Curious Video Game Machines: A Compendium of Rare and Unusual Consoles, Computers and Coin-Ops

CHAPTER 1

How to Make a Wargame out of Calculators

(Kimtanktics, 1977)

Kimtanktics, a wargame machine made by Chris Crawford in 1977. (Chris Crawford)

Video games are easy to make nowadays. Actually, forget I said that – they are still fearsomely complicated beasts, especially when it comes to big-budget blockbusters. Yet thanks to the proliferation of powerful and simple to use development tools, like GameMaker, Unity and Media Molecule’s Dreams , almost anyone can slap together a functioning video game with little or no previous experience.

That wasn’t always the case though. Back at the dawn of the microcomputer era, making a game meant not only learning the arcane computer languages of the time, but also often building the machine yourself from a kit. And in the case of Kimtanktics, it meant cobbling together custom hardware from assorted calculators and capacitors to run the first ever wargame on a home computer.

Chris Crawford, the man behind Kimtanktics, is something of an industry legend. After teaching himself how to program, he landed a job at Atari in 1979 and went on to create classic games like Eastern Front (1941) for Atari’s home computers. As a freelancer in the 1980s he created the Cold War-inspired Balance of Power for the Apple Macintosh – one of the first ‘serious’ video games – and he later founded the world-famous Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 1987, which continues to be a Mecca for programmers across the globe. He has gained a reputation as an engaging public speaker, first when he acted as something of a software evangelist for Atari – explaining to groups of developers how they could get the most from Atari’s machines – and later when giving memorable talks at GDC.

Crawford says he first encountered computers in the late 1960s, when he was still at high school. His father was working as a civilian contractor on an air force base, and he took him to work one day to show him the giant IBM mainframe they had there. ‘And basically he said, I’ve got work to do, so why don’t you play with this?’ recalls Crawford.¹. ‘So I played with it, and I thought it was great fun.’ Over the next few months, Crawford taught himself the FORTRAN programming language, and when he left for college, he used the institution’s computers whenever he could.

Computers as big as a car

Mainframe computers had been around since the 1950s, with early models utilising vacuum tubes, and later ones relying on transistors. But they were astronomically expensive: the room-filling IBM System/360 Model 75, for example, cost upwards of $2.2 million when it launched in 1965.² As such, only large companies and institutions tended to use computers, and very few people would encounter them in their daily lives. Crawford was one of the lucky few, although he found that getting access to these rare and expensive machines could prove difficult. After a year of community college in Sacramento, he carried on his physics studies at the University of California, Davis, where the computers were worked day and night. Students’ access to them was mostly limited to dropping off programs made up of punch cards for the computer engineers to run through the machine. ‘Typically the turnaround time would be two to six hours,’ says Crawford. ‘They gave you a little numbered receipt and took your cards, and when you came back the cards would be in a cubby hole with the paper output wrapped around them.’

After completing his bachelor’s degree at Davis in 1972, Crawford went on to do a master’s in physics at the University of Missouri, where the computers were similarly overworked. He became fascinated with these mysterious, enormous and incredibly expensive computing machines. ‘I realised I had no idea how computers work,’ he says. ‘I was using them to do all sorts of scientific computation, but I didn’t actually know what was going on inside them. And that just bothered me.’ This incessant curiosity, the need to understand how things work, would become a central tenet of Crawford’s entire career. Later on, he would become fascinated with everything from evolution to linguistics, obsessively studying any ideas that interested him and often ploughing those ideas into new game concepts. Before coding Balance of Power in 1984, he spent the best part of a year learning everything there was to know about Cold War politics, and would even go on to publish a lengthy book about the geopolitical principles behind the algorithms used in the game.³ But in the mid-70s, computers themselves, and their obscure inner workings, were his first objects of obsession.

After completing his master’s degree in 1975, Crawford moved to Nebraska to take up a job teaching physics at Platte Technical Community College in Columbus. Suddenly he found he was in a position to explore his interest in computers more fully: he now had much more free time on his hands after completing his studies, and Platte’s computers were available for him to tinker about with once the college staff left at around 5pm. He quickly began a new routine where he would go home to have dinner with his wife, then rush back to the campus to spend the evening playing around with the college’s IBM 1130. This was a small and affordable computer that was designed for use by engineers, scientists and mathematicians,⁴ although the terms ‘small’ and ‘affordable’ are relative here. The 1130 was still the size of a desk (rather than a car), and it cost a not inconsiderable $32,000 at launch in 1965, the equivalent of around $267,000 in 2021.

