extent. The Bally Professional Arcade debuted in mid-1977. It could have changed electronic game design history, but it didn't. Its high price ($299 retail) and daunting promotional rhetoric prevented mass market sales. Many saw it as a junior computer, not a high-voltage video game machine, and the public wasn't yet ready for that leap. This machine, conceived by the same company that earlier disdained video coin- ops, was utterly different than the ones that ultimately succeeded with the public: the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) and Magnavox's Odyssey2. The VCS, the most popular machine, was a black box like the Nintendo Entertainment System or Sega Genesis-- with the innards of its console off-limits to the user-- but the Bally system let the average person actually program his or her own video game designs. Its console incorporated a calculator-style keyboard, 8K of memory, and ports for up to four controllers. These were a story in themselves, combining joystick and paddle functions in one compact unit. Bally's pride and joy was a cartridge that taught owners how to program in BASIC, a "plain English" coding system popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. Programs could be stored on tape cassettes and transferred to the Pro Arcade. The system's documentation and advertising spoke confidently of how Professional Arcade owners would advance from playing prepared software to creating their own. It was no idle dream. User groups formed around the unit generated many programs, including games, until Bally stopped supporting its stillborn progeny. (Astrovision bought the project and relaunched it in 1981, but without success.) The Bally Professional Arcade had four resident software titles: a calculator, a drawing program, and two games. Gunfight made excellent use of the unit's controllers. The one- or two-player side-perspective shoot-out armed buckaroos with six shots each. The gamer moved the gunfighter in a limited area with the stick, aimed with the paddle, and fired by pressing a button. Checkmate, the other game, was a one- to four-player kinetic strategy contest with the same play-mechanic as Atari's later Surround. The player guides a constantly elongating line so that the head didn't intersect any other line, on-screen obstacle, or the playfield boundary. These games set the style for the system's software library: streamlined, action-oriented play-mechanics; a dash of strategy; and colorful but simple graphics with no playfield background detail. In short, these games were fun to play without being so complex that smart Bally Professional Arcade users couldn't imagine programming something as good or better. The Road Not Taken The Atari 2600 and the Magnavox Odyssey 2 rocked home entertainment in 1978. Their instant retail success launched video gaming's "golden age" and did much to shape the game design environment for years to come. Could the Bally Professional Arcade, or even the Fairchild Channel F, have cracked through eventually? It's not likely, considering their deficiencies. Yet it could have happened. And had one of those stillborn platforms overcome its handicaps, it would have profoundly affected the role of the game designer, since dramatically altering hardware capabilities radically changes the design job. What a difference that might have made to electronic entertainment in general, and game designing in particular. Provocative "what if ?" scenarios about the Channel F are scarce because Channel F was just too primitive. Had it somehow succeeded against all reason, Channel F's shortcomings might have blunted the first video game boom and set the technological time-table back a half decade or so. The Bally Arcade is another, more tantalizing question. Better marketing and merchandising, plus a lower price, could have turned this gaming computer into a hit. If the Bally Arcade had caught the public's interest, the US game business might be more like its British counterpart. In the United Kingdom, small computers filled the niche occupied by cartridge consoles in the United States. Instead of closed boxes like the Atari 2600, young Britons bought fully programmable computers. While America's youth perfected Pac-Man strategies, British youngsters dabbled in programming their tiny machines. That's partly why there are more game software programmers per capita in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Bally actively encouraged customers to try coding their own stuff. Widespread popularity for the Professional Arcade could have rewritten the subsequent course of game design history. It might have ushered in an era of do-it- yourself video game design. The shareware boom of the late 1980s could have started a decade earlier.