Original subtitles

- Midway is the punk rock, you know.

They're like The Ramones or The Sex Pistols

of the video game industry,

the guys who are like,

"Oh, this is how you think we should do it?

"These are the rules that you think we should obey?

"Well, what if we go the other way?"

[music] [character screaming]

- What was the culture of Midway in the '90s?

And my take on it was aggressive.

- It's being, pushing the boundaries of maybe good taste.

- [Character] I love it.

[car screeching]

- I don't think that there a single gamer that exists

that never played a Midway game.

- They were the only company, in a lot of ways,

that could make fantastic sports games

that anyone could pick up and play.

[character yelling]

- It looked so real to me, that I was like,

Boop, you just killed me.

[character yelling]

- I remember thinking to myself, wow, I'm working with gods.

- We made great games.

And at one point, we led the world.

[gentle music]

- I call it like the Big Bang of the video game universe.

I mean, we want from blank screens

to very rudimentary games like Pong,

to all of the sudden, we've got Space Invaders,

Pac-Man, Donkey Kong.

You know, we came out with Defender.

- [Announcer] Within months of appearing on the market

in 1981, his game Defender shot to the top and stayed there.

For Williams, the company that owned it,

his idea was worth $100 million.

- Well, it's sort of the, it's the ultimate fantasy

where you are the only force left between evil and good.

- You'd go into a place,

I mean, there'd be eight Defenders.

People would be standing in line, you know,

three or four, five deep.

It was a golden era.

But then we got to '84.

All this great stuff got kind of buried

under like this stinking pile of shitty clones,

and you know, six-week Atari 2600 ports.

- Anything was selling at the time,

as far as the home market was concerned.

And people started just shoving garbage out the door.

And at some point in time,

the customer got fed up with the thing.

- This year's hit is the next year's firewood.

- It's that tough, this business?

- It is, I mean three years from now,

you'll ask somebody what Defender was,

and they'll go, hmm, I don't know.

- The consumer got disenchanted with what was going on

with, I think, the consumer product.

It affected how things were going on in the arcades

and how the game's earnings went down.

And we did backtrack.

- The whole video game crash, we just kind of like,

wow, man, this is like game over.

And went back to school for a couple years in California.

But I just couldn't get the video game thing out of my head.

So it was like, yeah, man, we gotta do a new game,

get the band back together.

So back to working at what was known as Williams.

I just remember him, before he started doing anything,

coming to New York when I was still in New York,

talking about the idea of doing another video game.

- Eugene came in and wasn't really prepared.

But he knew in his mind what he wanted to do.

And he wrote down on a big piece of paper, N-A-R-C.

He held up the piece of paper, and it says NARC.

And they said, "What's NARC"?

- Guy, you know, protecting the world from this scourge

of drugs and pushers and drug dealers.

I felt like video games was always

in some kind of fantasy world, you know.

It was always like, oh, we're men in tights.

We're running around with swords

and casting spells on people, and spears, and stuff.

And like, why can't a video game be about something real?

We wanted to make an impression to the world

that Williams was back.

- My job was in field service.

Like I answered the 800 number.

And I would badger the programmers at ni

to understand what they did.

So then I would go to college

and I would try to find classes

that somehow matched what these guys knew

because I wanted to know what that was.

You know, my goal was to program a game.

And I just, there's no way you can learn

You just have to do it on your own.

- You think about the casualness of this era,

you know, you're kind of like putting together a team

and like man, I need a programmer for this game.

And then, you talk to a couple people,

and here's some kid, you know, just got out of college.

Actually, I think he's still trying to finish

the last couple of courses [laughs]

- I'm gonna be, this is,

I did visualize that as the opportunity,

the video game opportunity of a lifetime for me.

I mean, if Eugene's starting video

and I'm not on the ground floor,

I mean, if I wait six months to go do summer school

or whatever, I'm gonna miss something.

- Jack Haeger was really the lead artist

and then kind of the art director.

- Jack has a great history where he went on to be

one of the founders of the Amiga.

- What more can you say?

[audience laughing]

- When we started, I guess there wasn't a clear sense

of what we were going to do.

It was more let's develop a hardware and a software.

- I always thought with video games,

when you make them, someone would come with this great,

like this book, here it is.

This is what we're gonna make, and we start page one

and we start making it.

It was never like that.

It was like, so what do you guys wanna do

- At the time, then, the Japanese games had such,

they had this animation down.

I mean, they had just armies of incredibly talented artists.

How can you compete?

- I started playing with video digitization.

That became a huge thing for me during my career.

The idea of taking actual images, video images,

and getting them into a video game,

that was kind of revolutionary.

- The only thing that had happened like this prior

was a game called Journey.

They actually like digitized the heads of five frames

of the band members, and they would like, go.

[video game music]

A normal company, right, would go out and buy

tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment

and cameras and studio setup and everything.

But no, we worked for Eugene Jarvis.

He's like, "Yeah, go out, I bought a camera at Target."

It's like one of these,

you remember those RCA cameras where you put the videotape

in the side and you held it like that?

That's what we had, right, it was [laughs]

- We bought a treadmill that we were able

to take the top off, 'cause I realized

we would have to film people walking in place.

And teaching actors how to be a video game character.

And to my mind, nobody had done that up to that point.

- Jack Haeger approached me one day and said,

"Hey, Mark, I got this concept for this character.

"I think you'd be perfect for it."

- [Jack Haeger] I came up with that character

basically from the old Ironsides TV show

with Raymond Burr in a wheelchair.

And the wheelchair was mounted with guns, of course.

- It really was, at the time, just another day.

I don't think it hit me till decades lat

that oh my gosh, my image is still in there.

I have daughters now, they're gonna see this.

- I did have a question.

At that point, we had filmed a few characters.

We had filmed the environments.

And I asked, okay, we're,

a rocket launcher is one of your weapons now.

And I said, "Okay, when a player fires the rocket launcher,

"what happens?"

And people said, "What do you mean?"

I go, "Well, I can make it look real.

"These are real people."

The mission was to no, make it look real

- The body parts would fly.

I mean, I guess this was one of the first body part games.

I think maybe the first.

- I remember George was like,

"God, this is so cool, I can't believe this!

"It's so cool!"

And I came up and I was really being very gentle about it

and I just said, "I mean, it is cool.

"But do you think that's a good thing to put

"in an arcade where little kids are there?"

- You have to understand, arcades at that point

were still very democratic environments.

Any family, any age could walk in without concern.

- And this escalated into a huge argumen

And I just remember, it was a huge, huge screaming match.

And all I'm saying is,

"I'm just saying we should think about i

"I'm not trying to limit your creativity

"I'm not trying to censor you."

- You know, I think, and I think, too,

with a game that involved realistic content,

when we crossed that bridge of digitizing life,

the game was no longer an escape.

- I remember actually a member of the board of directors

of Williams called the game a surrealistic nightmare.

And he was really concerned that there might be some,

you know, negative ramifications from releasing this game

to the public, and felt that the game should be canceled.

- With the coin-op business,

you're selling that game a quarter at a time.

With the home business, once you sell the cartridge,

if it was back in the old days,

it was a cartridge that fit into a Sega,

fit into a Nintendo.

And it was a crappy game, okay, you made your money.

Coin-op, it was one quarter at a time.

And if that game sucked, the second quarter

or the third quarter, the fourth quarter wouldn't happen.

And in our case, we wouldn't even get out of the test phase.

- We had this magic number of like $700.

I don't know how that number came up.

But we wanted to earn $700 in a week.

That would be, if we could do that,

we felt like we've got something.

- So we put it out there.

I remember, actually,

I actually think we had some champagne.

You know, we were drinking champagne

in this high school arcade.

- I remember the first two guys that played it.

They were literally drug dealers.

I was like [laughs], these guys walk in.

I'm like, these are some bad characters.

They're like, oh, check this out, you know,

and they start playing it.

- The cool thing was the kids really dug the game.

And just this whole new world of kind of like reality.

No one had ever seen anything like that

in a video game before.

- Even with all of the problems in the software and stuff,

I think the first week, it earned like $742.

And we're like we've done it! [triumphant video game music]

We are successful!

Yeah, that was the first time that we actually started

like going, maybe, you know, maybe there's something here.

And that's when we got confident enough

to actually make a plan to sell it.

I think then management all of the sudde

all of the sudden, he actually goes,

"Well, maybe we should order some parts for this game.

"Maybe we should actually plan to build this game

"at some point."

- I don't know if they thought about canceling the game,

but it made so much money,

I think that thought kind of quickly vanished.

[Reporter] - The new game is called NARC.

It's manufactured by a company in Chicago

by Williams Electronics.

And it's currently the number one video arcade game

in the country.

- People were talking about this game

that was extremely violent.

And people could explode and this all other stuff.

But it was okay, because they were drug dealers [laughs]

- [Reporter] For some players,

the carnage is part of the appeal.

- I love the gore and the blood

and the guts spilling everywhere.

Then when you hit people, they go flying through the air

and their heads smash on the pavement.

It's really cool.

- Still ahead of its time, Pac-Man sitting next to it,

and things like Donkey Kong.

And now here's NARC.

It was like fast sports cars, drug dealers

trying to like take you down,

and body parts flying everywhere.

And it looked like a movie.

[guns shooting] [characters yelling]

- We weren't aware of the changing groundswell

and the appetite for

aggressive or realistic types of games were,

and what NARC brought to that evolution.

[characters yelling] [guns firing]

- One of the things that Williams was so successful

at doing was hiring very creative, dynamic designers.

But in order to do that, creative people have a tendency

sometimes to be kind of off the wall situation.

But we tried to bring those people in

because we knew that they could design

the most successful games.

- Ken goes, "Oh, I want you to meet this guy.

"He's flying in, his name's Mark Turmell

"He's coming from California."

And here comes this larger than life dude

tall, big like permed blond hair.

- What's funny, the interview process in Chicago

was a little bit crazy because I was kinda Mr. California.

I had kinda long hair.