Wargy

As well as computers, Crawford was into board games – or more specifically, wargames. ‘I’d been playing board games from high school,’ he says, ‘Through my college years I didn’t play very often, but I did continue, and even in graduate school I would occasionally take a little time to play a game.’ While he was at the University of Missouri, he had met a student who was ambitiously attempting to recreate the wargame Blitzkrieg by Avalon Hill on the university’s computer. Crawford never found out whether that student succeeded, as he lost touch with him after leaving Missouri, although he thinks it would have been unlikely owing to the complexity of Blitzkrieg and the relatively feeble computing power of the university’s mainframe. But the idea of creating a computer wargame stayed with him. ‘I thought about it off and on, and I began to get some ideas,’ he says. ‘So I started putting them into play, writing software that could handle the various problems. The biggest problem at first was being able to calculate the geometry of a hex grid – but I worked on it, and I solved it. And once I’d solved it, I realised that if I can solve that problem, I bet I can solve some of the other problems, too. So I went to work.’

Crawford spent much of 1976 coding a game he called Tanktics on the IBM 1130 at Platte College. The aim was to manoeuvre a team of tanks over a hex-based grid to hunt down and destroy a rival group of tanks controlled by the computer. But the 1130 didn’t have anything as fancy as a screen; instead, the entire game worked using an IBM Selectric typewriter, with moves being printed out on a continuous roll of paper.

Crawford soon got a chance to demonstrate Tanktics at the brilliantly named Wargy convention, a wargame meet-up at Platte that he had organised himself and advertised in a wargaming magazine. Around 20 people from across Nebraska came to play traditional board games, but Crawford recalls that he also took a few attendees off into the computer room to demonstrate Tanktics. ‘They thought it was fabulous,’ he says, ‘although it was difficult to beat.’ Crawford had shown it was possible to create a wargame on a computer, but the limitations of the desk-sized IBM 1130 were obvious. To take Tanktics to the next level, he would need to join the micro revolution.

The start of the 1970s saw the invention of the microprocessor, which led to a radical transformation of the computer industry. For the first time, the many transistors that make up a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) could be packed into a single chip, meaning the size of computers could be dramatically reduced. Importantly, they could also be made far more cheaply.

The Intel 4004 from 1971 is widely considered to be the first microprocessor, and the technology was quickly refined and improved by Intel and rival companies like MOS and Motorola. By the middle of the decade, various home computers had begun to find their way onto the market, often in kit form. Early kits, like the SCELBI and Mark-8 from 1974, used the very basic Intel 8008 microprocessor, the successor to the breakthrough 4004. But the US microcomputer boom really began in 1975 with the Altair 8800, which used the more advanced Intel 8080 microprocessor.

Even so, the Altair was extremely limited in its capabilities, and still cost a whopping $439 in kit form, the equivalent of around $2,200 in 2021. ‘It was terribly expensive and really gutless,’ says Crawford. Instead, he found himself lusting after a rival, much less famous computer. ‘By accident I stumbled onto this thing about the KIM-1, and it was a much superior machine,’ he says. ‘So I saved up my pennies and bought myself one.’

Chris Crawford poses with a chainsaw. Never anger him. (Chris Crawford)

The KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor-1) from MOS Technology was released in 1976 and used the MOS 6502 microprocessor, which was not only more powerful than the Intel 8080, but also far cheaper. ‘The 6502 processor was the most advanced CPU at the time,’ says Crawford. ‘It ran at one megahertz, which was fast, and it had 1K of RAM, which was a lot by those standards. It had two PIAs (peripheral interface adapters), chips that were designed to talk to outside equipment. And best of all, it had circuitry to save and read programs on cassette recorders. It had everything.’ Indeed, the powerful 8-bit 6502 processor (or variants of it) would later be used in numerous popular consoles and computers, including the Commodore 64 and Atari VCS. Most importantly, the KIM-1 was relatively affordable: Crawford paid about $245 (around $1,000 today) for his KIM-1 in early 1977 – a fraction of the cost of the Altair 8800. But it was still a considerable amount of money – especially considering the bare bones nature of the machine, which was simply a naked circuit board. Cases were a luxurious extra.

The microcomputer revolution

Crawford wasn’t alone in splashing the cash. A generation of enthusiasts were embracing the new microcomputers, and in some ways it’s easy to see why. The technology that had been used to put a man on the moon, technology that until that point could only be acquired by those with access to many thousands of dollars, was now available to anyone with a couple of hundred bucks to spare. But these early microcomputers were extremely limited, only able to run very simple programs of little practical use. So once you’ve saved up your pennies to acquire a microcomputer, what do you with it?

