Show Notes
We speak with Walter Day, the grandfather of e-sports and the inspiration for Wreck-it-Ralph’s avuncular arcade manager, Mr Litwack. Walter is the founder of the long-defunct but world-famous Twin Galaxies video arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the international scoreboard of the same name. Day waxes lyrical about the trials and tribulations of running an arcade during the Golden Age of electronic gaming, the films Chasing Ghosts and King of Kong, his brief stint as an oil futures trader and, of course, transcendental meditation. We also ask Walter for his official position on the ongoing furore surrounding Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong high-scores.
More from The Ted Dabney Experience
Despite lacking any knowledge whatsoever of the amusement industry, Kellogg’s sales manager Alistair Crooks and eccentric former RAF airman Phil Smith convinced a young Nolan Bushnell that they were the right men to introduce Atari’s Pong to the United Kingdom in 1973. Swiftly moving from importing to manufacturing, the company arguably grew too fast and was ill positioned to weather the perfect storm of the OPEC Oil Crisis and the Three Day Week, ultimately lasting only fourteen months. This is a nuts-and-bolts yet captivating tale of what might have been, recounted with modesty and good humour.
Doug Macrae founded General Computer Corporation in 1981 with Kevin Curran whilst still an MIT student and would go on to employ many other MIT students, including previous guests Steve Golson and Jonathan Hurd. We talk with Macrae at length about the disruptive business model and general chutzpah of the fledgling company, and what can only be described as GCC playing high-stakes chess with the biggest videogame company in town, Atari Inc. They went on not only to make such inventive arcade titles as Food Fight and Quantum for Atari, but also created one of the most successful coin-ops of all time for Bally Midway, Ms. Pac-Man.
John Ray joined Atari Inc in 1977 as a hardware engineer, learning the ropes with 1978’s Fire-Truck, arguably the first truly co-op arcade game and a distinctive arcade presence due in no small part to his analogue circuitry audio. Ray was also involved with the Atari-licensed versions of Namco’s Dig Dug and Xevious, the awesome arcade version of Tetris and — into the 1990s — the hugely popular San Francisco Rush racing series.
The Ted Dabney Experience is a podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander - A Journey to The Top of an Arcade Classic). We host in-depth conversations with the creative leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op Video Arcade gaming.
Rob Quinn joined Stern just as the company was branching out from it's core pinball business to explore the brave new world of videogames. Rob talks about his involvement with the company's early hit, Berzerk, his experiments with laser disc technology and his personal misgivings about how the company was managed.