And I think I came in there with some white pants on

and a blue vest, and, you know, kinda looking funny.

- Pretty much the conclusion was this guy

you know, like he's Hollywood, he's crazy

He'll never be able to actually do any real work.

- No, no.

- They did not wanna hire Mark.

We said, "No, we're hiring Mark,

"whether you like it or not."

- We're going, "Oh, this is a big mistake."

But you know, actually, he turned out to be

one of the most brilliant designers we ever had.

- Even when I interviewed,

I said I wanted to revive the dual joystick mechanic.

The dual joystick mechanic of Robotron i

again, it's one of my favorites.

- Crazy thing about Robotron,

I remember when we came up with

that dual stick control thing, and we felt, okay,

this is going to be the new standard.

Every video game from now on will have to have this.

Yet no one copied it.

- Robotron, when I think about that,

it's sensory overload.

There's so many rainbow of colors coming at you,

and the sound effects.

And so I was kind of in that vein

of trying to duplicate that experience.

And so we started kind of plugging away at the game.

And it only took maybe a couple of weeks

before I realized this John Tobias guy

was just a rock star.

- You know, the first game I worked on was SmashTV.

The funny thing about it was

I always looked at it as temporary.

I thought I'm gonna do this for a while.

I'm gonna save my money.

And I'm either gonna draw comic books,

or I'm going to CalArts.

- I remember when we brought him in,

I thought he hated me.

I thought he was like,

'cause he doesn't smile that much.

He doesn't talk that much.

And I just go, wow, this guy, I think he hates me.

- I remember thinking to myself, wow,

I'm working with gods.

I mean, I thought that these are gods.

And just was super excited about working with them.

- A big film at the time, of course, was Running Man.

Robocop was in that same era.

- I'd buy that for a dollar.

- We just had the idea to take these characters

and turn them into a game show.

- I'd buy that for a dollar.

[video game shooting]

- This consumerism gone crazy, futuristic world where,

you know, a toaster is more important than human life.

[cheering]

- You know, Eugene was the king.

We would all go to him for advice.

- We were just starting the Boss Master,

which I guess was Mutoid Man.

And we reached the point where you blew off his head.

- And so I remember creating the little blood spatters

and watching the characters onscreen kinda explode.

I remember the first time I had done it,

I kinda minimized the impact,

because I thought, oh, that's looking pretty gory,

and I dialed it back.

- I think John was opposed to just how many bloody chunks

I put on the screen.

- Everybody goes, "Oh, that's amazing, that's awesome."

And I was going, "Yeah, it's all right."

Then I go, "You know, multiply that by 100." [laughs]

- They pushed, hey more, more blood, more blood.

- This boiling fountain of blood, you know,

it was like, that's gonna get people's attention.

But it, oh man, it looked so alive.

It was just like this cauldron of just boiling blood.

- He said, "Now, you know what a game is

I said, "No."

He said, "A game is 100 of those fucking cool things.

"And now you have one."

And he walked out of my office.

So I was like, okay, so I'm on the right track.

- In terms of how the games did earn money,

we call that percentaging.

And that was largely

up to the game designer to pay attention

to moments in the game

where you might want to lock down a player,

and you might want to give them a greater challenge.

- We wanted to crush the player.

And if you're like crushed by some little guy,

or you get shot in the back by a ant or something,

I mean, it's like, wait a minute, that's not fair.

That guy couldn't have killed me, that guy's a wimp.

But if it's some monstrous guy that's 30 feet tall

on like tank treads running around, and he kills you,

it's like, well, you know, the dude was badass.

I mean, that was a badass dude.

I mean, obviously he's gonna kill me a few times

before I figure out how to do it.

You accepted it.

You accepted your death and gladly paid for more.

- Arcade games were built around

you play for this chunk of time,

and then you give us another quarter.

It's like, aw man, I was hoodwinked for decades.

Like people complain about mobile game microtransactions,

but arcade games were doing that decades before that

in way more nefarious ways.

- Supposedly, within SmashTV, was this

Pleasure Dome that

never existed.

- Well, I guess I'm a bit of a scammer.

I just kind of did it on a whim

because I couldn't bring myself to just having a message

that said congratulations, go away,

and never play this game again.

It didn't make sense to just shun people

- And he figured, eh, you know what,

we'll just tell them it's there.

And since it's so late in the game,

the majority of players will never even know.

[Ernest Cline] - I remember just feeding mountains

of tokens and quarters into SmashTV in the arcade

trying to get to the Pleasure Dome

and could never make it there.

And I figured, well, I didn't try hard enough.

- So when Ken Fedesna found out that I had done that

and that there was no Pleasure Dome,

he said, "You've gotta resolve it somehow."

And so we put together a new room,

and we actually supported it.

But of course, not every distributor or arcade owner

would get the new EPROMS to upgrade their machine.

- You know, with a lot of things that happened

in those days, we may not like it.

But if the game ended up doing well,

we kind of would shrug our shoulders and say,

"Okay, well, let's move on to the next thing.

"Don't do that again."

We wouldn't make that big of a deal of it

[Ernest Cline] - So I managed to find a guy

much like myself, who like

had probably spent his whole life,

like I'm gonna find these goddamn Pleasure Domes.

And he somehow found a version of the ROM chips

that had the Pleasure Domes in them, the upgrade.

I remember getting this chip in the mail

and swapping it out and booting it up

and seeing the new version.

And then finally, finally, I reached the Pleasure Domes.

And it was really just a bunch of like girls in bikini icons

that you could run around and scoop up.

[triumphant video game music]

It was pretty...

...lame

Whoever was responsible for, you know,

for that quest taking me like 20 years

to reach the Pleasure Dome, you should just be ashamed.

And if you never reached the Pleasure Domes,

if you're one of those people,

I will tell you, it was not worth it once you get there.

It's just a, yeah, just shitty.

All right. [laughing]

- There was a grittiness about producing product,

about making games at Williams Electronics,

that I think certainly had an effect on the types of games

that we produced.

- We were in a big factory.

We had rats coming through ceilings.

We had water leaks, floods.

It was part of what Neil fostered,

was a hungry, dirty, grungy atmosphere.

- Yeah, being in Chicago, I think it comes out of the grit

of the manufacturing process.

- I think it's a lot to do with the personalities

of all the people, and the collective personalities,

as we all kind of went for the down and dirty sometimes.

- We weren't afraid and we weren't troubled by the idea

of having people compete, because, you know,

we thought that it would be helpful

enhancing their animal spirits,

to really come up with something special

- When you go back to the pinball days,

you know, in the '60s and '70s, and all that other stuff,

you had basically three major pinball companies.

You had Gottlieb, you had Bally, and you had Williams.

Bally was the leaders at the time.

They were the first ones to come out

with solid state pinball machines.

They acquired Midway,

and then they were running the whole thing.

And they then were able to get Space Invaders,

and of course, Pac-Man, and all the other stuff

that went on at the time.

- The rivalry between Bally Midway and Williams

was, you know, a really longstanding, highly competitive

love/hate, maybe more hate than love relationship.

- [Reporter] Well, this is supposed to be Bally's big new,

you know, answer to Pac-Man

and all of that kind of stuff,

the next Pac-Man, the next generation.

Think you'll ever play Roto again?

- I probably would, you know.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on, you know.

- Everyone at Bally Midway had been

looking at Williams for years as Them.

They were the other guys.

They did these type of games

that required enormous skill.

And I did games that were idiot-proof and silly and funny.

- And so we really wanted to bury those guys.

We wanted to bury Bally Midway.

We felt that they relied on licensing brands too much.

So we just felt they were phonies and incompetents

and we were going to teach them a lesson

- And they were them and we were us,

and all of a sudden, now they were buying us.

[Ken Fedesna] - They were diversifying into

health clubs and casinos.

♪ Bally's, Bally's

- They decided to get out of the coin-op industry.

So it became available for us to buy,

and that's why we ended up purchasing them.

- Yeah, we won the war, we killed these guys.

And then the crazy thing is, then we like hired

all their managers and they became our managers [laughs]

And then it was, I don't know, it wasn't a year or two

before we had our name changed to Midway [laughs]

[Neil Nicastro] - We changed the branding of our video games

from Williams to Midway

because Midway had a stronger consumer presence.

- I think I could see Eugene's emotion in it.

We were fighting a war for our jobs,

to get video started.

It was the Williams name.

And a lot of us, we all took very much pride

in the Williams name.

- We won this war, we're Williams.

Why are we Bally Midway?

I mean, they should, Bally Midway becoming Williams.

And he goes, "You know what, I paid five million bucks

"for that fucking name, we're gonna use it."

[laughs]

- The only people that we were able to actually attract

was Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman,

who had done Rampage and Xenophobe

prior to the acquisition, and then came over,

and their first game with us was Arch Rival,

which was a big success at the time.

- The income from Arch Rivals basically paid for

the entire price of the merger.

So really, it was a free deal.

It was actually, Williams got Bally Midway for nothing.

[laughs]

- I'll have to send you the waving goodbye photo.

You'll appreciate it.

It shows what people thought about the buyout.

[George Petro] - I got a call, my phone rang

and it was Neil Nicastro, the CEO.

And he goes, "Hey, what would you think

"about doing a Terminator 2 game?"

And I was like, "There's gonna be a Terminator 2?"

- Arrangements were made for George and I to fly out

to Hollywood to meet with Jim Cameron and his people

and to show demonstrations

of what our digitizing hardware and software was capable of.

- We put on this videotape of us creating NARC.

And Jim Cameron sees it and he just freaks out.

He's just like, he's like, "This is awesome."

- Cameron was great.

I mean, it was like, you guys are making movies

like we are.

- And he just stands up at one point, he goes,

"Give these guys everything they need."

And we're like, Jack and I are like.

- What was interesting to us when we mad

the Terminator 2 arcade game is I'm pretty sure

it was the first movie that ever had

on the set of the movie,

shooting simultaneously through the movie

the arcade game people.

- We had access to all of the actors and everything

from the movie.

But like Arnold, we didn't really have access to him.

