So who *really* did the old Midway videos?
JWE134
I was talking to an ex-operator the other day and he mentioned that his
brother used to work for Midway in the late 70's. He also revealed to me
that Midway never developed any of their coin-op video games (except
for maybe 3 or 4) but were done by outside guys like Dave Nutting and
Marvin Glass. Others were the usual Japanese licenses like Taito (Space
Invaders, Blue Shark,etc.), Namco (Galaga, Pac-Man, etc.) and Data East
(Burgertime, etc.). It's shocking to hear this because for years I thought
Midway developed most of their games. Really doesn't make sense that
they recently snuffed out the Atari brand; at least Atari developed most
of their coin-ops themselves. Can anyone shed more light on this?
Al Kossow
>
> brother used to work for Midway in the late 70's. He also revealed to me
> that Midway never developed any of their coin-op video games (except
> for maybe 3 or 4) but were done by outside guys like Dave Nutting and
> Marvin Glass.
Sounds right to me. I know Dave Needle did Space Encounters, and Jay Fenton
wrote several of the 8080 B&W games for Nutting.
jrok
>
>Atari out sourced many games also.. Food Fight, Dig Dug, Kangaroo, Quantum, and
>Pole Position where out sourced to name a few...
yep. when it comes down to it Namco made all the really good ones for
Atari and Midway ;-)
-James ( donning flame proof suit )
----------------------------------
JrokLand http://www.jrok.com
----------------------------------
P L
public.
SmartPartl
Pole Position where out sourced to name a few...
Paul !
Smart...@Aol.com
Visit my Arcade game collection web page!
http://members.aol.com/SmartPartl/retro.html
----Choplifter!/Dig Dug/Dracula/Frogger/Gyruss/Kangaroo/Playchoice/Popeye/Space
Harrier/Vs. Cocktail ----
Rhett James Barnes
> In article smart...@aol.com says...
> >
> >Atari out sourced many games also.. Food Fight, Dig Dug, Kangaroo,
Quantum, and
> >Pole Position where out sourced to name a few...
>
> yep. when it comes down to it Namco made all the really good ones for
> Atari and Midway ;-)
>
> -James ( donning flame proof suit )
>
>
> ----------------------------------
> JrokLand http://www.jrok.com
> ----------------------------------
So can anyone here answer the question I've had:
With a software company bidding out to multiple hardware companies, how
would a company like Namco know what platform to write the game for? From
my experience writing (bad) computer games back then, it seems that video
game programming was extremely hardware dependent; you had to take
advantage of every quirk of the hardware, and that every platform had very
different graphics hardware.
But I would have guessed that the hardward itself was proprietary to
the hardware manufacturerers, say Atari vs. Midway. Which would mean that
a software company would have a write a program for a particular
manufacturer.
Is this correct, or did Namco have a generic "Namco" game platform that
they wrote for, and then bid the game out a manufacturer who then went on
to produce the game whose hardware would actually be very similar to games
produced by other manufacturers?
What really made me start to wonder was seeing how close Atari DigDug
and Midway PacMan looked at startup. I didn't know whether this was
indicative of them having very similar hardware. Or maybe a better
example would be Sega Pengo and Midway PacMan, which I think really do
have very similar hardware?
But, say, I don't think any outside companies wrote software for the
Williams in-house designed hardware system (Def, StarG, 2048, Sin, etc),
and I don't think any other manufacturers produced games with similar
hardware.
Hmmm, does my question make any sense?
-Rhett
andy r
and were developed to keep Atari at bay. Midway, as far as I knew, made
very few games and was sort of the dumping ground for many games from
outsidethe USA to beat the tariffs on imported electronics. They were only
kept alive by the Bally merger because of the long term contracts they had,
and would have been allowed to go belly up when the gaming market crashed.
Andy
MacMan
> Williams in-house designed hardware system (Def, StarG, 2048, Sin, etc),
> and I don't think any other manufacturers produced games with similar
> hardware.
No. But people wrote stuff afterwards.
There is a lotto picker that runs on Defender and a sea battle game that
also runs.
Then of course all the Defender bootlegs.
Or maybe the lotto game and sea battle game were written for the bootlegs.
Cheers
MacMan
--
*Spam filter in effect - reply to ogopogo(at)zip.com.au
Al Kossow
cryor...@yahoo.com (Rhett James Barnes) wrote:
> how
> would a company like Namco know what platform to write the game for?
They wrote the games for their OWN hardware.
Mitchell Patenaude
andy r <andyr@*no spam*ntsource.com> wrote:
>Actually, I thought FF, and some other game were the results of a lawsuit
>and were developed to keep Atari at bay.
Food Fight and Quantum were designed for Atari by General Computer Corp.
as part of lawsuit settlement. GCC had made a speed-up chip for Missile
Command, and Atari took issue with that. As part of the settlement with
Atari, GCC had to make two games for Atari, and Quantum and Food Fight
were the result.
You'll notice though, that Quantum is considerably different from any
other Atari vector. It was the first to use the Motorola 68000 series
processor, and it was the first (and only to my knowledge) vector game
to achieve solid object (probably because of the extra CPU cycles
available.) I don't believe it used the Atari mathbox or the vector
state machine, but I could be wrong. I don't really know much about FF,
and have never really enjoyed the gameplay, but I'll always wonder if
Quantum failed because of lack of support from within Atari (the "not
invented here" syndrome.)
-- Mitch
--
-- Mitch Patenaude Sr. Consultant, Professional Services
mit...@macromedia.com Macromedia eBusiness Solutions Group
m...@sonic.net (personal) (formerly Andromedia Inc.)