CINEMATRONICS

HISTORY

The collaboration was a huge success, but even though they were very happy with their share of the revenues from Space War, Pierce and Stroud were not so happy with their arrangement with Larry. 50 percent was (and continues to be) an outrageous share to go to a game developer. Also, in addition to his cut of the profits, Larry retained the application patents to his board, which he licensed to Cinematronics. This meant that he received additional cash for every game, Space War or otherwise, that Cinematronics manufactured using his technology. I am relatively sure of these details, but I never saw the contracts, only heard them discussed. However, later events would demonstrate that Rosenthal had maintained ownership of the patents.

 

My recollection of the sales figures on Space War was 30,000 units. This is not unreasonable given that the game was one of the top ten earners for almost three years, starting at number 1 for 1978 and ending at number 7 in July 1980. (Pac-Man would later break the 100,000 mark.) Based on manufacturing and sales figures at that time, a very reliable number for profit per unit on sales of upright coin-op games was $1,000 per game, net. Manufacturing costs were approximately $1,000 per unit and the games were sold to distributors for around $2,000 apiece. This, of course, varied with the desirability of the game, but given Space War's success, we can assume that it earned at least the minimum in profits. (Note: This $1,000 per unit figure was also used at Gremlin/Sega and Gottlieb/Mylstar during the time I worked for those companies, all the way through 1983.) If you do the math, you'll see that even without Larry's licensing "bonus" he should have made almost 15 million dollars from Space war. Even if I am off by a factor of ten, he still did pretty damn well for an individual in the early days of coin-op video games.

As told by Tim Skelly

This write up by Tim Skelly originally appeared on Vectorlist on May 25, 1999 courtesy of James Hague. 

 

To the best of my knowledge, while working for Vectorbeam, Dan Sunday,  with help from Larry Rosenthal, designed and programmed the game that  became Tailgunner. For absolute fact, I, Tim Skelly, designed and Scott  Boden programmed the game Star Castle for Cinematronics. The design for  that game incorporated a design element (revolving rings of shields)  created by Sunday and Rosenthal which I noted during the Cinematronics  takeover of Vectorbeam.

 

Okay, now the details of the whole damn Rosenthal/Cinematronics/Vectorbeam saga, based on hearsay, reliable witnesses, my own experiences and legal documents I have been privy to over the years. I will try to identify specific sources of information as I go.

 

 

Larry Rosenthal and Space War

 

Until Larry gets to Cinematronics this is just legend to me, but it all sounds reasonable and I have never heard a different version. From Larry's first contact with Cinematronics and up to the time I met him, my sources are Jim Pierce and Papa Tom Stroud, at that time the co-owners of Cinematronics.  Either while a student at MIT or shortly thereafter, Larry developed the TTL-based "vectorbeam" board and prototyped a coin-operated version of the famous MIT game Spacewar!. I was told by someone (I don't remember who) that Larry bought rights of

 

 

 

Tom Stroud

Jim Pierce

some kind to Spacewar! from the guy who is said to have first created it, so that game may not be in the public domain as has been suggested elsewhere. Larry took his prototype to just about every game company in the US, with an offer to split profits 50/50 with anyone who would build and distribute the game. This was an unheard of arrangement, and the industry reaction was a big fat NO.

Cinematronics and Me

 

I certainly had no 50% deal. My salary started at 15K a year and after three years had risen to 30k. I received 2 $1,000 bonuses. I've calculated that my games sold at least 59,000 units, total. Was I screwed? You do the math. Here are some events that I witnessed or was party to myself preceding Cinematronics' purchase of Rosenthal's and Cravens' company:

Like I said, the first thing I did was Starhawk, which I programmed first on legal pads in machine code, then on a teletype machine, then finally with Dennis Halverson's development software. It and Space War were the only 4K games. We immediately went to 8K for all future games. Jim Pierce designed the cabinet, which we later found had to have a cinderblock placed in the back or else it would tip forward onto the player! -- rather typical of Jim's design talents. The company that silkscreened the side graphics did the cabinet art. The indestructible joysticks, later used in Warrior as well, were handmade at Cinematronics.

