1975 · Microprocessor Arcade Game · Work 891 of 1,871
An upright arcade cabinet in a wood-panelled bar in Illinois on a winter night after closing, seen in three-quarter view from its rear side, its screen facing the far wall and casting a cool white glow onto the panelling, the side panel dark brown with abstract geometric shapes in orange, yellow and cream, two upright dark brown handles at the far front edge, the rear door open on a green circuit board with a row of plain smooth unmarked black chips, a serviceman in a denim jacket seen from directly behind, kneeling at the open door with a small screwdriver, a canvas bag of quarter coins on the floor.
What it was used for
A coin-operated machine from Midway Mfg., released in November 1975 per arcade-history, with more than 8,000 units built in the US and an Intel 8080 at 1.9968 MHz as its main CPU; a cocktail-table version also existed. Its model was Taito's Western Gun, which the same source says used discrete TTL logic; the Strong National Museum of Play records that Midway's version was the first Japanese arcade game to reach the United States. The programmer Tom McHugh says in an interview that he does not think he ever saw Western Gun himself and may not have been aware of it until much later, and that Dave Nutting specified what should happen on the screen.
What was new
What marked it was where the movement came from: a program instead of wired logic. McHugh describes the routine - Nutting's drawing, turned by him into hexadecimal and then into a table of bytes, then into EPROM - and gives as the reason for the 8080 that it was all that was available; there were no 16-bit processors. The processor could not handle much, he says; the patterns were traced by a hardware shifter from Jeff Fredricksen. The Strong Museum calls Gun Fight the first arcade game to use a microprocessor, arcade-history even the first video game to incorporate one; Electronics360 calls it Midway's first microprocessor-based arcade game and, in a caption, one of the first arcade games powered by the Intel 8080.
What the sources leave open: The sting comes from the Strong Museum, which attributes the point to Chris Kohler's book "Power Up": the superior animation convinced Taito's designer Tomohiro Nishikado to use a microprocessor instead of integrated circuits for Space Invaders. arcade-history makes its priority claim without citing a source. None of the checked pages gives a sale price.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.