#027x: Gotcha - One Controversy, Coming Right Up

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.

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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

Prehistory IV: Mouse in the Maze & Tic-Tac-Toe

This is the fourth in a series of mini-articles on the early history of video games. The games featured here will not receive review scores, and thus will not appear on the Tier List. 

As the 1950s come to a close, there are two final, closely related games that I want to cover to close out the decade. Both games were developed for the same computer, and both utilise an early form of touch screen controls: the light pen. Since neither of them are playable I'll be covering them simultaneously (plus there isn't a whole lot to discuss with another tic-tac-toe game.) As a result, this article is likely to be shorter than the previous few.

Mouse in the Maze

Release Date: January, 1959

Platform: TX-0

Genre: Maze

Developer(s): Doug Ross, John Ward

Publisher(s): N/A

Tic-Tac-Toe

Release Date:  1959 (unable to find a more precise date)

Platform: TX-0

Genre: Board Game

Developer(s): Uncredited 

Publisher(s): N/A

Both Mouse in the Maze and Tic-Tac-Toe were developed for the TX-0 ("Transistorized Experimental computer zero") stationed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was an experimental computer, one of the first to make full use of transistors. Basically all previous computers utilised vacuum tubes, but the TX-0 was the first to do away with these tubes in favour of transistors. It's also one of the earliest adopters of magnetic-core memory. Thanks to this form of memory storage, the TX-0 boasted a huge memory capacity of... 64K! Well, it was huge for 1950s computer standards... The TX-0 was also quite important in the grander scheme of computing and gaming, as it is the direct ancestor of the PDP-1 minicomputer, the computer which the legendary Spacewar! was originally developed for. The whole PDP series of computers saw a significant amount of game development throughout the 60s, as we shall see later on in the Prehistory series.

But I digress, to the games at hand. What makes these two games worth mentioning? The most noteworthy feature is the utilisation of the light pen, a device that could be considered an ancestor of the modern stylus used for the touch screens of devices such as the Nintendo DS and 3DS. The fact we have what are effectively touch screen controls in 1959 is rather shocking to me. I would not have expected to see such technology appear this early in computing history. 

For Tic-Tac-Toe, the implementation is rather simple: playing against the computer, you would select the square you wanted to claim by touching it with the light pen. There's little information available for this game other than that. We don't know how the computer played, if it was perfect like OXO or dynamic like Relay Moe. We also don't even know who developed the program. I simply couldn't find any information beyond what I've presented here.

For Mouse in the Maze, the light pen implementation is a little different. Rather than filling in squares, you're removing them. Mouse in the Maze initially presents you with an 8x8 grid, and you create a maze by removing lines from the grid with the light pen. Once you've created a sufficiently devious maze, you'd place cheese somewhere in the maze and let the mouse loose to find it. The mouse automatically moves about the maze, checking for paths each square. Eventually, if it doesn't find the cheese it tires out, but it will remember the information from its first attempt for later expeditions through the maze. Amusingly, later versions of the game would replace the cheese with martinis, resulting in the mouse becoming progressively more drunk as its maze travels went on. Speaking of, this little mouse also technically features some frames of animation, too, with its little tail wagging behind it as it moves about. Cute. Technically, this would make Mouse in the Maze the first game to feature animation. 

But really, what Mouse in the Maze is is a sort of level creating software for testing artificial intelligence and less so a proper game. Granted, many games over the years have included level building tools, and level creation games would become quite popular in more recent years. Just ask the Super Mario Maker community (hey, that game used a touch screen too!) So perhaps Mouse in the Maze could be called the grand-daddy of all make-your-own-level tools / games. Regardless, it and the computer it was created on still stand as important footnotes in video game development.

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