Last night, while I was assembling my wife’s and my new Wii, I couldn’t help but think for a few moments about some of the games I played in both high school and college — Asteroids, Star Wars, Galaga, Tron, etc. Certainly the advances in computer technology in the interim have been extraordinary; but as I inserted the Wii’s input wires and prepared to start up the game program, I couldn’t help but feel the same sense of exhilaration I experienced when I was haunting my college town’s video arcade, armed with a pocket full of quarters.
This prompted me to prowl my bookshelves and unearth my well-worn copy of Michael Rubin’s wonderful book Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, which details the origins and development of Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division – and its forays into film, games, medical graphics, etc. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Lucasfilm had a very pro-active gaming division; in Droidmaker’s chapter “A Hole in the Desert”, Rubin describes in scrupulous detail the free-form gaming environment there, and at other companies. For instance, there’s a lengthy examination of Atari and all the idiosyncracies both of its founder, Nolan Bushnell, and the company’s management style. I’ll examine some of those in subsequent posts.
But in the course of re-reading the chapter, one passage in particular caught my attention:
“By 1981, the arcade videogame world was reaching a feverpitch — it was impossible for anyone to imagine it continuing, and yet it grew month after month.
Atari released Tempest, the original vector display game, with color — a new feature. But all else was eclipsed by a game from Japan, Pac-Man. Distributed in the U.S. by Midway, the pinball giant, Pac-Man became a cultural phenomenon. The yellow character, originally called “Puck-Man” from the Japanese paku-paku meaning “to eat,” not only dominated in arcades, it was soon found on lunchboxes, board games, and hundreds of other products.”
But cultural phenomenon or not, what impressed me above all else was how the success of video game companies occurred almost in spite of their “let it be” management styles. For example, Rubin quotes Manny Gerard, a Warner Brothers executive (they had acquired Atari by this time):
“From $75 million, to $432 million, to a billion-one … it’s very hard to manage growth that fast … especially when the culture you’re starting out with — and I’m only slightly exaggerating — is a bunch of guys smoking dope.”
Michael Rubin’s book is filled with many more highly insightful interview excerpts like this one. I intend to review his book here in the near future. If you’re interested in the development of computer graphics, and the brilliant men and women who were at its forefront, Rubin’s book is an extraordinary window into that world – and an indispensable resource.
– Christopher Hartman
