The long history of Cinematronics and Vectorbeam

This is a tremndously long post. Apologies to those folks with slow
connections. The last line of the message should be "---END---". If it
isn't, then something was cut off somewhere; please let me know.

I exchanged a lot of email with Tim Skelly after the recent posting of
some mail from Dan Sunday by Zonn. Eventually I asked to him to condense
all that amazing information into his own history of Cinematronics, which
is included below. At the end of the history he specifically addresses
some of Dan Sunday's points.

I should be giving the central portion of this its own home at
<http://www.dadgum.com/giantlist> within the next week. This gives the
best overall picture of Cinematronics to date, AFAIK.

James Hague
jhague@dadgum.com

THE LONG HISTORY OF CINEMATRONICS AND VECTORBEAM

Two beavers stand talking in front of Hoover Dam. One says to the other,
proudly, "Oh yeah, that was based on an idea of mine."
--- Charles Addams cartoon, The New Yorker

To get right to the heart of the matter...

To the best of my knowledge, while working for Vectorbeam, Dan Sunday,
with help from Larry Rosenthal, designed and programmed the game that
became Tailgunner. For absolute fact, I, Tim Skelly, designed and Scott
Boden programmed the game Star Castle for Cinematronics. The design for
that game incorporated a design element (revolving rings of shields)
created by Sunday and Rosenthal which I noted during the Cinematronics
takeover of Vectorbeam.

Okay, now the details of the whole damn
Rosenthal/Cinematronics/Vectorbeam saga, based on hearsay, reliable
witnesses, my own experiences and legal documents I have been privy to
over the years. I will try to identify specific sources of information as
I go. Please feel free to contact me (tim@designhappy.com), especially if
you have any reliable first-hand information about the events of that
time.

LARRY ROSENTHAL AND SPACE WAR
Until Larry gets to Cinematronics, this is just legend to me, but it all
sounds reasonable and I have never heard a different version. From
Larry's first contact with Cinematronics and up to the time I met him, my
sources are Jim Pierce and Papa Tom Stroud, at that time the co-owners of
Cinematronics.

Either while a student at MIT or shortly thereafter, Larry developed the
TTL-based "vectorbeam" board and prototyped a coin-operated version of
the famous MIT game Space War. I was told by someone (I don't remember
who) that Larry bought rights of some kind to Space War from the guy who
is said to have first created it, so that game may not be in the public
domain as has been suggested elsewhere. Larry took his prototype to just
about every game company in the US, with an offer to split profits 50/50
with anyone who would build and distribute the game. This was an unheard
of arrangement, and the industry reaction was a big fat NO. Eventually,
Larry worked his way down to Cinematronics, a company that had done a
couple of cocktail knock-offs and was about to go under. This was at the
time of Pong and its early cousins. Pong had no copyright protection, so
there were many companies at that time that began by copying that game,
right down to the circuit board. Unfortunately, these companies, like
Cinematronics and Exidy, had nowhere to go from there and had to look for
other sources of product.

The collaboration was a huge success, but even though they were very
happy with their share of the revenues from Space War, Pierce and Stroud
were not so happy with their arrangement with Larry. 50 percent was (and
continues to be) an outrageous share to go to a game developer. Also, in
addition to his cut of the profits, Larry retained the application
patents to his board, which he licensed to Cinematronics. This meant that
he received additional cash for every game, Space War or otherwise, that
Cinematronics manufactured using his technology. I am relatively sure of
these details, but I never saw the contracts, only heard them discussed.
However, later events would demonstrate that Rosenthal had maintained
ownership of the patents.

LARRY ROSENTHAL, BILL CRAVENS AND CINEMATRONICS
My recollection of the sales figures on Space War was 30,000 units. This
is not unreasonable given that the game was one of the top ten earners
for almost three years, starting at number 1 for 1978 and ending at
number 7 in July 1980. (Pac-Man would later break the 100,000 mark.)
Based on manufacturing and sales figures at that time, a very reliable
number for profit per unit on sales of upright coin-op games was $1,000
per game, net. Manufacturing costs were approximately $1,000 per unit and
the games were sold to distributors for around $2,000 apiece. This, of
course, varied with the desirability of the game, but given Space War's
success, we can assume that it earned at least the minimum in profits.
(Note: This $1,000 per unit figure was also used at Gremlin/Sega and
Gottlieb/Mylstar during the time I worked for those companies, all the
way through 1983.) If you do the math, you'll see that even without
Larry's licensing "bonus" he should have made almost 15 million dollars
from Space war. Even if I am off by a factor of ten, he still did pretty
damn well for an individual in the early days of coin-op video games.

