Atari age the emergence of video games in america

Atari Age The Emergence of Video Games in America Michael Z Newman The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Newman, Michael Z., author Title: Atari age : the emergence of video games in America / Michael Z Newman Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index Identifiers: LCCN 2016028476 | ISBN 9780262035712 (hardcover : alk paper) eISBN 9780262338172 Subjects: LCSH: Video games United States | Video games industry United States Classification: LCC GV1469.3 N484 2017 | DDC 794.8 dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028476 ePub Version 1.0 Table of Contents Title page Copyright page Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Early Video Games and New Media History 1 Good Clean Fun: The Origins of the Video Arcade 2 “Don’t Watch TV Tonight Play It!” Early Video Games and Television 3 Space Invaders: Masculine Play in the Media Room 4 Video Games as Computers, Computers as Toys 5 Video Kids Endangered and Improved 6 Pac-Man Fever Select Bibliography Index List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Time magazine’s January 18, 1982, cover pictures a young man fighting an alien invasion within the representation of an arcade game Figure 2.1 Fairchild Channel F brochure Figure 2.2 Magnavox Odyssey flyer Figure 2.3 Catalog detail: “tele-games” from the Sears Wish Book for the 1979 Holiday Season Figure 2.4 Intellivision catalog Figure 2.5 Marx T.V Tennis game Figure 2.6 Sony Betamax advertisement: “Watch Whatever Whenever.” Figure 2.7 Atari advertisement: “Don’t Watch TV Tonight Play It!” Figure 2.8 Changing Times, 1978, showing the tension between games as TV and as participatory activity Figure 2.9 A Blip comic strip, positioning games between conceptions of good and bad television uses Figure 3.1 Atari commercial, “Have you played a game from Atari?” Figure 3.2 A 1950 television ad by Magnavox Figure 3.3 Mechanix Illustrated, 1975: father–son gameplay on the carpet Figure 3.4 Popular Science, 1972: playing the Odyssey Figure 3.5 Radio Electronics, 1975: a parent–child rec room scene Figure 3.6 Odyssey manual detail Figure 3.7 Parker Brothers catalog, 1982 Figure 3.8 Coleco ’77 games catalog includes a variety of toys including TV games Figure 3.9 Atari Outlaw cartridge box and game Figure 3.10 Atari Combat cartridge box and game Figure 3.11 Atari Maze Craze cartridge box and game Figure 3.12 Story of Atari Breakout, audio book set cover, 1982 Figure 3.13 Atari commercial: Space Invaders descending on the family home Figure 3.14 Activision StarMaster commercial: the player is being brought into the game Figure 3.15 Electronic Games, winter 1982: a boy fantasy of play as escape Figure 4.1 In an early scene in Vacation (1983), the use of a home computer to plan a trip is hijacked by the children’s video games Figure 4.2 Time “Machine of the Year” cover, 1983 Figure 4.3 “TV Typewriter” cover of Radio Electronics, 1973 Figure 4.4 Time covers: “The Computer in Society” (1965) and “The Computer Society” (1978) Figure 4.5 Magnavox Odyssey2 advertisement: “Mind of a Computer” signified by a QWERTY keyboard Figure 4.6 Isaac Asimov in an advertisement for Radio Shack’s TRS-80 Figure 4.7 Apple II advertisement in Byte, 1977, establishing normative gender roles for home computing Figure 4.8 Picturing the home computer and its adult male user at work, Changing Times, 1977 Figure 4.9 Commodore VIC-20 advertising showing the appeal of the technology for play, with Star Trek’s William Shatner as pitchman Figure 4.10 Commodore 64 advertising with the nuclear family sharing the home computer at different times of day Figure 4.11 Commodore 64 advertising recalling Atari’s “Don’t Watch TV” campaign Figure 6.1 Pac-Man cabinet with cartoonish characters Figure 6.2 Illustration from Martin Barker, I Hate Vidiots, sexualizing Pac-Man and its female players Figure 6.3 1982 Bally/Midway flyer showing Ms Pac-Man and its intended market Figure 6.4 Ms Pac-Man marquee with its feminized representation of the character and the game Acknowledgments So many people have helped me produce this book and I am grateful for many kinds of support from institutions, friends, family, and even people on the Internet I barely know For sharing their ideas, suggestions, research, or even just the name of someone else who might know the answer to a question, thank you Megan Ankerson, Catherine Baker, Anthony Bleach, Will Brooker, Rachel Donohoe, Christine Evans, Kevin Ferguson, Raiford Guins, Thomas Haigh, Carly Kocurek, Melanie Kohnen, David McGrady, Stuart Moulthrop, Sheila Murphy, Laine Nooney, Rebecca Onion, Tommy Rousse, Phil Sewell, Kent Smith, Colin Tait, Jacqueline