Boom

Back at video games for a bit. Not long after Pong made a splash in the arcades (shipping some 6000 units, astonishing for the time)rival companies came out with their version of the game to compete with the dwindling pinball machine market. Pinball machines were the dominant force in the arcades and saloons for nearly 40 years until Pong came along and everyone wanted a piece. Although there was a Pong for home use and the Odyssey could have been THE game console, Atari set its sites on more arcade conquests.

Atari started a new company called Kee Games to make more games. The arcade business was closely regulated by the game machine distributors then, with machines divvied up by territory. This resulted in a hit like Pong being suffocated because only so many could be in any one area. So Kee was started to simply get more Atari games out there. The cool thing was that Kee's first game was a good one: Tank. A true first of its kind, it brought strategy, tactics and lots of good fun loving death and destruction to the players fingertips.

Designed by Steve Bristow and Lyle Rains, Tank, like Pong, was simple yet satisfying. The player had two joysticks for movement, a la real tank, and a fire button. This was a fight against your buddy, who, like you, has to navigate a maze, avoid mines and enemy fire, and score as many hits as possible before time was up. Several versions of the arcade game were designed; a stand up model and a sit down table version. There is a third variant called a "cocktail cabinet" that is a waist high table version. Although the monitor was black and white, the tanks merely sprites that looked a bit like a tank, it was the first video game to store game data on ROM chips.

Tank was so popular that the arcade game distributors didn't care any more who had what rights to what game and where they went. All they knew was they needed as many as possible. Atari admitted that it was really Kee games and by 1975 Atari was releasing Tank too.

Hmmm, innovative leisure.