The Ultimate History of Video Games: from Pong to Pokemon and beyond...the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world by Steven L. Kent

Author:Steven L. Kent [Kent, Steven L.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2020-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

One of Tim Stamper’s first games, JetPac , was a major success by Sinclair standards. Nearly one million people owned Sinclair Spectrum computers in 1983, and ACG sold more than 300,000 copies of JetPac.

It was incredible penetration for a single product.

We had an advantage—we’d been working on an arcade product. We just took that expertise and transferred it directly to the Sinclair Spectrum.

—Chris Stamper

Toward the end of 1983, Hochberg visited Tokyo. While there, he saw a Famicom and instantly recognized it as the future of video games. He purchased a console and sent it to the Stampers to get their reaction.

The Stampers were not immediately impressed. Nintendo had not begun exporting Famicom from Japan at the time, and the Stampers were not convinced that they wanted to deal with the Japanese market. They preferred to work on computer games. At the time, it seemed as if computers were the only viable market for electronic games. With a little prodding from Hochberg, the Stampers agreed that they would design games for the Famicom system if Nintendo started shipping to the United States and Europe.

In order to make games for the new system, however, they needed to obtain system specifications, schematics, and a license to make games from Nintendo. As an arcade owner, Hochberg was familiar with Nintendo of America. He made an appointment with Minoru Arakawa and flew out to Redmond, Washington, to propose a partnership.

I contacted Nintendo and found out that they were not completely interested in sharing the technical specs with us. My question to Mr. Arakawa was, “Why?”

He said, “You have to prove that you have the technical expertise,” which was not a bad answer.

Chris spent a good deal of time, practically six months, reverse engineering the hardware and then proceeded to do for me an audiovisual display, very simple but utilizing graphic and other capabilities of the hardware that would show what we could do. We really weren’t interested in giving Nintendo a product; we were interested in giving Nintendo a view of what could be done.

When I sent that off to Nintendo, Mr. Arakawa said, “I like what I see. Now please do a game.”

But he still did not give us the technical specs at that point.

—Joel Hochberg

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