It was basically boy meets girl, and they chase each other, and then they find true love. That’s where I thought of the three animations. It was a long drive, and I’m in the car with my wife, and just thinking. I remember driving to a friend’s wedding. Horowitz: Then I did the intermission animations. Golson: I remember Chris on the piano there at the house figuring out the music for the attract mode and for all of the intermissions for all the cartoons. I did all the sound effects for the whole game.
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Reverse-engineering the sound generator was pretty much impossible, but I just played around, substituting in values trying to get a feel for what changed if I put a 6E here instead of a 24. The first thing I did was work on sounds. “It was basically boy meets girl, and they chase each other, and then they find true love.” I knew nothing about microprocessors, or video, or anything.
Doug said he’d be able to pay me no salary, but my wife made enough to support us.īy the time I joined, they had already made the mazes. Horowitz: I, unlike everyone else at GCC, actually graduated from college in 1979.
We kept playing with them until we liked them. They were originally designed on graph paper, then implemented and tried out. It took a good bit of time to create interesting ones that would be challenging for people and not have the monsters get trapped or stuck. Macrae: The maze design was being done carefully to help prevent areas where you could get dead spots and hide from the monsters. Living and working in close but comfortable quarters in the relative isolation of a house up a wooded hill in Wayland, the young crew set out to implement its planned improvements to Pac-Man. Doug was married, but he was there pretty much all the time. Golson: I remember times where I’d come downstairs in my bathrobe, but that’s what we did. The other guys, they’d come down at like 10 or 11 in their pajamas, go have breakfast, then see how I was doing. Horowitz: I would just come in, park myself at my emulator, and start coding. Steve Golson at a TRS-80 Model II computer during Super Missile Attack’s development. The problem became if a game lasted longer than three minutes, the quarter count would go down, or if it wasn’t being played 17 hours a day because people didn’t like it as much, and were not standing in line to play it, the quarters went down. If you do the math on that, that’s one quarter every three minutes on 17 hours a day. Macrae: When we first got them, our Missile Command games on the MIT campus were pulling in roughly $600 a week. And their thinking gravitated to Atari’s Missile Command, one of the most popular games of the early 1980s. So they did what any clever MIT student would do in that situation: confront the problem with mathematical precision. As arcade operators themselves, they had a direct financial stake in making the games more interesting.
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Macrae and Curran’s arcade route–a series of machines they owned and operated both for their own profit and for the benefit of students–quickly expanded to three dorms, but they soon had trouble with declining revenues as people began to master the games. Kevin Curran (left) and Doug Macrae during the development of Super Missile Command Steve Golson is in the background at the computer.
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