Free Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan Page A

brand new game. The reworked game would, they decided, give players points every time they ran over one of the people and leave a headstone-like cross marking the spot where the person was hit. They named it Death Race . “We had no clue that it would cause any controversy,” said Ivy. “The game was fun and challenging. There was no underlying motivation or thoughts in creating the first controversial video game. It was created out of necessity and defence of our own product licensing.” The media and public, however, didn’t agree and Death Race provoked the first major moral panic over the content of a video game. “The controversy began with a reporter in Seattle,” said Ivy. “The reporter interviewed a mother in an arcade and she said the game was teaching kids to run over and kill people. The story was placed on the Associated Press news wire and then escalated nationwide. The first indications were requests for interviews with us at Exidy.”
    Exidy’s media handling did little to quell the outrage. “If people get a kick out of running down pedestrians, you have to let them do it,” Paul Jacobs, the company’s director of marketing, told one reporter. Psychologists, journalists and politicians lined up to condemn the game. Dr Gerals Driessen, manager of the National Safety Council’s research department, described Death Race as part of an “insidious” shift that was seeing people move from watching violence on TV to participating in violence in video games. It was a charge still being levelled at video games more than 30 years later. As the criticism mounted, Exidy hastily concocted a story that it wasn’t people being run over, but gremlins and ghouls. The lie fooled no one and soon the controversy began making its way onto national US TV news programmes such as 60 Minutes . Exidy received dozens of letters about the game. Nearly all condemned Death Race . One neatly handwritten letter threatened to bomb Exidy and its facilities. ”We did not take this threat lightly, we asked ourselves ‘what have we done?’,” said Ivy. “The police were called and for several weeks we did have security guards at our facility both day and night. The letter was not signed and the person was never caught or heard of again.”
    The rest of the video game industry watched the controversy carefully. While several distributors and arcade owners refused to touch Death Race , video game manufacturers kept quiet – preferring to see what could be learned from the controversy. The main lesson was that controversy sells. “The height of the controversy lasted for about two months then slowly died as other news stories became more important,” said Ivy. “During this time the demand for the game actually increased. We did have customers cancel their order while others increased their orders. The controversy increased the public awareness and demand for the game. Negative as it was, we felt the press coverage did increase the demand for the game and established Exidy as a major provider of video game products at that time.”
    Around the same time as Death Race arrived in a blaze of controversy, Atari was enjoying major success with Breakout . Breakout came out of another of Nolan Bushnell’s attempts to instil a creative working culture at Atari: away days where staff would debate new ideas. “We’ll take the engineering team out to resorts on the ocean for a weekend or three days and do what we called brainstorming,” said Noah Anglin, a manager in Atari’s coin-op division. “Everything went up on the board no matter how crazy the idea was and some of them were really far out.” There was only one rule, according to Atari engineer Howard Delman: “Nothing could be criticised, but anyone could elaborate or enhance someone else’s idea.” At one of these away days someone proposed Breakout , a game that took the bat-and-ball format of Pong but challenged players to use the ball to smash bricks. “The idea