Free Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan

machine. As part of its relationship with Japanese video game manufacturers Taito, Bally had obtained the North American rights to Western Gun , the latest game devised by Speed Race creator Tomohiro Nishikado. Western Gun pitted two players as Wild West gunmen trying to shoot the other in a showdown and was popular in Japan.
    But the game was afflicted with many of the problems that plagued TTL video games and Bally couldn’t put the game into production as a result. Bally asked Dave Nutting Associates to redesign the game using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. Using a microprocessor turned the video game development process on its head. No longer would engineers armed with soldering irons build games out of hardware. Instead computer programmers would write the game in software that told the flexible hardware of microprocessors how the hardware should work. "TTL logic was a hard-wired system, to make a changed in game play meant redoing the circuit. Once we established the microprocessor hardware system all game logic was done in software,” said Nutting.
    To help with the programming, Nutting enlisted the help of two student volunteers from the University of Wisconsin’s computer science course: Jay Fenton and Tom McHugh. Fenton, a transsexual who became Jamie in early 1990s, was suspicious of getting involved with the amusements business. “I was worried about working for the Mafia. The amusements device industry had a much shoddier reputation back then. It didn’t take long for me to realise how silly that stereotype was.” McHugh became the main programmer of Gun Fight , Dave Nutting Associates’ remake of Western Gun , with Fenton concentrating on programming the company’s pinballs. For Nutting himself, working with programmers was liberating: “I, as the game designer and director, could literally sit with a software programmer like Jay Fenton and mould the game flow. It was like giving me play dough.”
    By the middle of 1975 Gun Fight was ready to go into production. Bally, however, was getting nervous. “RAM was, at that time, expensive,” said Nutting. “Marcine ‘Iggy’ Wolverton, the president of the Midway, asked Jeff Fredriksen and I out to lunch and he appeared nervous. Iggy looked at us and stated ‘I hope you guys know what you are doing because I am about to commit to purchasing $3 million of RAM in order to get a good price’. Of course we nodded yes.” Bally’s RAM order was a major purchase. Nutting estimated it swallowed up around 60 per cent of the memory chips available in the world at the time. Wolverton needn’t have worried though. Gun Fight became a popular arcade game and soon every video game manufacturer was looking at how they could use microprocessors in their products, Nishikado included: “Quite frankly I thought the play of Gun Fight was not really good and in Japan my version of Western Gun was better received. But I was very impressed with the use of the microprocessor technology and couldn’t wait to learn this skill. I started analysing the game as soon as I could.”
    The days of TTL video games were finished. One by one the world’s video game manufacturers embraced the new world of the microprocessor and 1976 saw the release of the last two significant TTL games: Atari’s Breakout and Death Race , created by Exidy – a small coin-op business in Mountain View, California.
    Exidy came up with the idea for Death Race after licensing its game Destruction Derby to the far bigger Chicago Coin, who released it as Demolition Derby . Chicago Coin’s version destroyed sales of Exidy’s original. “We had to do something,” said Howell Ivy, one of Exidy’s game developers at the time. “Someone jokingly said ‘why don’t we make a people-chase game?’ We had a steering wheel on the game, so let’s drive to chase the people.” The idea was simple enough that Exidy could easily adapt the design of Destruction Derby , saving it the trouble and cost of building a