CINEMATRONICS

HISTORY part 2

Cinematronics, Me and Vectorbeam

Speed Freak was a step above other driving games of that time, although like others, the player's point of view (and therefore, car) didn't rotate. Instead, the trick was to slide back and forth like a stick shift moving dropping through a slotted board. Even so, this simulated the driving experience fairly well. It was a good game, but Vectorbeam wasn't selling enough to keep the assembly lines going. They needed something to build and sell, soon.

I know this because I was in the room when Bill Cravens visited Cinematronics, looking for something to build and sell, soon. Cinematronics sold him Blitz/Barrier and we all laughed our asses off. But soon after that a very strange thing happened. Cinematronics purchased Vectorbeam, which at the time was building and failing to sell Barrier. It wasn't until much later, after I had seen the legal documents of the sale, that I was able to figure out this bizarre business move. It was true that Vectorbeam was in trouble, and therefore a bargain, but why purchase a losing company? Cinematronics didn't need product. The short run on Sundance had me hurrying to finish Warrior, but that game was ready to go with time to spare. Though it wouldn't see release for a long time, Rob Patton had started War of the Worlds. Also, by then we had hired Scott Boden, who was already up to speed and ready to start his first project.

 

As told by Tim Skelly

On that first visit of mine, I asked Dan what else they were working on and he showed me an odd demo. On the screen was a Space War type ship surrounded by a couple of rotating rings of rectangular blocks. The player controlled this ship, and the rings moved as the ship moved. What I saw in addition to that was a flock of what looked like giant snowflakes. These moved towards the player's ship with increasing speed. When a "snowflake" collided with a brick, the brick disappeared. Eventually, enough bricks were knocked out and enough snowflakes got through to destroy the player's ship. The End. Game Over. That's what I saw. I tried to talk Dan into staying on, but he said he planned to quit and go back east as soon as he finished work on Tailgunner.

Over the next few days I thought about the revolving rings. The game play of the demo wasn't very good, since eventually the player would be overwhelmed by sheer numbers - no real defense strategy except rotate and shoot like hell. Worse, because of the size of the rings, if the player moved the ship to attack or dodge, it was likely that he would move the shield blocks right into the attacking "snowflakes." So, I figured we got Tailgunner out of the deal and let it go at that.

So, what did Cinematronics have to gain by buying Vectorbeam? Nothing. Admittedly, the company did gain Tailgunner, but it didn't need it. Cinematronics shut the doors on Vectorbeam as soon as they finished building the game I had developed at Cinematronics, Warrior. Cinematronics may not have had anything to gain from the purchase of Vectorbeam, but Jim Pierce and Papa Tom Stroud were set to gain plenty - Larry Rosenthal's patents. They had been paying (or were supposed to pay) a licensing fee to Larry for every game sold. Now they wouldn't have to. But it gets better. Jim and Papa Tom purchased the patents under their own names, not Cinematronics. Now every time a game shipped, Cinematronics had to pay them, personally, as did other companies that later licensed the technology.

I didn't learn about this until months later. So let's go back to a week or so after the purchase, when Papa Tom's son Tommy had taken charge, and I was tasked with evaluating Vectorbeam's software assets. I flew up to Oakland with some of the Cinematronics techs. This was when I first met Dan Sunday, saw the game that was to become Tailgunner, and the demo that inspired Star Castle. The spaceship shooter that was near completion (and might have saved Vectorbeam if it had been finished in time) became Tailgunner when Tommy Stroud had Dan and Larry reverse the moving starfield. This was a clever decision that gave the game a stronger sense of purpose and set it apart from the "attack" POV that had been around since Atari's Starship. Dan and Larry had designed the game so that the player lost a "life" whenever an enemy ship managed to escape the player's shots. Okay, going forward or backward didn't make a lot of difference, but to my mind the "miss a ship, lose a life" game play is a defensive position, not an attacking one. I'm attacking and I miss a ship, so what - just one less dead. We'll swing around and kill him later. But if I'm the battle cruiser's first line of defense and an attacker gets by me, we're all in trouble. I'm not knocking the original version, but wanted to give Tommy Stroud this tiny bit of credit.

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