He was a little more expensive, more difficult.

But we had access to his stunt double that we could use.

And once he put, he had a prosthetic jaw that he put on,

and he could look exactly like Arnold.

[shooting]

- What's not commonly known is that Linda Hamilton

actually has a twin sister, who's a stunt double

and also her stand-in.

And in fact, at the end of Terminator 2,

there is a sequence where the T-1000 replicates itself

as Sarah Connor,

and then the real Sarah Connor comes behind.

And actually, there's no trick photography in that shot.

That's actually her and her twin sister.

So her twin sister came in and did all the stuff

and was quite happy to do it.

- Robert Patrick was so enthusiastic,

he kept asking me, "So it's gonna look like me?"

And I said, "Yes, it's going to be you.

"We're gonna digitize you."

He goes, "Really?"

"We're gonna videotape you,

"and it's gonna be you in the game."

I think he was just as excited about tha

as he was about his role in the movie.

- [Character] Excellent.

- I think what's really fun about the arcade experience

with peripherals is it kind of allows yo

to have a gaming experience

that you might not be able to get in your house.

Having that thing that you're holding in your hands

makes it feel more like a performance.

[Ernest Cline] - That was one of the most egregious

quarter-sucking games, too.

Like you would get killed after three seconds

and have to put it in, but the graphics,

again, it was like graphics from the movie scanned in.

So you're actually playing Arnold and fighting the T-1000

and there were elements from the movie.

So it really felt like you were in the movies.

- [Character] Hasta la vista, baby.

- But by the time you reached the end

and defeated the T-1000, you had spent more

than it would cost to watch the movie 10 times.

- See, when a game went on test, we all,

we all went out and kind of,

we'd go watch it and have dinner and come watch it.

And the game was killing people in like,

I mean people were literally lasting like 18 seconds.

I remember John Tobias one time,

he's like standing next to it and we're watching it,

and these guys just got wasted.

And he just turns around, he goes, "That was 18 seconds!

"They died in 18 seconds!"

And it was like, you know, he's yelling.

I'm like, "Don't tell them they just lost their money."

It was so funny.

- T2 was a good success for Midway.

It opened the door for a more cinematic experience.

- It got Midway to a new level.

It just all of a sudden was like, this is what it means

to sell a crap ton of games.

And this is what it means to earn $1,000 a week.

And just, you know, I mean, it was just nonstop.

- [Character] It's Judgment Day.

- So we released T2, and it did, it was doing great.

And I think this was around the holidays

Matter of fact, I know it was around.

It was New Years Eve.

And our marketing person called me at home and said,

"Jack, are you available on New Years Da

"to come downtown to the studio

"and be interviewed by Entertainment Tonight?"

So I went down the next day, and there was a reporter there,

and the game was there, and she was asking

lots of questions about the development.

Like, "How did you get Arnold into the game?"

and "Wow, that really looks like Robert Patrick,"

those sort of questions.

And right in the middle of it was a question

that was framed very different than any other question

she had been asking me.

"So in the game, you are shooting police officers.

"How do you feel about that?"

- It's very clear in the movie

that Arnold never kills anybody.

He shoots them in the knee.

And they fall over and they're no longer a threat.

And that's exactly what happens in the game.

[characters crying out] [shooting]

- And I told her to stop right then, and I said,

"You need to convey my answer in its entirety,"

because I felt very personal about this.

And I said I had family members who were in the police force

so I took it very seriously.

And what it ended up being was kind of this real accusatory,

hard-hitting like, "So how do you feel

"about making a video game that encourages people

"to shoot cops?"

- And it was, it was our first experience in

how video games were directly impacting

the entertainment community,

and through the media, society as a whole

- You know, in some ways, I think the old saying is

bad publicity is never really bad.

It's publicity.

And it gives you some notoriety and some attention.

And maybe people that might not have been aware

of the game before have now become aware of it

because of this free publicity.

So it worked to our advantage, ultimately

- By the early '90s, I mean, we were on a roll at Midway,

and the whole NARC technology,

our photorealistic digitization was just killing the world.

But as studio head, I really didn't have the cycles

to like do something new.

A dream of mine was what's the next phase of the industry,

and it's 3D texture mapping.

I could see that that was going to happen

And I really wanted to do a driving game

- Go in to work Monday morning,

and the person that had to office next to me

I noticed was empty.

And I was like, well, what's going on?

And I noticed a couple of cubicles were empty.

I called Ken, I'm like, "Did I miss something?" [laughs]

"Did I miss something that was going on?

"I don't understand."

And he said, "Oh yeah, Eugene and Mark,

"they had a project they wanted to work on.

"But they're gonna work on it out of house."

And out of house meant they had quit

and they started their own company.

And it was like, uh.

- You know, they had tremendous talent.

And you know, it was Turmell, Petro, Jack Haeger.

The art side had John Tobias.

- The first time I heard that,

I remember feeling lost a little bit.

It's almost like your parent is leaving the house

kind of a thing.

- You know, in true Williams style,

nobody decided to say anything.

They never sort of like dealt with the fact

that the manager of the video department was gone.

They just kind of left us, you know,

Lord of the Flies style.

- I always looked at him as being kind of the Godfather

of the industry and sort of a leader of, you know,

of our studio.

And so when he was walking away,

that was not a good feeling.

Here we've got the Godfather, the Doctor of Video Games,

Eugene Jarvis, creator of all.

Some call him God.

What do you call yourself?

- Ah, [beep] face.

[laughing]

- [Woman] That's a wrap.

- That's good, that's a wrap, let's end it.

- In the early '80s, the games were metaphor.

So it wasn't real space men.

It was little metaphorical bleeps,

and you know, little animated sprites

that represented a human or an alien or a spaceship.

The more you got into realism, definitely

I think brought in more of the male aggressive game player.

- The games were louder.

The graphics are more detailed.

There's lots more blood.

Like it feels different.

And that's something that the companies

were really actively advertising.

Games have always been violent,

so I'm not saying that comes out of nowhere.

But it's not the thing

that they were kind of leading with before, right?

[Neil Nicastro] - I think everybody by this point

knows the story about Mortal Kombat.

It wasn't Mortal Kombat to start out with

And this is probably the greatest story of Midway

Ed Boon and John Tobias.

[John Tobias]- I think the first time I met him was...

he was playing his radio really loud in his office.

He kept coming next door to us,

you know, knocking on our door and coming in,

sticking his head in and going,

"Hey, is that too loud?

"Sounds too loud."

And he'd go back and lower his volume a little bit

and he'd come back.

"Hey, is that too loud?"

And you know, so that was the first time that I met him.

I think my first reaction was, who the fuck is this guy?

[Neil Nicastro] - We had about a three-month gap

in the factory's production line.

And they said, "We can give you a game."

It was like some ridiculous break time.

It was like six months.

"A new game in six months to fill the gap."

"All right, what is it?"

"It's a fighting game."

[John Tobias] - Karate Champ was a fighting game that I had

played in high school, and I loved that game.

And I thought, wow, that would lend itself

to sort of this one-on-one fighting game idea.

I was a huge martial arts fan.

I loved old Kung Fu movies.

In the early '90s,

there were two up-and-coming martial arts stars.

There was Van Damme, and then there was Steven Seagal.

We thought, wow, we have to get one of those guys involved.

- Not bad kid.

- And we're gonna use Jean-Claude Van Damme's image

in this game like we, you know,

now have begun doing in our other video games.

Okay.

- We wanted him to come in to do some videos

you know, to digitize him, and things like that

the voiceover, whatever.

What I remember is he just wasn't cooperative

- This was a filler game for us,

you know, just something to fill the gap

And excuse my language, okay, but I said

"Kenny, tell him to go fuck off.

"Tell these guys, make up their own characters

"and put their own characters in the gam

"Make a fighting game with their own characters.

"Forget about Jean-Claude Van Damme."

- Actually, I thought that was great.

Like, I thought the freedom to sort of create our own story

and our own characters and all those things was appealing.

The first character we taped on Mortal Kombat

was Johnny Cage.

- I remember first showing up to the first day

of shooting Mortal Kombat, showing up to film

and literally having to spend an hour with John and Ed

cleaning up an area for us to film,

because there was no room for us to film anything.

[John Tobias] - When we taped the Johnny Cage character,

I think we might have worked on the game

for at least a month before we taped the second character.

I think the idea was we wanted to kinda take our learnings

on Johnny Cage and figure out really what it was

that we were messing with.

If a character threw a kick, you know, they would always,

they'd wanna throw it as fast as they could.

And so the problem for us was it would become a blur.

- John is like, "Bup can't you float?

"Try to float.

"Hold yourself in the air,

"because it's gonna come out blurry."

I was like, Bup, really?

- And that was a learning process.

We didn't walk in with all the answers.

It was just sort of, we would tape a character doing moves

and then we'd go back and work with the actual artwork.

Ed would start to work with the graphics and the game.

He would kinda come back with the reality of,

well, we have to do that in three frames, or four frames.

Speed was super important to him.

- Then we'd go on our review.

We'd go look at the games.

And it was early on.

When we saw up on the screen,

they had fighters fighting fast as hell.

[Mortal Kombat music]

[characters yelling and grunting]

We said, holy shit.

This thing is great.

And what was a six-month production time

to fill a hole in the factory,

we threw that out the window and realize

continue where you're going,

because this thing is great.

[characters yelling]

[Game] - Test your might.

Liu Kang, wins.

[applauding]

[John Tobias] - That's just an obnoxious moment

[Daniel Pesina] - John wanted to do a ninja

And right away, I was like, ninja?

Ninja's already been,

you know, everyone's a ninja, it's friggin' '80s.

But there's, in China there's these type of ninja.

- The Chinese Ninja Connection was the name of the book.

It was written as this historical book about

some order of Chinese assassins who had

sort of predated the Japanese ninja.

- So actually, he bought that book,

and Scorpion and Sub-Zero are originally from that clan.

- The whole thing was like, the name was made up.

The whole story was gonna be bullshit.