 

Starhawk was enough of a success to keep the doors open, so I began my second game, Sundance. This game was an oddity in more ways than one. It had a vertical screen and a switch which could be set to display Japanese rather than English, the only game I ever did that had that feature. The controls were two matrixes of buttons (3x3, or 4x4. I don't remember which), one set per player. I would have to explain the whole game to tell you what they did and why. The biggest difference about this game was the addition of more levels of intensity for the vectors. This required a daughter board and lots of cut-and-jumpering. As a result, this game was very fragile and few lived long.

 

Larry Rosenthal and Me (a very short story)

 

I'll skip my humble beginnings and go straight to the day I interviewed for a job at Cinematronics in El Cajon, CA, just east of San Diego, sometime around May 1978. After talking to co-owner Jim Pierce, I was sent to the tech area to talk to Larry Rosenthal. There he showed me the "development system" he used to program Space War - a piece of plywood with the TTL board, some LEDs and buttons that allowed him to manually punch in Hex op-codes. That scared the hell out of me, but at least I knew how hex and machine code worked. Scarier was that my limited graphics experience had been with bit-maps. I knew next to nothing about vector displays. Larry didn't explain very much and answered very few questions. Whenever I mentioned our possibly working together he was evasive, so I figured I had failed the interview. I flew back to Kansas City, where I lived at the time, and waited to hear back from some other game companies. I was amazed when Jim Pierce called and told me to drive on out. I had the job!

 

After a fast packing job and a four day drive, I was shown to my office, which was the same tech area I had been interviewed in - except now it was empty except for some office furniture, a legal pad and a pencil. I met Jim and the rest of the Cinematronics employees, who informed me that during the four days I was on the road, Larry Rosenthal and Bill Cravens departed to start their own company in the Bay Area. Oh, yes, they took with them EVERYTHING that might have been necessary or useful for developing games using the vectorbeam board.  Cinematronics still had the legal right to use the board (as long as Larry got his licensing fee), but now they had nothing except me, a legal pad and a pencil to get them a new game to build and sell. Bill DeWolf and another couple of techs were there when I arrived, guys who mainly worked in testing and service, but who later did a great job with custom sound boards, controls and even the modifications to Larry's board that made the graphics in Sundance possible. Soon after I started, Dennis Halverson was hired to create a macro assembler that we ran on a DEC machine. Dennis handled only system stuff and utilities; he later wound up at Atari.

Obviously, things eventually worked out. I managed to crank out Starhawk in time for a winter game show in London. But what still angers me to this day besides being put on the spot like that, is the fact that more than a hundred employees were depending on a new game to maintain their livelihood, and I was clearly chosen as the guy who couldn't come up with one. I think you can see that, under the circumstances, there was no love lost between the Cinematronics and Vectorbeam camps.

 

Eventually, Larry worked his way down to Cinematronics, a company that had done a couple of cocktail knock-offs and was about to go under. This was at the time of Pong and its early cousins. Pong had no copyright protection, so there were many companies at that time that began by copying that game, right down to the circuit board.  Unfortunately, these companies, like Cinematronics, had nowhere to go from there and had to look for other sources of product.

Starhawk

Space Wars Warsoud

Somewhere around the time I was finishing Starhawk, we hired Rob Patton as a second game programmer. He stayed busy learning the system while I was working on Starhawk and Sundance. One day Jim Pierce walked into the lab with a Mattell handheld football game. This was the first handheld game and extremely popular, despite being incredibly simple, with just a few LEDs for a display. Jim thought we should turn it into a video game. I told him that it would certainly stink as a video game and would probably mean a law suit from Mattell. He forgot about it for a while, but when it became clear that Rob had run out of things to do, Jim talked me into letting Rob program it strictly as a learning exercise. That game was Blitz, later Barrier. To make Jim happy, we put it out on test. It did very poorly, to put it nicely, and we stuffed it in the closet.

I started work on Warrior, my one-on-one sword fighting game. Late at night, while waiting for code to compile, I'd go down to the production floor and set a new high score on peed Freak, the first Vectorbeam game to rise above the radar. On their breaks, the production crew would beat my score.

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