‘Learn,’ is Crawford’s simple answer. Like many thousands of other hobbyists, he wanted to find out how these new and exciting machines actually worked, and he devoured information on them from wherever he could find it. ‘I read Adam Osborne’s book, An Introduction to Microcomputers, to learn how to program in machine code,’ he says. ‘And there were also the monthly magazines I subscribed to, BYTE and Kilobaud. But for the most part, I was learning everything just by trial and error.’ Legions of enthusiastic electronics amateurs across the United States were also devouring the wisdom of magazines such as BYTE and, like Crawford, for the most part these pioneers were working things out on their own, having little opportunity to collaborate with like-minded individuals. There were some community efforts, however, of which the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California, is probably the most famous. Its members included Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and the club’s monthly meet-ups are often cited as a vital crucible of innovation in the nascent world of personal computers. Indeed, the two Steves demonstrated the first Apple computer at a Homebrew meeting. But Menlo Park was too far away to visit from Nebraska, and with no computer clubs in his local area, Crawford was stuck with what knowledge he could glean from books and magazines.

After absorbing all of the computing knowledge he could gather, he decided to flex his newfound skills by creating a two-player version of Tanktics on the KIM-1. But considering the stripped-back nature of the machine, this was no easy task – it may have had an advanced processor, but the KIM-1 lacked seemingly essential components like a screen or keyboard. All it offered was a six-digit LED display and a 23-button numerical keypad, of the type you’d find on a pocket calculator. ‘I realised that I was going to require a lot of additional equipment,’ says Crawford.

To make his dream a reality, Crawford was going to have to turn his KIM-1 into a custom machine specifically designed to play one game: Kimtanktics. His first step was to beef up the power supply, and he also created a large custom case to shroud the KIM’s naked circuits. The wooden case, roughly around 70cm wide, had a slanted front with a lift-up lid made from red plexiglass, used so it was possible to still read the KIM-1’s LED display.

A peek inside Kimtanktics. The silver cylinder on the bottom is a huge capacitor, roughly the size of a Coke can. (Chris Crawford)

The Tiny Terminals that Chris made for Kimtanktics. The two rows of LED numbers reveal the number and grid co-ordinates of your tank, as well as the direction it’s moving. (Chris Crawford)

Then Crawford set about creating two custom controllers with LED displays, which he nicknamed the Tiny Terminals. ‘I bought two metal boxes that were designed to hold seven-segment LED arrays,’ he says. ‘The LEDs came in sets of eight digits, and there were lenses built into them to magnify the numbers – that’s how tiny they were. I stacked two of these on top of each other, so I had 16 digits, and I added some keypads from calculators. But then I had to interface to them – and that was a big job.’ It wasn’t possible to simultaneously interface to each LED, so instead Crawford used a process called strobing. ‘Each one was lit up for a fraction of a second, then the next one, and the next one, and so on. They were hit with a higher voltage and glowed very brightly for a few milliseconds, but it happened so fast that the eye would see them as continuously glowing.’ Crawford used a similar process for the keypads, where he would strobe one horizontal line of keys and then read all four vertical lines of keys to see if any of them got a signal, which would mean that the key had been pressed. To handle the interfacing of the Tiny Terminals, he added a second circuit board that was about the same size as the KIM-1 itself.

Over the course of 1977, Crawford managed to get Kimtanktics working and sought to constantly improve it, with his friend Mike Shepherd acting as the main play tester. The custom modifications Crawford had made meant the machine generated a lot of heat, necessitating the addition of two large heat sinks and a fan, and he also added an enormous capacitor roughly the size of a beer can. ‘Nowadays we use what are called switching power supplies, which are fairly smart and just switch power on and off as needed,’ he explains. ‘Back then though, these power supplies had to store up lots of charge during the alternating current cycle, so if you’re using a lot of current, you need a big capacitor. And these machines needed a lot of current.’

The first version of Kimtanktics had a fairly small map size owing to the KIM-1’s limited 1K of RAM. So at around the same time he moved back to California to take up a teaching job in Davis, Crawford bought a RAM expansion to boost Kimtanktics to the dizzy heights of 4K. He remembers that he had to do a little DIY soldering to get the roughly A5-sized RAM board to work as intended: ‘The kit came with a little photocopied insert saying, We made a mistake with the design and it would work better if you make these changes, so I had to add extra wires and resistors to fix the board.’