- You have people out there who care

about the lore of Mortal Kombat.

You have people that can go through, lik

well, this is Sub-Zero's brother,

and he's not wearing the mask here.

And this is original Sub-Zero,

and then there's classic Sub-Zero.

They can run all that stuff down

because those characters have just become so iconic

over the years.

I mean, wrestling was stealing stuff from Mortal Kombat.

Glacier, the wrestler, was just Sub-Zero

[video game yelling drowning out announcer]

[Announcer] - Combination of styles.

[John Tobias] - You know, while I may have created

maybe the visual qualities of the characters,

you know, the back- story and whatnot,

really, the core of the product was its playability.

And that started with Ed.

That always came from him sort of playing the game.

And he would sit in his office for hours

and call people in to kind of,

"Hey, try this, hey, try that."

- His games reflect his personality.

I think his games bring out the way Ed really feels

about things, because his nature is outrageous.

- There was a period at the end of a match

where you kind of got a free hit off of your opponent.

And we wanted to kind of put an exclamation on it.

For us, it was always, hey, watch me go do an uppercut.

Somewhere along the way,

Ed put in Johnny Cage punching off the opponent's head.

- I was like, you can't, I was like, in shock.

I was like, you can't do that.

Holy cow, it looked so real to me, that I was like,

Boop, you just killed me.

- [Game] Cage wins.

- And he was like, "Yeah, isn't that really cool?"

And I was like, "Dude, you can't do that

And he goes, "We can do whatever we want

And I was like, looked at him, I was like

"You're right, we can" because no boss has ever let,

I've never seen a boss hanging out with us.

We can shoot whatever we want, and that's what they get.

- I was never telling Ed Boon, "Hey, don't pull that,

"don't decapitate that guy's head."

Instead, you know, I would, I remember suggesting to him,

"Can't you do a fatality where you rip the guy's leg off

"and beat the crap out of him with his own leg?"

[character yelling]

From a management standpoint, we also believed

that's what the customer wanted.

- He buried it in some button, joystick combination

that he thought no one would ever discover.

I remember the players discovered it right away.

Like it was the first weekend, they discovered it.

And we were there at some point watching the reactions.

- Oh, everybody kind of, when they saw the fatalities...

[characters yelling]

They knew this was something different.

- We knew right then, there, that there was no way

we were going to ever take those things out.

And if anything, we need to give them more.

- Back in the day, I had a little piece of paper

that had all of the combos for the fatalities written down.

I mean, obviously you have to memorize them at some point.

But I would like whip that little cheat sheet out

and like quickly type in all the buttons

to make sure I got it.

- They've got this game, Mortal Kombat,

and you could kill people.

And I was like, I didn't,

it's hard to even know what that even meant.

But I'm like, all right, dude.

I'm gonna go, we're gonna check this out

And sure enough, in the back of this skateboard shop,

they had an MK machine.

And I just took one look at it and was like.

- [Game] John Cage.

- They are killing people.

- It was like a big F-U to everybody.

It was like, oh, you don't want us

to make video games like this?

Well, how about we turn it up to 11

and just make that even worse than anything you could imagine?

I'm sure they were all just laughing heartily.

- You know, we're doing the stuff with Liz.

She's athletic, kickass.

- Then she goes up into that. - Yeah.

- Okay. - Then pose.

- Right! - Yeah!

- We're going to go into fatality.

And Liz looks at him and goes,

"I'm not going to do a fatality.

"Why can't I just give him like a flower or something,

"and peace and love?"

[character yelling]

- [Game] Sonya wins, fatality.

- And then, of course, came the brutalities,

the babalities, which were so ridiculous

and the friendships.

- By the end of its production run,

the first Mortal Kombat game, I believe,

ended up selling about 27,000 units.

- And I guarantee if you ask Ed and John separately,

there's no way they had a vision

that it was going to go the way that it went.

I mean, none of us did.

None of us could imagine that you could sell

that many games again in our era.

[music]

- Being a nerd and being aspirational

about the games industry in general,

from a young age, I knew some names.

I knew Mark Cerny had created Marble Madness.

And I remember hearing these stories

about a guy named Mark Turmell,

who had created Toy Bizarre for Activision.

- [Announcer] Mark is one of nation's leading designers

of home video software,

a former boy wonder who did not burn out

A creative computer whiz with a dinosaur-like age of 23,

he's still cranking out video games for the home market.

How many teenagers, after all,

make it into People Magazine

and find themselves in other articles

described as the hottest designer in the industry?

- I love golf.

I go on streaks on golf.

I get addicted and then I get frustrated

But I love basketball and gambling.

- So when I recognized Mark Turmell's name

in the credits of NBA Jam, that was a revelation.

I know that guy.

I don't know that guy, but I know that guy!

I remember, I remember hear,

whatever happened to Mark Turmell?

Oh, he's making one of the greatest arcade games

of all time.

[Mark Turmell] - The rules of basketball are so perfect

You've got a three-point line.

You've got timers for the shot clock.

You've got periods that we can tighten up to be

the right timeframe.

So just the inherent rules of basketball

made for really a great product strategy

- People have asked me about the influence of

Arch Rivals on NBA Jam, obviously,

'cause a lot of the same game-playing mechanic.

We were first.

But all I really know is that I've been told

that Mark Turmell was a fan.

- You know, I think maybe I've played that game

three or four games total in my life.

It's just not a game that appealed to me with,

you know, you kinda pull the pants down.

They had a punch.

- He asked us about our interest in doing licensed products,

officially licensed products.

And we were resistant,

mainly because on my side was,

I didn't want to do photographic stuff.

I wanted to keep doing cartoons.

I felt that's where the humor was gonna be.

- Neil Nicastro came into my office one day,

and he said, "How come you're not pursuing

"the NBA license?

- If they're the real basketball players

that's what the players are going to want to be.

They're going to want to,

they have their favorite basketball stars

They want to play as those basketball stars.

That what we have to do.

- Made the pitch.

- [Announcer] Williams Electronics is currently developing

an arcade-based, four-player video basketball game,

one which employs lifelike digitized graphics.

First, basketball players are videotaped in the studio

performing hundreds of moves.

Artists digitize this footage into individual frames,

which are stored and played back in sequence,

or animated to create a video basketball player

capable of performing on command.

Well, the NBA's immediate reaction was,

hey, thanks, but no thanks.

Their kind of understanding or perception

of the arcade business was rooted there

in Times Square, which was a very seedy area at the time.

And they did not want the NBA logo presented

in that atmosphere.

- I remember a comment internally

"Don't they realize how much money they're gonna make?"

Seriously, I mean, we're not even gonna cover the salary

of one player, let's face it.

The NBA will continue whether they do a game with us or not.

- So our video guy, once again, he said,

"I can solve this."

He went out to family entertainment centers

around Chicago and he took videos to sho

what a real arcade is like.

We sent that back to the NBA

to tell them this is what it's like, not Times Square.

They accepted that, they understood,

and they started talking deal terms with Roger Sharpe.

- Understand and appreciate that there's never been

a professional sports team licensed in coin-op.

- Well, the logistics of getting all the players

in our studio, and then the logistics of having them do

every animation over and over and over again,

because there was a few hundred animations,

and the logistics of then going through

and stripping out all those, it couldn't be done.

Like there's just no way.

- [Man] Okay, all right, that's good.

- We figured out a system for using

an attachment system that games typically used

for putting like different types of guns or weapons

or props in characters' hands.

[Mark Turmell] - And so Shawn Liptak trimmed off a head

and he pasted that head on to prove

that we could kind of change up a different flesh tone,

a different look.

- There were 16 different head angles that we had to use,

one looking forward, one looking up, one looking down,

one looking left, one looking right,

one looking left up, one looking left down [mumbles],

all the way around.

- And again, this is before the internet

This is before, you know, any easily accessible resource.

So we were looking at VHS tapes

of the biggest dunks of all time,

looking at the athletes and trying to trim out

their faces at these different angles.

- We thought, hey, why don't we put our heads in.

Like let's be in the game ourselves.

How cool would that be?

That's worth doing the game right there for.

We got, you know, everybody from around

who wanted to be in there.

And we'd get them into the studio,

and we'd shoot all our angles.

And then there was one guy that we worked with,

Sheridan Oursler, who came in with a derby hat on his head.

And we're like, "Hey Sheridan, you want us to shoot you

"with that hat on your head?

He was like, "Yeah, yeah, this is my derby."

And so we go, "Okay."

And so we shot him with a derby on his head

and put him in the game

and like didn't think anything of it.

And then I think we put the game on test

And people freaked out because it was a person

with a derby.

You've never seen a person with a derby

playing a basketball game before.

So like within a few weeks, you know,

throughout the arcades that we had it on test in,

everybody's playing Sheridan's head with a derby hat.

- [Game] Go up, delivers the special!

- Funny, because we got NBA license,

but people liked playing the special characters

more than they liked playing the NBA players.

- Well, we were doing things now,

like putting in the Mortal Kombat characters.

[NBA Jam music]

- The NBA had a fit

when they saw there were Mortal Kombat characters.

[characters yelling]

- And I thought, oh gamers are gonna love that.

A little crossover, thing, that's great.

And so Mark says that on the record in an interview,

and I go and I type it up.

And a week-and-a-half later, I get a phone call from Mark,

which I'm not expecting.

And he goes, "Yeah, I needed to follow up with you

"on something that came up in our interview.

"Remember that thing about the Mortal Kombat

"secret characters in Tournament Edition

I'm like, "Yeah, I'm looking forward to that."

He goes, "Yeah, we've been on the phone with the NBA,

"and they're, they're not really into the idea." [laughs]

- And it was not a good situation.

And we had to scramble very, very quickly

to produce a new set of ROMs that did not have

the Mortal Kombat characters in them.

- [Game] Get that outta here!

- That traditional gaming audience

that wants to find secrets,

that needs to collect every coin in the game,

that wants to know every secret warp in every level,

that absolutely was catnip

to all of the hard-core gamers that were like,

"Well, I know something you don't know."