Vickery, Ira Wagman, and Mark J P Wolf Anonymous readers for the MIT Press offered outstanding feedback I am so happy to have found communities of scholars on Facebook and Twitter who answer questions and give advice On Tumblr, I am thrilled to follow hundreds of people I not know “in real life” who share images, videos, GIFs, and links Even if I don’t know you personally, your presence in my networks enriches my knowledge and experience every day Thanks are also due to a number of institutions and people who serve them Ellen Engseth and other University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee archivists helped me get my hands on a treasure trove of department store catalogs The Interlibrary Loan office of my campus library is doing God’s work, and I owe them more than I can offer here UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies and its former director, Richard Grusin, were essential in helping me shape this project when it was getting started and giving me time to work on it I could not have completed this work without an Arts & Humanities Travel Grant and a Graduate School Research Committee Award, and I am grateful for those forms of support Librarians, archivists, and support staff at the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong, UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Library of Congress aided me in many ways Thanks in particular are due to J P Dyson, Thomas Hawco, and Lauren Sodano of The Strong/ICHEG, and Mark Quigley of UCLA At the MIT Press it has been my pleasure to work with Susan Buckley, Susan Clark, Judy Feldmann, Pamela Quick, and Doug Sery I want to acknowledge some of the sources of information that we all rely on and tend not to cite in our scholarly publications: Google Books, Google Scholar, Amazon “look inside,” and Wikipedia I use these constantly to look things up I often go to them even when sources I need are on the bookcase next to my desk or stored on the hard drive of my computer Wikipedia in particular is so useful because so many volunteer editors have given generously of their time and knowledge, and anyone who ever wants facts quickly owes them their thanks In spring 2012 I taught a seminar on video games to graduate students, and I learned an amazing amount from its participants Stephen Kohlmann, Alexander Marquardt, Pavel Mitov, Max Neibaur, Carey Peck, Leslie Peckham, and David Wooten, thanks for all of your contributions to our collective understanding of games and their history My colleagues in the Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are supportive in many ways I want in particular to acknowledge the generosity of David Allen, Rick Popp, Jeff Smith, and Marc Tasman Elana Levine is a wonderfully helpful colleague and spouse I presented portions of this book as work in progress to audiences at UWM; Marquette University; more than one Console-ing Passions International Conference on Television, Video, Audio and New Media; conferences of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the American Studies Association; the Fun with Dick and Jane: Gender and Childhood conference at the University of Notre Dame; and the Interplay conference at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Thanks to all who organized these conferences and in particular to the Interplay conference participants and organizers, including Reem Hilu Thanks to my audiences for your attention and your questions and feedback Allan Zuckerman and Ron Becker were sources of old game consoles and cartridges Some of these were also passed down from the collection of my late father-in-law Elliott Levine I am grateful to every friend and acquaintance who told me where in their childhood home the video games would be found I also want to acknowledge my childhood friends and friends of friends in whose basements I played Atari, Intellivision, and Colecovision as a child, and with whom I went off by bicycle, bus, or subway to Toronto’s public spaces of play My mother-in-law Dodie Levine’s basement on Woodview Lane in Park Ridge, Illinois, was an inspiration to me In the years when I visited it, this space contained two 1970s pinball machines, a one-armed bandit slot machine, a ping-pong table, a personal computer, an upright piano terribly out of tune, a well-stocked bar, and many sundry hobbyist and collector artifacts I often reflected on the status of public amusements in the home while playing with my children down there, and thought of that room as a time machine to the 1970s Research happens in the library and the archive, but it also happens during moments of everyday life when we encounter people, objects, and spaces who prompt us to think and reflect and wonder