He even experimented with adding sound. Most early computers didn’t come with dedicated sound functionality, so Crawford says he got really excited when Texas Instruments released a new chip for sound effects, and decided he had to have one. ‘It had a library of about a dozen sound effects,’ he says, ‘so I wired up a board for that, and I rigged it so that when one player shot another player, you’d hear an explosion. But the output of this thing was too weak to actually send to a speaker – you had to put it through an amplifier, so I rigged a cable up to my stereo system.’ The debut of sound in Kimtanktics ended in comedy, however: Crawford had neglected to check the sound levels, and the first time he shot another player, the speakers emitted a room-shaking explosion sound that was so loud he fell out of his chair in fright.

Considering the limitations of the technology – and the simplicity of most video games at the time, which had evolved little beyond the bats and balls of Pong and Breakout – Kimtanktics was remarkably sophisticated. Each player controlled a team of eight tanks, and the key idea was to simulate the fog of war, so that you had limited information on where your opponent’s tanks were lurking. Both players were given a physical paper map made up of hexes, which they could use to mark the location of tanks with cardboard counters, and at the start of the game the computer would scatter the tanks across the grid. On each player’s controller, the top line of the display would show the number of the tank they were controlling, followed by its grid co-ordinates and a number from one to six to indicate which direction it was facing in. Meanwhile, the bottom line of the display was used to input orders, and players could cycle through each tank on their team to give orders to each one. ‘So if you press 1, 1, 2,’ says Crawford, ‘the tank would take one step in direction 1, another step in direction 1, and then a third step in direction 2. And if one of your tanks sees one of the other player’s tanks, then a little dot shows up on the decimal point along the bottom edge, indicating which number tank it is.’ The player could then press a button to bring up the enemy tank’s co-ordinates and fire a shot at it, with the winner being the one who can eliminate all of the enemy’s tanks. Charmingly, to stop players from taking a peek at their rival’s screen or map, Crawford would hang a blanket between them.

A page from the instruction manual for Kimtanktics that explains the meaning behind the rows of numbers on the Tiny Terminals. (Chris Crawford)

Real-time battles

The most impressive part of Kimtanktics – and its biggest advantage over its tabletop inspiration – was that it worked in real time rather than being turn-based, leading to some frantic keypad jockeying. And despite the lack of fancy graphics and the somewhat unusual control system, Crawford reckons that people adapted to the setup fairly easily. ‘I took it to wargaming conventions, and people were absolutely fascinated,’ he says. ‘Nobody had ever seen a wargame on a computer. The reactions ran from Good lord, I didn’t realise you could get a computer to do that to Well I knew it had to happen someday. I think the general view was: Yes, this was inevitable, yes, this is the future, I just didn’t expect it anywhere near this soon.’

However, it was a glimpse of the future that very few people got to see. Crawford exhibited Kimtanktics at several conventions, but since each match took a while to complete, only very limited numbers of people ever had the chance to play. And of course, there was only ever one Kimtanktics machine. It was revolutionary, a landmark achievement in video gaming, but it was only ever experienced by a tiny cabal of players in California.

One of the hexagon-based paper maps that players used to keep track of their tanks while playing Kimtanktics. (Chris Crawford)

Yet nothing stands still for long in the fast-moving world of video games. After spending much of 1977 and the early part of 1978 working on Kimtanktics, Crawford upgraded to a Commodore PET. The futuristic-looking PET had a built-in monitor, keyboard and tape deck, and was a far cry from the bare bones DIY aesthetic of the KIM-1, although it had the same 6502 processor at its core. Crawford quickly set about porting Tanktics to the new machine.

‘I sold the first commercial computer wargame on December 30th, 1978 to a lawyer from Woodland, California,’ Crawford says. ‘It had a big black and white printed map, cardboard counters, the software on a cassette and the manual, and they all went into a Ziploc bag.’ Most games were sold like this in the early days of home computers, with the creators sending out cassettes in plastic bags via mail order, or selling them to one of the few specialist stores that carried software. Crawford sold 150 copies of Tanktics on the PET, and went on to develop another wargame called Legionnaire featuring real-time battles between Romans and barbarians.