From Pierce, Stroud, and legal documentation, I've pieced together the
next part of the story. Bill Cravens, a longtime coin-op businessman,
worked at that time as Cinematronics' head sales rep. Let me say right
now that, based on their actions and later legal difficulties, Jim Pierce
and Bill Cravens were pretty close to being outright con-men. (I only
believe the things Pierce told me if they were corroborated by at least
one reliable source.) I mention this because it helps parcel out
responsibility for what happened next. Cravens got chummy with Larry and
convinced him to take his seven figures of money and start his own
company, with he, Cravens, as the President. In his favor, Cravens
demonstrated some business sense clearly lacking in Rosenthal. Larry had
wanted to place the company smack in San Francisco, an extremely costly
move which might have drained their capital before they had time to
finish the first game. Cravens chose a much more reasonably priced
location near Oakland.

LARRY ROSENTHAL AND ME (a very short story)
I'll skip my humble beginnings and go straight to the day I interviewed
for a job at Cinematronics in El Cajon, CA, just east of San Diego,
sometime around May 1978. After talking to co-owner Jim Pierce, I was
sent to the tech area to talk to Larry Rosenthal. There he showed me the
"development system" he used to program Space War - a piece of plywood
with the TTL board, some LEDs and buttons that allowed him to manually
punch in Hex op-codes. That scared the hell out of me, but at least I
knew how hex and machine code worked. Scarier was that my limited
graphics experience had been with bit-maps. I knew next to nothing about
vector displays. Larry didn't explain very much and answered very few
questions. Whenever I mentioned our possibly working together he was
evasive, so I figured I had failed the interview. I flew back to Kansas
City, where I lived at the time, and waited to hear back from some other
game companies. I was amazed when Jim Pierce called and told me to drive
on out. I had the job!

After a fast packing job and a four day drive, I was shown to my office,
which was the same tech area I had been interviewed in - except now it
was empty except for some office furniture, a legal pad and a pencil. I
met Jim and the rest of the Cinematronics employees, who informed me that
during the four days I was on the road, Larry Rosenthal and Bill Cravens
departed to start their own company in the Bay Area. Oh, yes, they took
with them EVERYTHING that might have been necessary or useful for
developing games using the vectorbeam board. Cinematronics still had the
legal right to use the board (as long as Larry got his licensing fee),
but now they had nothing except me, a legal pad and a pencil to get them
a new game to build and sell. Bill DeWolf and another couple of techs
were there when I arrived, guys who mainly worked in testing and service,
but who later did a great job with custom sound boards, controls and even
the modifications to Larry's board that made the graphics in Sundance
possible. Soon after I started, Dennis Halverson was hired to create a
macro assembler that we ran on a DEC machine. Dennis handled only system
stuff and utilities -- he later wound up at Atari.

Obviously, things eventually worked out. I managed to crank out Starhawk
in time for a winter game show in London. But what still angers me to
this day besides being put on the spot like that, is the fact that more
than a hundred employees were depending on a new game to maintain their
livelihood, and I was clearly chosen as the guy who couldn't come up with
one. I think you can see that, under the circumstances, there was no love
lost between the Cinematronics and Vectorbeam camps.

CINEMATRONICS AND ME
I certainly had no 50% deal. My salary started at 15K a year and after
three years had risen to 30k. I received 2 $1,000 bonuses. I've
calculated that my games sold at least 59,000 units, total. Was I
screwed? You do the math. Here are some events that I witnessed or was
party to myself preceding Cinematronics' purchase of Rosenthal's and
Cravens' company:

Like I said, the first thing I did was Starhawk, which I programmed first
on legal pads in machine code, then on a teletype machine, then finally
with Dennis Halverson's development software. It and Space War were the
only 4K games. We immediately went to 8K for all future games. Jim Pierce
designed the cabinet, which we later found had to have a cinderblock
placed in the back or else it would tip forward onto the player! --
rather typical of Jim's design talents. The company that silkscreened the
side graphics did the cabinet art. The indestructible joysticks, later
used in Warrior as well, were handmade at Cinematronics.

