if you could interview them today....

vintagegamer

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What does everyone think the game designers and actual builders (the guys that were in the trenches actually assembling all of these games) would say today, knowing that many PCB's have held up for decades, a whole new hobby of collecting has surfaced because of their efforts, and everything else?

I also can't help but wonder what they would say about the placement of batteries on PCBs (on both game and power supply boards), and what they theorized "might" happen back then to the boards in their current designs, only to have their feedback rejected by the Brass? Some examples I'm thinking of are the battery damage on MCR power supply boards, and the positioning of the battery on game boards like Omega Race (that ended up leaking all over).

I know also that, as many of us have discussed in the past, the true plan for many of these games was that they were only intended to survive a couple of years and that would be it. So, maybe the builders would be more surprised than anything, about the state of many of those games today?
 
There's been a quite a few interviews with some of the games designers. Usually they are pretty open and have some good stories. Not sure many people have asked targeted negative questions though.

I've always wanted an interview with a few of the people from Atari who designed the controls.
 
There's been a quite a few interviews with some of the games designers. Usually they are pretty open and have some good stories. Not sure many people have asked targeted negative questions though.

I've always wanted an interview with a few of the people from Atari who designed the controls.

Yeah I've seen some of the details that have come from the designers, but one of the reasons I thought about it from the builders' point of view is, they were the ones actually putting the components IN the cabs, and seeing where things might actually go South. I don't know what other games had serious design flaws, but I can only wonder, being an Omega Race owner, how many of those games met their death early on thanks to the battery sprinkler system..
 
Myself, I've never been a big fan of ARII's. I would rather have a system fail over low voltage, than to have a power supply that keeps pumping out the volts until everything in its path burns up through power and sense lines. I'm sure they didn't see that coming, but still wonder what they would think about it today.
 
The magic in the games, for us, probably didn't filter out into most of those who built them. I think most of them would be roughly as nostalgic about their work as I am about the machined parts I made 20 years ago for Browning Firearms.

If some gun nut asked me what it was like to be part of making the gun/bow he loves, I'd be hard pressed to come up with an answer other than "Hey man, it was just a job I had in college".
 
The magic in the games, for us, probably didn't filter out into most of those who built them. I think most of them would be roughly as nostalgic about their work as I am about the machined parts I made 20 years ago for Browning Firearms.

If some gun nut asked me what it was like to be part of making the gun/bow he loves, I'd be hard pressed to come up with an answer other than "Hey man, it was just a job I had in college".

That is a very good point, Sean. I'm sure that many may have gone down that path since business was booming, even tho for them it may have been 'just a job'.
 
I would like to ask the guy that designed the marquee for Star Wars WTF he was thinking? :mad:

Yes, I did spend many hours last night trying to remove the adhesive residue from the marquee on my SW cab last night. :D
 
Of the designers I would ask, so how loud did you scream when dual-port RAMs finally hit the market? :p
 
I think you need to break the categories down a little more. On any given game there were:
- game hardware designers
- game hardware implementer (usually but not always the same)
- power supply designers
- power supply implementers (again not always the same as the above)
- cabinet designers
- wiring harness designers
- wiring harness implementers (sometimes both building and installing the wiring)
- cabinet artwork designers
- cabinet artwork implementors
- game concept designers
- game artwork designers
- game artwork implementers
- game artwork animation artists
- game implementation designers
- game software programmers

On any given game, many items would be scavenged/stolen from previous works. This might include things like marquee installation hardware, marquee & general lighting, board placement in cabinets, power supplies, monitors, controls (buttons & joysticks), gaming hardware (i.e. board sets), etc.

So a bad decision early on, could ripple through several generations of games.

Most likely any of the hardware designers would be shocked at how many of their boards are still running. The lifetime window of these things was 5 years. Likewise any cabinet designers would probably have a stroke at seeing their cabinets still in service today, for the same reason.

I would love to get a bunch of the game concept designers in a room and talk about how they would do the games differently today with the kinds of hardware choices that are available today. But I am afraid that what they would come up with probably wouldn't stand the test of time as well. :(

Doing incredibly creative things with the limited hardware bandwidth that was available back then required some real creative geniuses both from a design and an implementation perspective. Today, they just throw more bodies and and more pixels at the problem.

ken
 
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