It was at this point that Crawford’s hobby would become his career, with his work on Tanktics helping him to land a job at Atari in 1979. Although it almost didn’t happen, he explains: ‘My wife saw an ad in the newspaper saying Computer Programmers: Make Your Own Games!, and there was a phone number. I called them, and it was a headhunter, and I arranged to come down for the interview. I brought copies of the games I had sold, and said, See, I did this game and sold 150 copies, and I did this game and sold 100 copies, I know how to do games. The guy was very impressed and said, You’ve got quite a résumé, Mr. Crawford. Tell me, how many years of experience do you have of programming? And I said, Well, I’ve been programming since I was in high school. And he said, No, professional, how many years have you had a job programming? And I said, "Well, I’ve never had a job programming, I’ve done it all on my own. And he said, Well, I’m sorry, but the client requires three years of experience as a professional programmer. And I said, But I’ve actually made and sold computer games! And he stood up and said, Thank you very much, Mr. Crawford Have a good day."

‘So I drove home. And when my wife called that evening, she said, Don’t worry, and she grabbed the Yellow Pages and looked up games. She said, Oh look, here’s something, Atari. I’ll call them in the morning. So she called the human resources people, and they said, Sure, come on over for an interview. So I came down, did the interview, and got the job quite easily. A few months later, I discovered that the job that the headhunter turned me down for was the job that I actually got All he did was cheat himself out of the fee.’

CHAPTER 2

Atari’s Forgotten Consoles

(Home Pong, Video Music, etc. 1975–77)

Atari’s Home Pong console. (Rees)

When it comes to Atari’s history, much gets written about the company’s breakthrough arcade games. Famously, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, working under the name Syzygy Engineering, designed the world’s first commercial arcade video game in 1971: Computer Space . It was strongly influenced by Spacewar! , a game created in 1962 by Steve Russell and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the university’s PDP-1 computer, and the Spacewar! code was widely shared over the years to come.

Bushnell and Dabney went on to form Atari, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972, and the company released Pong in the same year, to enormous success. A string of arcade hits followed, like Tank and Breakout, and then in 1977 the company released the Video Computer System (VCS) home console, which soon became a runaway hit. The name Atari became synonymous with video games (in the United States, at least), and the VCS – later renamed the Atari 2600 – sold an estimated 30 million units in its long lifetime, only being discontinued in 1992.

The story of Atari’s meteoric rise and precipitous fall has been told time and time again – and most people with even a passing interest in gaming would recognise a VCS/2600, or at least its iconic single-button joystick. But the VCS was far from Atari’s first console. In fact, by the time the VCS emerged from Sunnyvale, Atari had already released nearly a dozen different home machines. ‘I didn’t know of any of these things until I looked into it more in around 1995,’ says Karl Morris, author of We Love Atari (Zaffin Books, 2019), in reference to Atari’s ‘forgotten’ consoles.¹. ‘In Europe, we didn’t have any of this.’ The VCS may have become a success in various countries across the world, but most of Atari’s early home consoles never made it outside North America, and these obscure, curiously shaped oddities are mostly remembered only by dedicated collectors. ‘I love them,’ says Morris. ‘The design of them … they are really something out of the ’70s, for sure. They’re cute, there’s no doubt about it.’

Back to basics

To tell the story of Atari’s forgotten consoles, we need to go back to 1972 and the launch of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. It was the brainchild of Ralph Baer, who had been shopping a prototype of the console around to various companies for years. Eventually, Magnavox – a consumer electronics firm mostly known for their TVs – showed an interest in Baer’s baby, and offered to sell it exclusively in their outlets, casting it as a kind of expensive TV accessory.

At this time, games were hardwired rather than being based around a programmable chip that could be made to do whatever you wanted (that would come a few years later with the microprocessor revolution). If you take a peek inside the Magnavox Odyssey, you’re presented with a chaotic tangle of electronic components – nests of colourful diodes, capacitors and wires, without a microchip in sight. You can find an excellent explanation of the Odyssey’s analogue wizardry on David Winter’s PONG-Story website:² basically, along with the main board, there are several smaller boards or ‘modules’ that each handle a different aspect, like vertical sync and horizontal sync. One module, the ‘spot generator’, generates a rectangle on the screen. There are four of these spot generators – and that’s about all the Odyssey could do, generate four rectangles of varying parameters. But by presenting this limited range of objects in different ways, it was possible to create different experiences.

Although the Odyssey had a number of different game cards, these cards didn’t contain a game, per se – instead they ‘wirejumped’ the circuits on the Odyssey into a different configuration. If you imagine the Odyssey’s circuits as a maze, the game cards would shift the maze into a different pattern, causing the four rectangles to be displayed in different ways and to exhibit different behaviours.

The Odyssey also shipped with several plastic overlays that could be placed over the TV screen to provide different game backgrounds, and it came with a number of different board-game accessories, like dice, paper money and cards. In a game called Simon Says, for example, the screen overlay featured pictures of a boy, a girl, a dog