Starhawk was enough of a success to keep the doors open, so I began my
second game, Sundance. This game was an oddity in more ways than one. It
had a vertical screen and a switch which could be set to display Japanese
rather than English, the only game I ever did that had that feature. The
controls were two matrixes of buttons (3x3, or 4x4. I don't remember
which), one set per player. I would have to explain the whole game to
tell you what they did and why. The biggest difference about this game
was the addition of more levels of intensity for the vectors. This
required a daughter board and lots of cut-and-jumpering. As a result,
this game was very fragile and few lived long.

Somewhere around the time I was finishing Starhawk, we hired Rob Patton
as a second game programmer. He stayed busy learning the system while I
was working on Starhawk and Sundance. One day Jim Pierce walked into the
lab with a Mattell handheld football game. This was the first handheld
game and extremely popular, despite being incredibly simple, with just a
few LEDs for a display. Jim thought we should turn it into a video game.
I told him that it would certainly stink as a video game and would
probably mean a law suit from Mattell. He forgot about it for a while,
but when it became clear that Rob had run out of things to do, Jim talked
me into letting Rob program it strictly as a learning exercise. That game
was Blitz, later Barrier. To make Jim happy, we put it out on test. It
did very poorly, to put it nicely, and we stuffed it in the closet.

I started work on Warrior, my one-on-one sword fighting game. Late at
night, while waiting for code to compile, I'd go down to the production
floor and set a new high score on Speed Freak, the first Vectorbeam game
to rise above the radar. On their breaks, the production crew would beat
my score.

CINEMATRONICS, ME AND VECTORBEAM
Speed Freak was a step above other driving games of that time, although
like others, the player's point of view (and therefore, car) didn't
rotate. Instead, the trick was to slide back and forth like a stick shift
moving dropping through a slotted board. Even so, this simulated the
driving experience fairly well. It was a good game, but Vectorbeam wasn't
selling enough to keep the assembly lines going. They needed something to
build and sell, soon.

I know this because I was in the room when Bill Cravens visited
Cinematronics, looking for something to build and sell, soon.
Cinematronics sold him Blitz/Barrier and we all laughed our asses off.
But soon after that a very strange thing happened. Cinematronics
purchased Vectorbeam, which at the time was building and failing to sell
Barrier. It wasn't until much later, after I had seen the legal documents
of the sale, that I was able to figure out this bizarre business move. It
was true that Vectorbeam was in trouble, and therefore a bargain, but why
purchase a losing company? Cinematronics didn't need product. The short
run on Sundance had me hurrying to finish Warrior, but that game was
ready to go with time to spare. Though it wouldn't see release for a long
time, Rob Patton had started War of the Worlds. Also, by then we had
hired Scott Boden, who was already up to speed and ready to start his
first project.

So, what did Cinematronics have to gain by buying Vectorbeam? Nothing.
Admittedly, the company did gain Tailgunner, but it didn't need it.
Cinematronics shut the doors on Vectorbeam as soon as they finished
building the game I had developed at Cinematronics, Warrior.
Cinematronics may not have had anything to gain from the purchase of
Vectorbeam, but Jim Pierce and Papa Tom Stroud were set to gain plenty -
Larry Rosenthal's patents. They had been paying (or were supposed to
pay) a licensing fee to Larry for every game sold. Now they wouldn't have
to. But it gets better. Jim and Papa Tom purchased the patents under
their own names, not Cinematronics. Now every time a game shipped,
Cinematronics had to pay them, personally, as did other companies that
later licensed the technology.