- [Game] No way!

Jackson [cheering drowns out words]

- Having actual announcers,

I couldn't push them into the high energy part

of being an announcer voice

for a quarter-at-a-time video game

in an arcade setting.

- I had never done any voiceover before.

I had never done any sports work before,

related to acting or voiceover.

It was just acting work, stage work,

and work at Second City.

- So I got Tim in.

And he was kinda doing his Marv Alpert

but really, he just became himself

and became that actor.

- It was like this.

John came in, gave me a script.

He said, "Big," he said, "Loud,"

and I went, "He's on fire, rejected, boom shakalaka!

"He's heating up!"

And that was about it. [laughs]

- And think about making that system work

We're talking about a system that is calling

the play-by-play action, splicing in player names,

at different levels of inflection.

- The reason for the different inflections is

just for that variety of before a shot,

after a shot, in the middle of a shot.

Pippen for three!

Pippen with the dunk!

Pippen with the monster jam!

Pippen, Pippen, Stockton, Stockton, Stockton!

- [Game] Rebound, Jams it in!

- And there used to be a game called Run and Gun by Konami

that was the first game that actually the camera work

seemed to like follow you down the court

I go down, I listened to that game,

and I hear the guy go, "Nice shot."

- [Game] Fakes him up, put it up, three, yes, good shot.

Way to go.

- What is this guy?

Is he medicated or something?

That's not how you call a basketball gam

I go down to the other end and hear,

"Get that stuff outta here, rejected!"

And I could feel the effect that my voice had

on that extra amping up of the situation

So sometimes I'd sneak up behind him,

guy would take a shot, and I'd go, "Ugly shot!

"Puts up a brick!"

or "Get that stuff outta here!"

He'd turn around and go, "Hey, you sound like the guy!"

And I'd go, "I am the guy, dude."

- Eugene Jarvis always told me, you know

make sure the player gets more powerful.

Never take something away from him.

But what if we, you know, put the player into a mode

where he's on fire and everything's a swish?

And we knew right away that there was a mechanic there

that made sense.

- And I was saying, "Oh, that's unrealistic.

"That's not cool, it's gonna be fantasy then.

"People aren't gonna take it seriously," or whatever.

And they're like, "No, no, it's video game.

"It's totally video game, it's totally cool.

"It's totally cool!"

And I'm all like [muttering] "It's not gonna be cool at all.

"Nobody's gonna like that."

- He said, I won't give you the art.

I won't give you flame art.

So I actually went back into SmashTV

and took the flame explosions, attached them to the ball,

and we started the Smoke Mode and the On Fire.

- First time that we had seen in the arcade,

and these kids who are playing the game already

for a couple weeks had seen, you know, On Fire,

and slamming and shattering the backboard

and the guy just went, "Ah!"

Raised his arms up in the air, "Oh, hell no!"

And ran around the arcade, inside.

He ran around four times.

Everybody screamed.

Everybody was like, "Ah!"

They're holding their heads like they just saw

the Second Coming.

And we were like looking at each other, like oh my God.

It's just such an iconic part of,

and just felt so good to see people get

that excited about something.

We're like, yeah, I think it's gonna be pretty cool.

- This is bad, man, this is bad!

[NBA Jam music]

- If you're playing against the computer

it's never going to allow you to get too far in front.

You'll start missing shots.

Or the computer will start missing shots a lot,

if the score's too far in front.

So it doesn't allow the scores to get too far apart,

and it keeps the excitement of,

oh, I can so overtake you, the last minute,

the last throw, I can win!

- If you're in the fourth quarter,

and you have, you know, just a few seconds left

and have an opportunity to tie the game,

to have it go into overtime,

and take a shot at the buzzer,

the chances are so much higher

from the half court line

than it would be from laying it up

at any other point in the game.

- Rubberbanding is,

I don't know if that was a Mark Turmell call,

or what the deal was,

but the rubberbanding in NBA Jam

and then later in NFL Blitz, and Showtim

and all that sort of stuff,

it's almost evil.

But also, it makes for really heightened moments

of like, oh man, we went to overtime again!

What are the odds!

Turns out the odds are pretty good.

- [Game] At the buzzer, he scores!

- We were getting calls about games that were broken.

I said, "What?"

Because that's one of the things,

you put a game on test, you know, it's gotta work.

And to have a game that's not working,

it's like the height of stupidity.

- The game was supposedly down.

We said, "What the heck's going on here?

So we go out there,

and you couldn't put any more quarters in the game.

- It had accumulated so many quarters,

it had jammed the coin mech

and you couldn't put any more quarters i

- [Announcer] Unheard of collections.

At all of our test locations,

NBA Jam is collecting between 124 and 167 percent

of what Mortal Kombat did during its first six weeks.

- Jurassic Park was the biggest film at the time,

and it was breaking all kinds of earning records.

It made $350 million.

And that was a milestone that people said

we can't believe it, it's incomprehensible.

And here comes NBA Jam, and Mark said, I said,

"Can you tell me about how popular this really is?"

"I can tell you this.

"NBA Jam made a billion dollars."

And I said, "In quarters?"

- Anybody that just liked games and liked sports

and walked around a mall would hear and see that game,

because in malls, they were like arcades

and there was always groups of people around.

And you're like, what's that?

- And when people were playing together,

they're probably more likely to keep playing,

because you can't just walk off from your friend

that you're playing with.

- Whereas some games are abstract,

or some people just don't want to blast aliens,

or they don't want to fight other people

the idea of, it's like basketball,

but without all of those pesky rules.

That becomes a very appealing thing to people

that would be into sports,

but wouldn't be caught dead in an arcade

But here, this is the perfect gateway.

[game announcer yelling]

John Tobias - The home versions of the early Mortal Kombat games

were released by Acclaim.

- Mortal Kombat!

- I remember seeing TV ads for the games

that partly fueled the kind of concern

that parents had about Mortal Kombat,

because it always emphasized gangs of like young kids

running around streets yelling, "Mortal Kombat!"

- Mortal Kombat!

- I think parents felt there was a revolution

about to happen, because that's how it was portrayed

in the marketing materials.

That somehow their kids were involved in this weird thing,

and suddenly they turn around

and it'd be like a 1984 kind of situatio

where all of the parents would be thrown into jail

and kids would run amuck.

- You know, the home games, when they came out,

they were marketed, I think, to a younger audience.

- You know, when we filmed it,

we didn't film it for a home version.

We filmed it for arcade.

And who is, you know, at the arcade?

Kids with their own money.

- Actually, when I think back

of all of the time I spent in arcades,

I don't remember seeing too many moms walking around.

- [Reporter] After a $10 million advertising campaign,

Mortal Kombat, debuting in home video today,

is expected to sell two million copies at $50 a pop,

a horrifying possibility for parents

who can't believe the game makers are fantasizing

about decapitation and murder.

- So now moms and dads are looking at their kids

playing this game, and they see heads being decapitated,

skulls being pulled off of bodies.

- I don't know think we'll have this at home.

- You don't think so?

- No, they're too violent. - You look a little startled.

- Yeah, it's a little too violent, I think.

- That's pretty bad.

That's just plain gross.

- I'm sure moms were walking through the living room

and looking at the game that their

kids were playing, and writing a letter to their Congressman

like, "I bought Mortal Kombat thinking

"it was a fun fighting game."

- It's crazy to me how some people don't see the humor

in Mortal Kombat.

I mean, one of the taglines is Toasty!

What game does that?

I think that humor was essential to its success,

because without it, I think it just would have been

almost violent for the sake of being violent.

- Seeing Mortal Kombat held up as a scapegoat

for societal ills was a direct parallel

to what rock-and-roll had gone through

through the '50s through the '70s,

what comic books had done in the '50s.

It was the latest thing for the previous generation

to blame society's problems on and say,

"These kids today, they're gonna ruin the world."

- [Reporter] Children of different ages.

And that is exactly what--

- Many companies would shudder when they see

their product talked about in an unfavorable light

by a US senator.

- The game narrator instructs the player to finish,

and I quote, "finish his opponent."

The player may then choose a method of murder,

ranging from ripping the heart out

to pulling off the head of the opponent

with spinal cord attached.

- I personally delighted in it,

because we saw a clear effect every time someone

was making a big deal in the press about Mortal Kombat,

it was on TV, we saw the sales in the home product jump up.

And if we happened to have something in the arcade,

you know, it was probably also seeing the benefit of a jump.

- And we hope very much that you step ba

and take into account

our counter-responsibilities as citizens here,

and not only as people who are employed

to maximize profits.

- Then you had the issue of Nintendo and Sega.

- We were starting to encroach

on Nintendo's share of market.

And one of the reasonswas that we were appealing

to an older age group.

And part of that older age appeal became Mortal Kombat

in its original form.

- the Nintendo version was very neutered

The blood was turned into like a sweat.

- People who played it knew what was happening.

So I thought that was a silly thing to do

And I thought it detracted from the game

So I was committed that we were going to show

all the blood that existed in the arcade version

of Mortal Kombat.

- It had that blood code.

It had two codes.

It had the A-B-A-C-A-B-B, the main blood code,

and then it had the builder code,

down-up-left-left-A-right-down

for the cheat menu.

And then you could get Reptile and do all this other stuff.

And yeah, so the Genesis version was the version,

as far as anyone I knew was concerned.

This NES version was just a wreck.

- We wanted to be different.

We wanted to be edgy.

We wanted to make the point that we weren't

this nice, clean, young kids company that Nintendo was.

- Sega used the slogan like, we do what Nintendon't.

Nintendo would never do this

because they're so family-friendly.

But we do other things.

And there's something like

really delightfully salacious about that

- We outsold the Nintendo version by about five to 10 times

more than what sold on the Nintendo system.

- Will you ever draw the line where you say

it's too violent?

- Yeah, there's, of course, we're gonna draw the line,

sure, yeah.

[metallic slicing] [body parts plopping]

- [Game] Scorpion wins, fatality.

- There's an ad for a poster in the Attract Mode

for Revolution X.

