Commodore - A Company On The Edge by Bagnall Brian

Author:Bagnall, Brian [Bagnall, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0973864966
Publisher: Variant Press
Published: 2010-12-10T22:00:00+00:00

To properly launch the VIC-1001, it was important to have software that could demonstrate the capabilities of the new computer. Terakura himself had some software skills. “When I was in Japan I developed some games—very simple ones,” he recalls. “In Japan there were a few games but it wasn’t many as I recall.”

Tokai did not have to look far to find skilled programmers eager to develop quality software for the computer. He was familiar with the “groupies” who came to Commodore Japan after their classes ended to help out the engineers. “That was my hangout, and I was not alone,” says Satoru Iwata. “There were others there who also looked at those early computers, and thought the same thing I did: how could we play games on them?”[2] The programmers initially developed games for the PET computer, using the rubber-keyboard PET-2001 models they all owned. “We became friends, formed a club, and soon rented an apartment in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, where we began designing our own games,” recalls Iwata. Their initial games for the PET had been very disappointing compared to the games they played in the arcades.

In early 1980, Iwata was finishing up his two year program at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. “I don’t really remember how, but I managed to keep up with my class work and graduated from the institute,” he recalls.

On February 21, 1980, five of the groupies formed their own company. “That group of friends is what became the company known as HAL,” says Iwata.

Terakura remembers the period. “Iwata, who is now the head honcho of Nintendo, was working for HAL.”

Although Iwata was a young man, several of the programmers were still in high school. “In terms of the programmers, a number of them were just really young,” says Commodore software developer Andy Finkel. “There were a couple of senior guys so they weren’t entirely kids.”

The groupies were fixated with the PET 2001 computers, and the obvious similarities of the monitor housing and keyboard from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film, a super intelligent computer named the HAL 9000 controls a complex space station. The Japanese game programmers decided to name their company HAL Laboratory. “We thought that name was very cool,” says Iwata. “The name came from the computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

According to Iwata, the entrepreneurial instincts of the young programmers were not appreciated by his parents. “I left to become only the fifth full-time employee of HAL and when I told my father this, you can imagine, it was not the happiest moment in the history of my family,” he recalls.

When the young programmers saw that Commodore’s Yash Terakura was working on a small computer meant for video games, they knew where they wanted to spend their development efforts.

The programmers were particularly taken by a game called Pakkuman, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980. The Namco game featured a small yellow character that gobbled up dots and ate blue ghost monsters.

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