I didn't learn about this until months later. So let's go back to a week
or so after the purchase, when Papa Tom's son Tommy had taken charge, and
I was tasked with evaluating Vectorbeam's software assets. I flew up to
Oakland with some of the Cinematronics techs. This was when I first met
Dan Sunday, saw the game that was to become Tailgunner, and the demo that
inspired Star Castle. The spaceship shooter that was near completion (and
might have saved Vectorbeam if it had been finished in time) became
Tailgunner when Tommy Stroud had Dan and Larry reverse the moving
starfield. This was a clever decision that gave the game a stronger sense
of purpose and set it apart from the "attack" POV that had been around
since Atari's Starship. Dan and Larry had designed the game so that the
player lost a "life" whenever an enemy ship managed to escape the
player's shots. Okay, going forward or backward didn't make a lot of
difference, but to my mind the "miss a ship, lose a life" game play is a
defensive position, not an attacking one. I'm attacking and I miss a
ship, so what - just one less dead. We'll swing around and kill him
later. But if I'm the battle cruiser's first line of defense and an
attacker gets by me, we're all in trouble. I'm not knocking the original
version, but wanted to give Tommy Stroud this tiny bit of credit.

On that first visit of mine, I asked Dan what else they were working on
and he showed me an odd demo. On the screen was a Space War type ship
surrounded by a couple of rotating rings of rectangular blocks. The
player controlled this ship, and the rings moved as the ship moved. What
I saw in addition to that was a flock of what looked like giant
snowflakes. These moved towards the player's ship with increasing speed.
When a "snowflake" collided with a brick, the brick disappeared.
Eventually, enough bricks were knocked out and enough snowflakes got
through to destroy the player's ship. The End. Game Over. That's what I
saw. I tried to talk Dan into staying on, but he said he planned to quit
and go back east as soon as he finished work on Tailgunner.

Over the next few days I thought about the revolving rings. The game play
of the demo wasn't very good, since eventually the player would be
overwhelmed by sheer numbers - no real defense strategy except rotate and
shoot like hell. Worse, because of the size of the rings, if the player
moved the ship to attack or dodge, it was likely that he would move the
shield blocks right into the attacking "snowflakes." So, I figured we got
Tailgunner out of the deal and let it go at that.

Because Warrior was ready to go and Vectorbeam needed product fast,
Cinematronics decided to build it at Vectorbeam and sell it as a
Vectorbeam product. Once Tailgunner was finished, it would be built and
sold through Cinematronics. My contribution to that piece was limited to
designing the cabinet with its blue Plexiglas and the cabinet artwork,
which was executed by Rick Bryant.

My only other contribution was subtractive. I made one more trip to
Vectorbeam. When I got there Rosenthal was working with Dan Sunday on
Tailgunner. They were adding the old Space War starfield to the
background and Dan's initials at the bottom of the screen. Regardless of
motive, these were bad things to do for one simple reason - Larry's board
had a watchdog circuit that reset the program counter to zero if it
wasn't hit every certain fraction of a second. This was used to prevent a
runaway program
from letting the cathode ray shoot the side of the display tube. (Bad
mojo, believe me.) This scheme also initialized the program counter. The
program counter would usually start up at zero, but nothing in the
hardware guaranteed that it would. If it came up at some random value, in
a very short time the watchdog would reset it to zero. Sometimes the
counter would start inside a bogus loop that hit the watchdog
continually, but that was very rare and could be fixed by turning the
machine off and back on again.

Every moment of frame time was precious. How much we could draw on the
screen was based on the worst case. We had to hit that damn watchdog and
we couldn't do it while a line was being drawn. If something on the
screen wasn't one hundred percent necessary to gameplay, it had to go,
and so went the additional stars and Dan's initials. I was sorry to have
to delete his initials because giving credit is very important to me.
Initially, it was for technical reasons like this (not enough memory was
another) that we designers weren't allowed to put our names on the
screen. But that continued long after this technical problem was fixed.
My first Gottlieb game, Reactor, was the first coin-op game to have the
designer's name on the screen, and I only got that because I was
freelance and negotiated it into my contract. The other Gottlieb
developers weren't as fortunate.