And since playing through that game start to finish,

I've been one button click away about four times

from buying that poster on Ebay.

It's got the girl with the New World Order,

no was it, the New Order?

But yeah, that game,

I would really like to know,

I'm looking forward to watching this finished product,

because I hope you have the story about how that game

came to be in there, because...what the hell?

[George Petro] - I got this speech two times from Neil

It was like, "Okay, you can do whatever you want, but,"

[laughs] "it comes from these three choices,

"sports, driving, fighting, or gun.

"You can't do sports, you can't do driving,

"and you can't do fighting.

"So take your pick."

It was, so I guess we're doing another gun game.

It was supposed to be Generation X with Public Enemy.

That was the original concept, yeah.

So two things happened.

Number one, we got a letter from, I believe it was Marvel

that said, "We own Generation X, so back off."

- I remember George being very, very angry about that.

He wanted to put into Generation I remember him saying,

"You know what, I'm so pissed at this, I'm so angry,

"I think we should put some sort of superhero

"all in yellow spandex that you get to shoot a lot."

- The second was is Public Enemy,

who would have nothing to do with us.

So, don't know why.

So we had to really like, okay, strike one and two.

So what are we going to do now?

So we changed the name to Revolution X,

and we started thinking really hard about who we would have.

We knew we wanted music in the game.

- Initial premise was that we were going to get bands,

plural, together,

we do country-western

do hard rock.

Do this, do this, and it was just like, seriously?

- Our marketing person, Roger Sharpe, God love him, said,

"Jack, how would you like to go out

"and speak with Aerosmith?

"What do you think of Aerosmith?"

And I'm like, my God, Aerosmith is awesome.

And I loved their music.

I bought their music with my own money since I was a kid.

- So we got in front of a camera

and just like made our pitch.

Jack was really good.

I was horrible on the pitch.

It was like, we're super pasty white.

And we're just like, hey, we're from Chicago

and make video games.

We wanna use you in a video game.

And I go, "This is gonna go zero far."

- Hi guys, I'm Jack Haeger.

- Hi, George Petro.

- And we're from Williams Bally Midway in Chicago,

makers of exciting and new pinball and video games.

There were things I heard on the radio at that time

that were dealing with the impact of music

on youth culture and how it literally saved lives

and gave meaning to every generation.

They can't go to their parents,

because their parents didn't grow up with computers.

They don't know what's happening in the world

or what's gonna happen in the next 20 years.

It's a real difficult time to grow up.

But the one stable thing that has always kept kids sane

is their music.

- You know, you're this youth that's getting like oppressed,

and Aerosmith becomes your guiding light

They leave clues all through the world

and they leave these videos.

You just go to see them at an underground club.

You get right close to the stage.

Aerosmith's jamming.

All of the sudden, these New Order troops come on the stage

and push Aerosmith off of the stage.

And it's like, what happened, you know,

and you guys are like, whoa, come on,

you know, get away from me.

And you decide, hey, I'm gonna fight this

So you use your gun, you're shooting everybody.

So we did it, we wrapped up the video tape,

sent it to their management.

And like a week later, they called, they go,

"Yeah, the band saw it, they love it.

"They wanna do it, they're in."

So we, um, we're like, what?

- Aerosmith has always been one of those bands

that was the most eager to take digital risks.

They did a game for PC

that was a virtual guitar, early, early on.

This was way before Guitar Hero

or any of the other guitar abstraction music games.

So when Revolution X became announced,

all of my friends were like, "Wow, Aerosmith!"

I'm like, this is what they do.

They were the risk takers.

They thought digital entertainment was fun.

That seemed like a perfect fit to me.

Besides, I'm sure they looked at Journey back in the day

and said, "We can do that."

[video game music]

[George Petro] They showed up.

We got this big bus that they came from the airport in.

Steven Tyler was the first guy off the bus.

He had watched everything.

- There's Steven Tyler up there,

and George is just saying, "Do this and do that."

I mean, he's doing whatever we ask.

- [Director] Action.

- Hey, come on in.

You got your wings, welcome home.

- Yeah, we didn't have a drum set,

because I remember the drummer had to air drum.

And we said, we're gonna build your drum set digitally.

Remember where all your drums are, so,

and he would play them, because I mean,

he's a professional drummer, so he just.

[Aerosmith music]

- [Director] Cut! Cut!

- We had a whole looping session with the band.

So we would take all the,

we took all the footage,

and then we sent it to the sound department

and they brought up the footage.

- This is all like combat stuff,

I mean, like heat of the battle kind of, "No, no, no!"

Stuff like that, so you know, pretty high energy level,

and that kind of yelling stuff.

About that long, too.

Give me just three or four of them.

- No, no, no, no!

- [Man] That's great.

Can you give me one that's like really deep in your throat,

like a "No!"

- No!

- [Man] That's cool, all right.

- Awesome.

- [Man] Excellent.

- Excellent.

- [Man] All right!

- All right.

- [Man] Rock and roll!

- I'm not gonna say that.

- [Man] Okay, I'm sorry.

That's just too much.

- I think, oh, like rock and roll, it's like, come on.

- [Man] Okay, fair enough.

♪ Sweet

- These guys are maggots.

They're putting chemicals in all our foo

♪ Emotion

- Aerosmith looks like they had half an hour

to come in and sit down and go like,

you know, it's just like, "Yeah, all right!"

And then the keys fly out of the screen.

You get the videotape in put it in.

Here's Steven Tyler going like,

"You did good, now go do this."

That stuff is so corny, but like kind of amazing.

- It's a gun game, but what if the gun shot compact discs.

And it's a crazy idea, I know, makes little sense.

- The sound of a CD launching like a grenade launcher,

[mimics shooting]

like that is part of the core experience to me.

And I can listen to that all day.

- So much of the discussion of should it be

Revolution X: Music as a Weapon

or Revolution X: Music,

was it Music as a Weapon or Music Is the Weapon? I think

There was this humongous amount of email

going backwards and forwards about whether it should be

Music as a Weapon.

Who the hell cares?

- Unfortunately, people have come to use Revolution X

as a punchline.

I still unironically like it [laughs].

- It doesn't match up to T2.

It just didn't have the,

T2, who had so much momentum because of what it was,

the movie, the robots.

You know, Revolution X was just kind of our,

you know, our sort of creation.

- We had this thing where we were supposed to take

a quarter every 45 seconds.

That was what you were aiming to do

with these arcade games.

NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat did that, actually.

But most of the other games didn't.

And you ended up having to try and make story games

really, really difficult to be constantly taking money.

Well, there's only so much difficulty

that someone's going to do to pay for it once,

because you play through once

and it costs you an arm and a leg,

and you don't wanna do it again.

- But the game just didn't earn.

I mean, it's all about the earnings.

It always is about the cash box.

How does the cash box, is it filled or isn't it filled?

What's my return on investment?

I paid 4,000 or $5,000 for a game.

I would expect the operators are looking

for a little return on their investment

in six to nine months.

- We all realized that we bit off a lot

in combining such major talent with a cinematic experience.

And flying by the seat of our pants game design

wasn't going to hack it in the future.

- As video games are moving towards movies,

this is definitely a step in the right direction.

That's what I think is different.

It's history, man, history in the making

- One thing that I think really sunk it home

for a lot of these guys who were still at Midway

was that Eugene Jarvis,

who used to be one of their fellow coworkers,

had left Midway.

And I think that kind of put in each of their minds

that there's opportunities for their talent.

- At one point, we were contacted by Universal Studios.

- They wanted to spin a story around this new thing

called GameWorks that they were trying to start off.

- [Announcer] GameWorks,

the ultimate entertainment destination.

Games, drinks, music, and food.

- And so they were looking for people to develop

their location-based arcade game.

- So we go on this ridiculous trip

where the Universal jet that Steven Spielberg flies on

is showing up at Midway Airport,

and we're all to get on it and like fly out to,

fly out to California.

And it was, it was the best experience ever.

Number one, it turns out you can get to LA in like two hours

if you fly really fast.

We meet with the president of Universal.

We have lunch with him in the commissary

Like, here's all these goofy video game guys.

- So I was usually the guy that would have the balls

to like propose some numbers,

or you know, paint the picture.

- It was just the epitome of Mark,

just throwing out these huge numbers

that they're gonna demand.

And it was fun, because it was like this confidence

with these guys that they realize they were the value.

- I remember hearing all of the rumors of competitors

courting our guys.

- Some of the guys would be getting comments,

innuendos, and remarks from management

about your obligation to the employee agreements.

Well, what would happen if they left.

- If they were gonna screw us and leave,

we're gonna sue the crap out of them,

because we created this contractual relationship,

which prevented them from working for a competitor

for at least a year after they left us.

- And it was more about making your life difficult

than it was about the clause actually being legal.

It was about suing you

and you having to defend yourself,

and him having more money than you

and being able to outspend you with lawyers,

just making your life difficult.

So other employers didn't want to hire you.

- In the pinball area,

when a bunch of guys left our pinball business

to work for an upstart,

we unleashed our legal dogs

on everybody associated with that to sue them,

take them to court, and make their lives so miserable

that they would just eventually throw up their hands

and say, "We give up."

- You know, he really felt ownership over all of us.

You know, he would yell and say, you know

"Get your ass back here!

"What are you doing?"

He was pretty strong in his opinions.

- Although the Universal deal didn't get penned,

it did produce the negotiating point and motivation

for Midway to pay these guys what they really were worth

and recognize the value that they really were bringing

to Midway's role and placement in this industry.

[John Tobias] - I remember Ed and I were in the studio

and Larry Kasanoff was brought through by Ken Fedesna.

And Larry was familiar with Midway through Terminator 2.

- I heard through the grapevine that Midway

was testing an arcade game that was on track

to beat our Terminator 2 record.

We couldn't have that.

So partly, just to keep in touch on a friendly basis,

and partly out of competitive spirit,

I went to play it.

And I played the game in Neil Nicastro's office

on the arcade for 15 minutes.

