Release Date: October, 1973
Platform: Arcade
Genre: Maze
Developer(s): Atari
Publisher(s): Atari
Alrighty, finally I'm back from my break. It feels like quite an awfully long time, even though it's much shorter than previous breaks I've had. Probably because it wasn't that much of a break - I was sick for the entirety of my holiday and am still having some health issues. Anyway, that's enough about me - on to today's topic.
Now, who's ready for some controversy?
Video games have had no shortage of controversies over the medium's lifetime (it seems like there's more controversy than ever in current day.) But, there always has to be a first one, and I'm fairly sure this is it. A rather minor controversy in the grand scheme of video game controversies, to be sure, but it shows that developers were interested in doing some rather silly things with their games that would get them into trouble, even in these formative years.
Atari tended to be right at the forefront of most controversies early on in the industry's life. Lawsuits about copying Pong, terrible movie tie-in games, and Pac-Man. All with Atari at centre stage. It's been well-documented that there was a culture of excess at early Atari, including significant drug use (this has been admitted by staff,) which does provide a suitable explanation for some of the odd decision making at Atari.
Those above controversies occur much later in Atari's life. In 1973 was their first flirt with danger, coming in the form of Gotcha. Gotcha appears to have been born out of Atari's frustration with the voluminous Pong clones dominating the video game market throughout 1973. Despite being the originators of the idea, Atari only had roughly 10% of the market that year. Patents were filed to stop the clones, but came too late to have any effect. By 1974 most of the Pong clones were falling out of popularity anyway, thanks in part to Magnavox's Odyssey lawsuits, and probably in part to oversaturation. Atari were then able to get more of a foothold, as those lawsuits put many of their competitors out of business, but benefitted them quite nicely.
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| A flyer featuring Atari's 1972-73 selection of games. |
Atari's alternative solution to combat the Pong clones was to branch out from ball-and-paddle games. They already had done Pong Doubles as a sequel, and did Quadrapong through their sneaky fake competitor / subsidiary, Kee Games (a story for later.) Space Race, which I've already covered, falls into the same category as Gotcha, in being an alternative to Pong-style games, although it was also intended to fulfill a contract preceding Pong's creation. Gotcha, only Atari's fourth game, had no such contract needing to be fulfilled, and thus Atari were completely free to design the game as they pleased.
Once again, Al Alcorn was the chief designer for the game. The story goes that he was inspired by an error he saw occasionally in some Pong boards. This error in the circuit board would cause glitched numbers to appear all over the screen. In his eyes, the numbers created maze-like patterns, and so he modified what was a bug into a feature - not a first time occurrence at Atari. Alcorn made the numbers move, creating a moving maze, with pathways constantly opening and closing. Added to this were two characters, a chaser and chased, and Atari had Gotcha. The prototype design was finalised by Cyan Engineering's Steve Mayer, a recent acquisition of Atari that'll play a very important role in the company's future.
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| Gotta sell it somehow, right? |
Now this all seems relatively innocuous and non-controversial, and you'd be right about that. So where does the trouble come in? Well, it's not with the game itself, but rather the... unique cabinet that was designed for it. The design was done by a fellow by the name of George Faraco, who was at the time Atari's "product designer." There seems to be come conjecture at this point, but the story goes that either he, or someone else at Atari, had their mind firmly stuck in the gutter and thought that it would be funny if they had Gotcha use a "feminine" control scheme to contrast with the more "masculine" scheme of a joystick.
As a result, the first design of the Gotcha cabinet included as a controller a large pink/purple half-sphere. One looking at this controller can very easily make out what it was meant to represent, and as such Gotcha earned itself an infamous nickname - the "boob game."
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| The offending article. |
Adding to the controversy was the game's marketing. There's an infamous flyer featuring a man grabbing a woman who appears to be wearing a short dress with the appearance of a night gown. Alongside it is the cabinet with two of the pink controllers front-and-centre. What exactly Atari was trying to communicate here is anyone's guess. Were they trying to market Gotcha as a more "adult" game? Or just playing off of the suggestive controllers with the subtlety of an atomic bomb?
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| There are so many questions with this flyer. |
Regardless, Gotcha wasn't a very popular game. It was received poorly, and it sales weren't all that positive, either. Ralph Baer has it listed as selling 3,000 units. Of those 3,000 units, the majority ended up not using the controversial controllers, instead replacing them with cheaper, more conventional joysticks.
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| Non-pink cabinet. |
One more noteworthy thing to mention with Gotcha is that it's also the first game that experimented with true colour. Most arcade games through the early 70s that wanted colour did so through the use of cellophane overlays - the colour did not actually come from the game itself. Gotcha, however, actually had a true colour version produced, and is likely the first colour arcade game ever produced. It's quite rare, but cabinets of it do still exist in the wild. Back in 2016, a collector named Ed Fries acquired a PCB of colour Gotcha, restoring it to working order.
A quick word on the game itself. I did play it for the article, although I won't be scoring it. It's a fine little maze chase game that has some merit from the constantly changing maze. I could see it being fun. The sound is quite obnoxious, though. My thinking is that it could've potentially been more successful without the whole "boob game" thing hanging over it like a bad smell, and if its release were delayed till after the Pong craze ended in 1974.
Getting back into the process after the illness/holiday has been rough. Lots of work and lots of fatigue has been taking a lot out of me. So apologies if this article feels a little short and dry. There should be some more regularity come next week, and hopefully I'll be back to two articles a week then.
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