Back at Cinematronics I had started work on Rip-Off, but Scott Boden
still needed a project. Soon, I came up with a way to make Dan and
Larry's shield of rings work. I put the enemy inside of the rings and
anchored it to the center. The player would have a free moving ship, much
like those in Space War. The player's goal was to shoot through the rings
and hit the enemy. This was made much more interesting by the fact that
the enemy's shots, very accurate and deadly, could not pass existing ring
segments. This meant that by shooting out the shield, the player was
shooting away the one thing that was protecting him from that nasty gun
in the center. I cut the shield segments down to lines instead of blocks
(fewer unnecessary lines) and added more rings. The player scored points
by hitting and destroying ring segments and other enemy bits and pieces.
A hit on the central cannon resulted in an extra life. Besides the
central cannon, danger to the player came from "space mines" that
originated in the center and then hopped outwards from ring to ring,
giving the player some time to anticipate their approach. Destroying a
ring segment that held a mine would free the mine to float towards the
player's ship. It would continue to seek the player until it was
destroyed or had timed out. Whenever a complete ring was destroyed, a new
ring was regenerated from the center and other inner rings moved outwards
to fill the gap. You can see at work here an attractive tension between
the player's motivation to shoot and score, and the fact that his success
made it easier for the enemy to destroy him.

Except for the rotating shield rings and a "player" in the center, not
one of these game elements was present in the demo I had seen at
Vectorbeam, and even those were altered substantially in form and
function. No effort was ever made to examine or even save the demo code.
And remember what I said about non-functional playfield elements? For
Warrior I had used a half-silvered mirror to superimpose playfield art on
the screen. For Starcastle I came up with the idea of the colored screen
overlays to highlight the rings. Oh, yeah, did I mention that I designed
the cabinet art (executed by Rick Bryant) and named the thing too? Scott
Boden wrote every single line of incredible, economic and elegant code,
and invented many small features that helped add up to the game
Starcastle. That is how Star Castle was developed. Period.

When Vectorbeam finished its run of Warrior, the doors were shut. Exidy
purchased the rights to build the sit-down version of Tailgunner, which
was
known as Tailgunner II. As far as the game business is concerned, that was
the end of Vectorbeam and Larry Rosenthal.

Tailgunner did well, but not as well as other games. This was not because
it wasn't a good game, but because of the failure of the analogue
joystick. Chosen by the original Vectorbeam techs, it used a conductive
plastic material instead of wires and brushes. This made it extremely
durable, a very important feature for an arcade game. (On the plane
flight back from Oakland, we stomped on the sample we were given. We
couldn't hurt the damn thing. It was a very cool little joystick.)
However, what the manufacturer hadn't told anyone was that after x number
of movements of the stick, the plastic lost its conductive qualities. For
other applications, that had been no problem, but for a video game that
ate up about a zillion moves a day? As a result, many fewer units were
sold than might have been, since the game would die at unpredictable
times and the stick had to be replaced on a frequent basis. The sit-down
version used a more rugged conventional joystick.

MY LIFE AFTER VECTORBEAM AND CINEMATRONICS
My next game, Rip-Off was the first two player cooperative video game. In
June and July of 1980 it was rated fourth in RePlay magazine, headed only
by Asteroids, Galaxian and Space Invaders. In October of that year it was
still rated fifth in Playmeter. Rip-Off was still being built and sold
after I had finished Armor Attack and had left the company. I worked
briefly for Gremlin/Sega before moving to Chicago in October 1981. There
I did three games under contract to Gottlieb/Mylstar, Reactor (Dave
Thiel, sound), Insector and Screwloose. Only Reactor was built, but it
was done in time and earned enough to jump start that pinball company's
video division. This was 1981-1983, and the video game business was about
to go down the toilet. The rest is an even longer story, but it doesn't
include vector games.

------------------------------------------------------------

I was prompted to write this history of Cinematronics and Vectorbeam by
the appearance of these claims by Dan Sunday, a programmer at Vectorbeam
who did, in fact, design and program Tailgunner with Larry Rosenthal. I
was going to refute all of his most outrageous assertions in the text,
but some just didn't fit in. Below are direct refutations of some of his
statements in correspondence to Zonn.

Memory sucks, and I don't blame Dan for getting his facts wrong. But I
care a lot about the history of our industry, especially my own
contributions. Not just because of ego, but because the pride in the work
we did is about all most of us got out of it.

Tim Skelly
May 24, 1999

>When Larry sold VB, for 2 million dollars, Cinematronics said
>they would keep me on as a programmer, but it was a big let
>down for me at the time after helping make VB a winning
>company and hoping for better.