It was Mortal Kombat, and I turned to him afterward,

and I said, "If you give me the rights to this,

"I guarantee you, I promise you,

"I will make it in every medium in the world,

"movies, TV, animation, music, live stage

"you name it, 'cause I think this Star Wars

"meets Enter the Dragon."

And Neil said, "You're crazy."

I went home and I wander around our arcade in Westwood,

and I was hanging around the Mortal Kombat game.

And a little 11-year-old kid slaps a quarter down,

and he looks up and he challenges me,

and then he beats me.

And he was so empowered, you know,

"You lose, Sub-Zero wins," and I lost,

and that kid was thrilled.

And I thought, I'm gonna make this into a movie.

- I was an aspiring filmmaker.

I grew up in the north of England,

and then discovered no one made movies

in the north of England.

So I moved to London and then discovered no one in London

made the kind of movies I loved.

So I ended up moving to LA.

And the first movie I did when I moved to LA

was Mortal Kombat.

And I had become really obsessed with it

when I played it in arcades in London.

- Paul Anderson had a tremendously great, great,

great manager who kept calling me and saying,

"You gotta see this guy's film."

And I thought, this guy's done some small, British art film.

There's no way.

But in Paul's small, British art film,

there was one three minute fight scene.

And I liked the energy of the fight scen

[hard rock music]

[man yelling]

- It's always a cultural clash with the video game company

and the movie people, again, because the video game people

are used to not having to make story decisions.

Left, right, center, fine.

It's what, remember, you the audience want.

The movie, you have to make decisions for the character.

So they were incredibly involved,

but it was always a little bit of that, you know,

odd two cultures meshing scenario.

It always is.

It still is with any video game company and movie company.

- The first thing I remember was thinking

well, how are these guys gonna change

what we produced.

- The question in Mortal Kombat was

what to do with the finishing moves,

because they were extraordinarily violent

It would have made the movie Rated R,

which would have negated a lot of kids from seeing it.

And it would have made you lack empathy

with the main character.

If Johnny Cage ripped people's spines out

in a movie, which is more real than a video game,

you wouldn't have liked him.

- I think they ended up being PG, right?

Weren't the Mortal Kombat movies PG?

You can't make a Mortal Kombat movie

and have it be accurate unless it's like NC-17.

And then it's gonna play in art houses,

and who's gonna go see Mortal Kombat

in an art house?

Me, I probably would, but...

- Well, the most difficult thing in the movie

was actually Goro.

- Good ol' Goro, the last great physical

animatronic character didn't work quite as well

as we wanted to.

So we had to cut down some of the lines of Goro.

- The producers had committed to him

before I became involved in the movie.

So they're already building him.

And you know, ultimately, I don't know whether

I would have gone in that direction.

You know, we built Goro.

It was like, it was a man in a suit,

who then on his shoulders wore big, animatronic torso

with another two arms.

And of course, he just broke down all the time.

Goro became like the biggest diva on set

We're always waiting for Goro.

- So we go and we decide we're gonna show Neil Nicastro

the movie before it comes out.

So we bring out this, some bad copy of the movie,

and we show it to him.

He looks at me, he goes, "Based out of 10, maybe a 3."

And so, he just hated the movie.

- And I remember thinking,

when they did the first trailer and they used that music

and they basically just showed these characters.

[Mortal Kombat music]

- [Announcer] Kano.

Liu Kang.

Raiden.

Johnny Cage.

Scorpion.

Sub-Zero.

Sonya.

- It's not terribly imaginative.

I was a little disappointed, to be honest

And then I saw it play in cinemas.

And I was sitting in the cinema,

and there's a couple of Mortal Kombat fans, obviously,

in front of me.

And they loved it.

They loved it.

And what they loved was that you could s

they were making a mental checklist.

Scorpion, tick.

Sub-Zero, tick.

Raiden, tick.

And they actually said that to one another.

It's like, oh, they're all there.

- [Man] Mortal Kombat!

[Mortal Kombat theme music]

- [Announcer] Kombat begins.

- So now it comes the most nerve wracking time

in the life of a movie producer or director.

The movie's essentially done,

and now you're waiting for it to be released.

- [Reporter] Mortal Kombat as a video game

is already a two billion, with a B, dollar business.

The take is going up this weekend with the debut

of the feature film based on the game,

starring Christopher Lambert as Raiden.

- New Line calls me up and says,

"I've never seen numbers like this.

"We're breaking records all over the world."

You go, oh, thank goodness.

And then you have a great weekend.

- I mean, he was a very smart producer.

This guy got Mortal Kombat, you know,

and set it up as a movie,

when a lot of people, I think, were doubting

whether it was good idea to adapt video games or not.

- Did Neil ever own up to his prediction to me

that I was crazy and it would be an utter failure?

I don't think he did.

I think he probably owes me that.

[Neil Nicastro] - We had a very entrepreneurial

compensation structure so that if you were running a team,

and that game became very successful,

you were gonna make a lot of money.

Guys were walking away with million-dollar checks, plus.

- They had a limit of how much bonus money

they would ever pay you over one title.

I think it was $2 million.

And as Neil explained it, it's like,

"Well, I'm not gonna pay you any more than $2 million,

"because the moment I do,

"you don't need to come into work anymore

"And I want you to carry on making games for us."

- Each team was really competitive.

Ed Boon and I were kind of at the top

of the competition scale.

I don't know if this is true or not,

but Ken Fedesna actually told me

that when it came time to negotiate contracts,

Ed wanted to make sure he had a salary

that was one dollar higher than my salary

- We were talking about the compensation structure

and how some may view that as

creating a bad atmosphere where you're pitting teams

against each other.

And I could understand and appreciate that.

Some people think that is destructive.

But I think those are the same, you know, thoughts

that think that communist consciousness works,

that we have a desire to work hard

for the benefit of our fellow man.

I think that's bullshit.

- Everybody, every designer, every developer

on the Williams, and I'm still to this day,

I think of them as the Williams side,

were very, went out of their way to make us feel welcome,

but in a way that was very different

from what we were used to at old Bally Midway.

I mean, guys like Eugene and Jack Haeger

and Ed and Mark, all would come up to us and say,

"Hey, this is the way it works here,"

and "Glad to have you guys.

"You're gonna do great stuff here,

"but don't go talk to them.

"They're not doing it right."

- And it would just push them.

People have that drive.

It would just push them to do better

because the people that just wanna help everybody else out,

they typically don't have that burning desire

to prove something.

- If you look at thehistory of the department,

we started out with nothing.

And we had to build this whole department, and get,

I mean, we were nobody,

and we were fighting like the Ataris of the world.

And there was a point when we all were together.

Like everybody's like clicking.

We're all working with each other.

And then, you know, I'll be very honest,

success came and screwed the whole thing up.

- Footage came from the Tokyo Game Show.

- [Game] Ready, go!

[fighting and punching]

- And the footage was of Virtual Fighter

And the moment that was seen,

everybody looked at each other and went,

"We need to be doing this."

And then forced their turn.

This was when Mortal Kombat 3 was happening.

They turned to Ed, and Ed's like, "I'm not ready.

"I'm elbow-deep in Mortal Kombat 3.

"I'm not doing this."

And so this other team that was making a tank game

decided, we're gonna make a fighting game

[inspirational musical burst]

- We were making a fighting game in the company

that made Mortal Kombat.

And I think that was a huge challenge,

because I think a lot of people thought

War Gods was going to be Mortal Kombat 4, or whatever.

And it was not.

- You know, it seemed like thematically,

they were a little closer, too close to Mortal Kombat.

- It was unadulteratedly a ripoff of Mortal Kombat.

They used all exact control mechanisms

with the joysticks and the buttons.

It was just, it was no beating around the bush.

This was Mortal Kombat, but in 3D.

[characters yelling]

- Nobody had it.

Nobody has a corner on ideas, you know?

Just kind of ideas come and flow,

and we needed to do what was best for the department.

But it could get very difficult sometime

- People would walk past an office

where some of the Mortal Kombat guys were in there.

If you were on the War Gods team,

they would literally shut the door in your face.

- Did we get any help from the MK guys on War Gods?

And that answer is zero.

- It was, it was ugly. [laughs]

- You know, that's the way,

you know, the way management pitted the teams

against each other.

That kind of didn't help the situation.

- I think I remember one of the reviews,

we all had a good chuckle at this,

one of the reviews was War Gods, God Awful.

[dance music]

[Eugene Jarvis]- Well, we had been working on Cruis'n project

for, God, I don't know, maybe,

I guess two-and-a-half, maybe only three years.

You know, we were running out of money

and kind of over budget and over time [laughs]

- At the time, Nintendo was touting their Ultra 64.

[Announcer] - Project Reality.

Leagues beyond any currently available

or anticipated hardware,

Project Reality will bring to home video players

the same types of astounding visual effects

seen in movies, like Terminator 2.

- They were making a push just to show

that we've got this incredibly powerful,

polygon generating new video game system

- So the Ultra 64 was really vaporware at the time.

They didn't have anything.

They were a year away.

So they came to Neil Nicastro and they came to Williams

and said, "Listen, what do you guys have

- You know, went to Eugene, and I said,

"Hey Gene, if I can get you this amount of money,"

I think it was "give me all your rights

"to the home side of it."

Eugene says "Yes, if you get me X.

"I'll be happy with that."

And then we ended up getting another figure from Nintendo

that was like a big multiple of X.

- And so we decided

rather than going broke, that we would go back to Midway.

[laughs]

- So Nintendo was bragging that it was going to based

on the N64 and everything else and stuff

Well, of course, showing it at the CES Show

was not running on N64.

It wasn't anywhere near N64.

- You know, we kinda had to swallow hard on that one,

because it was, it was our hardware.

It was hardware that we created in there

And they were labeling it the Nintendo hardware.

- [Announcer] Only on Nintendo Ultra 64.

- Nintendo system being in the Cruis'n game?

Somebody in their marketing department made that up

after the fact.