Anyone who inquired about my video games book and how it’s going, or asked me what I’m working on, maybe you were just making conversation—I appreciate it You gave me opportunities to encapsulate my ideas and offered a sense of how the world would receive them Many thanks are due to Leo Newman, not only a dear son but a research assistant and companion in play, and his brother Noah Newman, equally dear, barely a toddler when I started this work and as of this writing, the only member of the family who really appreciates the animated TV series Pac-Man No one has helped me more and in as many ways as Elana Levine, my partner in so many things In addition to commenting on chapter drafts, taking unnecessary words out of sentences, and sharing sources, she has sustained me and our family while I have been at work, and given me the inspiration of her own scholarly example Such great gratitude is owed to my family, friends, and networks, who made this work better, and indeed, made it possible Thank you all Preface Video games have been part of my life since my childhood, but I have found myself intensely interested in them during two periods: the early 1980s, and the years I have spent on this book I began the research for Atari Age not out of any particular desire for recapturing the past, but out of an interest in one aspect of the history of television While writing about digital television innovations of the early twenty-first century, such as DVRs and online video, I wanted to understand a longer history of TV’s technological improvements Ideas about video games in the 1970s, along with ideas about cable TV, videotape cassette recorders, and other new ways of using a TV set, were remarkably similar to ideas about television during the era of digital convergence In particular, people assumed that TV was in need of a technological upgrade to give its viewers more agency and alleviate problems associated with mass media.1 This book began as a project of tracing the history of interactive moving-image technologies, of entwining video game and television history After all, the medium’s name includes a word that was for many years a synonym for TV, and “video games” was used interchangeably in the 1970s with “TV games.” While looking into this connection, I discovered that relatively little had been written about early video games, particularly little social and cultural history of the medium as it emerged, and I became eager to help fill that gap.2 Early cinema and early television had been studied in illuminating and influential historical work.3 Early video games, I thought, had the potential to be just as productive for historical study I also saw that doing research on this topic would give me an excuse to read old magazines, which I knew would be fun This book is the result Once immersed in research, it was probably unavoidable that I would come to an expanded understanding not only of games and related media, but also of my own childhood Although it wasn’t my conscious agenda, I did relive my younger years through writing this I was born in 1972, the same year as the debut of Pong, and I was ten years old in 1982, when the most desirable plaything in North America was an Atari 2600 I played video games including Tron, Tempest, and Ms Pac-Man (as well as pinball games) at Uptown Variety, a convenience store on Eglinton Avenue I could ride my bike to from my family’s home in a residential neighborhood of Toronto I played console games in the rec rooms of friends’ houses I also played in arcades like the clean and respectable Video Invasion on Bathurst Street, where classmates had birthday parties, and some seedier, less wholesome spots on Yonge Street downtown, where I traveled by subway I owned a few handheld electronic games, but we had no Atari console (or any of its rivals), and the family’s first PC arrived years later My own parents were suspicious of video games and objected to their presence in our home They shared a fear (which I discuss in chapter 5) with many other grown-ups at the time: that their children’s success in school and their ... required a distinction between the promising interactivity of the former and the reputation of the latter as a vast wasteland The place of video games in the home was inflected by the idea of domestic... about the early history of video games, it does not share the ambition of some of the video game histories already published Books such as Replay: The History of Video Games, The Golden Age of Video. .. circulating already in the 1970s and 80s This book is, among other things, a history of how video games became masculinized during their period of emergence It is also a history of how video games