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Concept
Cinematronics
Summary
Cinematronics Incorporated was an arcade game developer that primarily released vector graphics games in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While other companies released games based on raster displays, early in their history, Cinematronics and Atari, Inc. released vector-display games, which offered a distinctive look and a greater graphic capability (at the time), at the cost of being only black and white (initially). Cinematronics also published Dragon's Lair in 1983, the first major LaserDisc video game.
Cinematronics Inc. was founded in 1975 by San Diego Chargers football players Dennis Partee and Gary Garrison in Kearny Mesa, California. Soon after, they brought in a third partner named Jim Pierce to manage the company's day-to-day operations. Cinematronics' first games, a Pong clone, a Flipper Ball copy and their first original game design, Embargo, were released in 1975, 1976, and 1977, but they were not particularly notable. In 1977, Pierce and mortgage broker Ralph Clarke bought out Garrison's share of the company.
In 1977, MIT graduate Larry Rosenthal approached Cinematronics with a custom TTL-based hardware of his own design that could run the mainframe computer game Spacewar! cheaply enough that it could be placed in arcades. Needing a hit to keep the company afloat, Jim Pierce agreed to manufacture it in exchange for a five percent royalty.
Cinematronics introduced the game under the name Space Wars at the annual trade show of the Amusement and Music Operators of America in October 1977, but did not have sufficient funds to enter production. In early 1978, Pierce brought in a new partner, a veteran operator of coin-operated amusements named Tom Stroud. Stroud bought out Partee's share of the company and helped fund the production of Space Wars.
Space Wars was the first arcade game to use black & white vector graphics, which enabled it to display sharper, crisper visuals than the raster displays of the time. Space Wars was the best-selling coin-operated video game of 1978 and ultimately sold more than 7,000 units.
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