[video game music]

- When the Nintendo thing came along,

it enabled us to come back and really ha

a longer runway for us to finish the game

And the advantage that we had by doing that was,

I'm not saying that we were doing it in a bubble.

But we weren't amongst the Turmells of the world

and the Boons of the world, and so on,

that could give us valuable information.

- And they were kinda brutal on our game

I mean, the Cruis'n USA.

I remember Fedesna was like, "Yeah, snoozin'."

That was his term for it.

- I do remember that.

But I don't remember who gave it that name.

But it had to be one of the other guys.

It wasn't me that gave it the name Snoozin'.

- Here was the guy that abandoned them

in the coming back.

And it was a little bit awkward for a while.

- Oh, when that game came in, it was garbage.

It was like, it was such garbage.

And Eugene knew it, too.

That's why he came back in.

He was wise enough to know he needed,

you know, he needed that punch, that he would get Turmell.

I mean, Turmell would sit around that ga

and just write stuff.

You know, I would talk about it.

- We got that energy, like that negative vibe,

like, you know, like ooh, you know, like

and then we got movin' and it was cool.

It was really cool to get that frank input.

What really hurts is the truth [laughs]

- The common denominator in everything that we did

was that we all worked for Eugene.

And we all like, we all grew up on Eugene's games.

Ask Mark Turmell, Eugene fan.

Ask Ed.

You know, we all worked for Eugene.

He was our guy, you know?

He was Stan Lee, man. [laughs]

- Cruis'n was a huge commercial success.

But critically, actually, it took a lot of flack,

because it was more of a casual player's driving game.

Actually appealed a lot to girls.

Like teenage girls loved the driving mechanic

and loved, you know, like pre-drivers,

like practicing for their license.

- The startup cost to going to play a fighting game

is high, right, like everyone's paying attention,

and you're having to play with another person.

You're probably looking for a slightly different experience.

You might be lookingfor a machine

that's not as crowded so you can go play

and kind of be left alone.

- You know, we just took all this flack,

that we were sellouts, and our game sucked,

and there was no skill.

And you know what's crazy is I look at Cruis'n USA today

and from today's standards, which is,

I guess 28-odd years later.

The game actually is horribly difficult [laughs]

So if you put it out in an arcade today,

people would refuse to play it, it's so hard.

[voice speaking on overhead]

[music]

- When I interviewed Ed and John about Mortal Kombat 3,

we had already spoken a few times before

and I said, you know, "You're on your third game.

"Are you tired?"

And they actually did sound a little bit tired.

- [Ed Boon] To some degree,

we've become like a Mortal Kombat factory

in the sense that we know exactly how to do the backgrounds.

We know exactly how to do characters.

We know how to do all the throws, and the filming.

We're just like an assembly line.

- [Dan Amrich] Right.

- [Ed Boon] So in that respect, we're like, you know,

you kinda wish at getting a chance to do something

completely different.

- Apparently, there was at the time a pitch

for a Star Wars game.

And when we started talking about

what that potential Star Wars game could be,

on the record, they lit up.

They were so happy.

And I could tell, these guys need their batteries recharged.

They needed to shift gears out of Mortal Kombat

to keep Mortal Kombat interesting for themselves.

And I really believe that that's what The Grid became.

The Grid was a six-player competitive death match game

with completely different controls.

- And then it had all these sensibilities

that came from SmashTV.

- Good luck.

You'll need it.

- You've got two minutes to get five points.

Good luck!

Mike Mika - It was trying to be this thing that was creating

a sport out of this new kind of interfac

a new kind of way to play.

It had all the makings and the trimmings

of what would be a big e-sport today,

but all the way back in the '90s.

- We'll get people here that it's like,

hey, we're gonna be on The Grid all night

If anybody's saying we need to be off, let us know,

just because we just wanna grind out and play

for six hours of The Grid.

- The Grid was Ed Boon having fun.

He really did, he let it all out.

He let himself do something different.

And you can see that there's a joy in that game,

of him being able to shift gears

and stretch a different part of his design brain.

I always see it as sort of Ed Boon's vacation game

that he worked so hard on

that it was not a vacation at all.

- We only sold 550 Grids, it was, approximately.

There was nothing.

Grid earned terribly as a single unit.

If you had four or the six units togethe

The problem there was, though,

you gotta buy four cabinets or four sets of electronics

and everything else.

So now in order to get the earnings,

which you're talking about,

you had to invest, instead of X, you had to invest 4X.

- You know, the operators expected every game

that comes out has to earn, you know,

so much money per week.

There was no way that every game was going to come out

and earn two grand a week.

It just wasn't going to happen.

- All management wanted to do was just,

they wanted to stamp out.

Basically, if they could have stamped ou

more Mortal Kombats, you know, in a row,

that's what they would've done.

- We went to the well too many times with the same mechanics

or not enough innovation.

- But it was in the late '90s I saw the warning signs

that things may be getting more difficult

in the coin-op area.

- The consoles for the home get more sophisticated.

The CD-Rom is a hugely important technology.

And it brings that kind of arcade-style graphics

into the home.

- I could feel that what we could do as a company

on the hardware side wasn't going to be able to approach

that what a whole team of engineers could pull off.

- Console gaming really changed how I felt about games

because I was able to take my time.

I was able to play games without somebody

looking over my shoulder and judging

whether I was good or not.

And I was able to experiment.

I was really happy when consoles came about,

because then there were games for me, to

Whereas in a arcade, there is,

you know, if I weren't good at Street Fighter,

you know, the whole sort of experience kind of stopped

at a certain level.

- I think the other thing that had a huge impact

was the internet.

So the social aspect of the arcade,

where that's where you would go and trash talk your buddy

and friend, you could now find ways to do that

playing your game, but also via the internet.

- In fact, I remember an operator telling me once,

when the Monica Lewinsky conversation got published

on the internet, that he saw a decline in his audience.

Like, it seems weird, but the internet became

like this entertainment factor.

- I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

- And people stopped going to arcades.

- So it was that period of time where, you know,

you feel yourself being, you see your future,

and your future looks crappy.

And you feel

somewhat paralyzed to actually make a change.

I'd say that's probably the crappiest time.

- You know, Neil basically had a meeting and he said,

"Hey, I think the days are numbered

"for the coin-op business."

- So the writing was on the wall.

Things started falling apart very quickl

And you had this millions of dollars of overhead

in coin-op and it was decided, okay,

we're gonna get out of coin-op

because there's so much more money,

theoretically to be made, on the consume

than there was in coin-op.

And that was the end of coin-op.

Pinball first, then came Midway,

as far as coin-op was concerned.

- Games were focused direct-to-consumer now.

You know, Sony, et cetera.

And it took all of the arcade mechanics out.

It took the ways that we percentaged games,

the way we would bring a player through a game.

Certainly, consumer development is a lot more complex

and requires, you know, higher structure in a team,

and more team members.

But that did change what Midway was for all those years

in the '80s and '90s.

- When you look at it sort of in the grand scheme of things,

it was fairly short-lived.

My career at Midway spanned, I think,

a little bit longer than maybe a decade.

And I experienced the rebirth and then the death

of an industry.

- You know, we had this great thing,

and it was kind of like the party was over.

You know, it was just like, it's two AM.

Everybody's got a headache.

And we had, what a ride we had.

But they're closing up the disco, man.

And you go home with a headache, and that was it.

[video game music]

- There was just nothing like the experience

of going to an arcade.

It was like a dark cave filled with simulators

that were like portals to other realities

Like I could pilot a starship over here,

or kill drug dealers over here,

or be a NBA champion.

You know, any fantasy that you could have

you could go and put in a quarter

and live out that fantasy.

- Whenever you think of arcade style,

an arcade-style product, a fast-paced product,

I think that was birthed by a lot of what we were producing.

- You cannot plan that coalescing of the talent.

Just the way everybody came together,

you know, that made all these games is so ridiculous.

Nobody planned that. Nobody wrote on a

piece of paper, now I need a Mark Turmell.

Now I need an Ed Boon type.

Now I need a Eugene Jarvis, or whatever.

- Remember who's creating these games.

Guy from Michigan, guy from California, guy from Illinois.

And as they're, they went through their life,

playing all these different things,

they said, "You know," their brains are turning,

"Wouldn't it be interesting if you could do this?

"Wouldn't it be interesting if you could do that?"

Then these guys grow up, and they come knocking on the door,

or they get a job working for a company like Midway

or Williams, and somebody says to them,

"Okay, what's your idea?"

"Oh, I got this brilliant idea!

"I want to do this!"

"Okay."

[upbeat video game music]

- I definitely put in code to have Pistons score in

late periods at a higher rate, than the Bulls

Because in that era, it was Pistons Vs Bulls

[Josh Tsui] So you're a Detroit fan working in Chicago

- Yeah, I was a Piston fan living in Chicago

and I had to watch the Jordan era unfold night after night

So I did my little part to make the Pistons

better than the Bulls. At least in NBA JAM

- I first discovered the game when I went to church

and I was going across the street to get some candy

and I ran into this brand new game that showed up

called Mortal Kombat

Blew my mind, I saw this one person playing and...

it was the perfect balance between gore and competitiveness

and a chance for a a nerdy little Asian kid to actually...

be toe to toe against all kinds of different people

I hated going to church, so every Sunday...

I would tell my mom I'm going to church all of a sudden

When I would go, I would go across the street

and play this videogame, literally for 2 hours straight

My mom didn't have a clue, but all of a sudden...

She didn't know why I loved church so much

- It was the mid 90s and I was approached by a PC programmer

about doing a possible skate game

I went with him to pitch to publishers

and we ended up at Midway

It was probably the most defeating meeting I ever had

The whole meeting felt contentious,

it was almost like we were wasting their time

They said, "Skateboarding is not even popular

"why would anyone want to play...

...a videogame based on skateboarding?"

I've been in plenty of pitch meetings

I didn't necessarily expect everyone to

or there'd be bidding war for our game

but at the same time I didn't expect to be just beat down

I think I needed to go through that, it me up to

for what became Tony Hawk's Pro Skater