This sentence about leaving Vectorbeam is especially peculiar. The 2
million dollar purchase price was a fire sale. Larry Rosenthal had to
have put at least that much into the physical plant alone. Given that the
sale of 2,000 games (a number Speed Freak should have been able to reach)
would equal that amount in net profit, was selling for 2 million a
tempting offer that couldn't be refused? It's very hard to believe that
Vectorbeam was a "winning company" based on a sale price of $2,000,000.
Also, what does Sunday mean by "A big let down" and "hoping for better"?
Did he expect to be made president or something?

>Next was Speed Freak which was more of a success. Then
>Tailgunner which was the third rated game that year (after
>Pac Man and Space Invaders I recall), and was a very big
>success. That was the game the resulted in Cinematronics
>making an offer to buy Vectorbeam from Larry, and he
>accepted and left.

Wow, where to start? Speed Freak was Vectorbeam's one successful game. In
fact, it may have been the only one manufactured in greater than test
quantities. This Tailgunner stuff is dead wrong, just based on the dates
and events at that time. Tailgunner was manufactured at Cinematronics and
sold under the Cinematronics name. This occurred AFTER the purchase of
Vectorbeam. Given the animosity between the two firms and simple business
practices, I can't think of anything less imaginable than Vectorbeam
calling Cinematronics and saying "Hi, guys! We've got this game that
looks like it's going to be a huge hit. Would you like to come up and see
it? If you like it, we'll sell you the company!" This is made even more
ridiculous by Sunday's own claim that Vectorbeam was a "winning company."
If it was so "winning" why would they be looking to sell?

As for Dan's recollection of Tailgunner's rankings in the polls, it would
be rather unlikely that Pac-Man would have been beating Tailgunner. Not
because Tailgunner was that good, but because Pac-Man wasn't manufactured
until 1981 -- more than a year after the release of Tailgunner! Space War
might have had "legs" like that, but definitely not Tailgunner.

>There was an electrical tech, Sid, who did all kinds
>of stuff. Eventually, when Exidy bought Vectorbeam
>(you knew that, right?), Sid programmed Armor Attack
>(I think that's what it was called) with a helicopter.

Exidy may have eventually purchased the Vectorbeam facility after
Cinematronics finished shipping Warrior. This would make some sense,
given that Exidy licensed the rights to build a sit-down version of
Tailgunner, Tailgunner II. However, it would have just been the physical
plant they purchased. Not name, not product. This guy Sid programmed
Armor Attack, eh? Nice trick since he would have been out of a job in
1981, when I finished designing and programming that game.

In the final summer I also had a summer student (CS major from Berkeley)
working for me. He went back to school.

So, now, was Dan Sunday the only programmer at Vectorbeam as he claims,
or did he have help from this guy Sid, or maybe this summer student? I'm
getting petty now, but if Sunday is going to make claims as outrageous as
these, he had better get his story straight.

>Now, the game potential was clearly there, but
>marketing an adult game to arcades filled with
>minors was not a good idea. So, the sperm became
>space ships, and the egg became a Star Castle.
>This was how Star Castle was conceived. To
>balance the game difficulty, we came up with the
>idea of rotating rings of bricks that had to be
>blown away. We had this working when i left, but
>i didn't stay long enough to see Star Castle
>finished. However, i consider it one of the games
>that larry and i created. I don't know who took
>credit for it in the end.

I doubt Dan Sunday has ever even played Star Castle, which, by the way,
was not named until Scott Boden and I finished working on it, sometime
well after Sunday's departure to the east. I concede that I lifted the
ring/shield idea, but past that his description of gameplay bears no
resemblance to the final product whatsoever. Like space War, Oops was a
two player simultaneous game. Star Castle was one player trade-off. The
object surrounded by rings in Star Castle was a computer controlled
object fixed in the center. In Oops it was a player ship that was free to
move around the screen. In Oops there is also a flock of attacking
objects controlled by another player. There is nothing remotely like that
in Star Castle. The list of game elements not found in Oops goes on and
on.

---END---
Received on Tue May 25 21:32:00 1999