Hello it's blogging time once again and today i'm doing something a bit different as im starting a possible new blog series Im calling Games That Might Have Been where I take a look at canceled games that never made it, and try to speculate what they might have been like. Im certainly starting off on a somber note as the game im looking at has ties to someone we have sadly lost recently. She was known for her looks as much as her personality, and over her 80 year life she had incredible success as a country singer, an actress, and a buisnesswoman. I'm of course talking about Dolly Parton.
Born into poverty in rural Tennessee in 1946, Parton began writing songs at the young age of six, performed on television by the time she was 10, making her first recording a year later, and became a professional songwriter at age 16. After writing songs for others, she released her debut album, Hello, I'm Dolly in 1967. From 1967 to 2023, Parton had released 49 studio albums and wrote more than 3,000 songs, with many of them earing her gold, platinum, and multi-platinum certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 11 Grammy Awards a Tony Award, and was logged 25 number-one Billboard country singles (tied with Reba McEntire for the most by a woman), 44 career top-10 country albums (a record for any artist), and 110 career-charted singles over 40 years, Earning her the nickname the "Queen of Country" and making one of the most successful country music performers in history.
Though Parton certainly made her mark as musician, She also had success in acting for movies and televsion. While she earned of 400 credits to her name, her first and best known film was the comedy classic 9 to 5.
The plot concerns three women three women (played by Fonda, Tomlin, and Parton) who live out their fantasies of getting even with and overthrowing their company's autocratic, their egotistical, sexist boss (played by Dabney Coleman).
While the film is a comedy, its insparation and subject mater is anything but a laughing matter. The Story of 9 to 5 begins in 1973 in Boston Massachussetes with the founding of an orginization called the 9to5, National Association of Working Women.
Founded by Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy, the orginization itially focused on women's rights activism and antiwar movements. But after running low on money and taking jobs as secretaries, Nussbaum and Cassedy observed firsthand the mistreatment and inequities faced by women in office work. These experiences inspired them to develop the concept of a labor organization specifically for women office workers.
This work managed to attract the attention of someone who was dedicated to womens rights: political activist and actress Jane Fonda.
Fonda happened to be a freind of Nussbaum and Nussbaum would often recount the stories of sexual harrasment that members faced before joining. Horrified, the stories resenated with Fonda and felt that it would make a great premise for a movie.
By then she had formed her own film production company, IPC Films which produced both the Vietnam Documentary Introduction To The Enemy in 1974, and the anti nuclear power thriller The China Syndrome in 1979. The latter of which ended up being a box office hit earning $51.7 million on a production budget of $5.9 million, giving IPC Films enough finaces to explore the idea.
Originally it was going to be a drama where the three women would actually end up killing the boss, but they felt it would be too preachy and too much leaning toward the femminist side so instead they decided to make it a comedy.
As for casting, while the film was written with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton in mind, they weren't sure if they were going to be casted and had they been unavailible, the parts would have went to Carol Burnett and Ann-Margret. Luckily Tomlin and Parton were able to be casted and got the parts.
However Parton had one condition: she could write the film's theme song. They of course obliged, and the films theme song became of her biggest hits of the decade. Interestingly enough the song made its debut a month before the movie came out on her album 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.
After months of production, The film was finally released in the US on December 19th, 1980 and was a massive success, grossing over $103.3 million at the box office and reciving positive reviews from both critics and audiences, and would spawn both a tv sitcom and a broadway musical.
However fast forward to 1981 and the film would almost get adapted into an unexpected form. At the time, the films distributer, 20th Century Fox, was sold for $720 million to investors Marc Rich and Marvin Davis. Under their leadership, Fox would begin adapting its properties into the 3 biggest growing forms in entertainment in the early 1980's: Home Video, Cable TV, and Of course Video Games.
While Fox wasn't as interested in video games as they were with home video and cable, they were aware that the video game industry was growing at a rapid pace, even making more than the motion picture industry were their main focus was, so it made sense to at least look into it.
So in January 1982, Davis met with Frank O'Connell, the former Senior Vice President in charge of sales and marketing for Mattel Electronics division around the time Intellivision to discuss the idea of Fox branching out into the video game market. O'Connell was then contacted by Fox and signed a $5 million deal to turn his Santa Clara start-up Elite Capital Partners into a video game company.
The result was Fox Video Games, formed in April 1982 to produce video games for the Atari Video Computer System (later known as the Atari 2600).
Fox Initially had a line up of 4 games: Fast Eddie, Deadly Duck, Worm War I and Beany Bopper all of which launched in July of 1982.
To develop these games, Fox reached out to another company called Sirius Software. Sirius Software was a small Apple II game developer out of Sacramento and they had quite a backround. They were founded in 1980 by 2 men: Jerry Jewell and Terry Bradley.
Bradley was the owner of a local Computerland store and Jewell worked as a sales manager at his store. One day, a college student named Nasir Gebelli walked into the store with a disk containing some graphic utility programs he wrote.
Though Bradley thought that the program was merely "OK" and asked to keep the disks for a day or two, Jewell was impressed enough to ask him to help him to incorporate his work into Jewells own program, which would become E-Z Draw, one of the earliest graphics editors for the Apple II.
E-Z Draw (1980)
Together they formed Sirius Software with the goal of writing games for the Apple II. They managed tor crank out some notable hits like Gorgon (A clone of Defender) and Space Eggs (A fixed space shooter inspired by Nichibutsu's Moon Cresta).
Their success caught Fox's Attention and Sirius contracted with Fox Video Games to develop 12 games for the Atari 2600. Fox, in turn, was to develop 12 games adaptable to personal computers that would be marked by Sirius with each company taking royalties on sales.
But Fox also had plans to adopt titles from their films into games. They had 3 games that would follow this stratagy: Alien, Megaforce, and Fantastic Voyage, all released a few months later in November.
But they did have plans for more movie based games down the road. these titles included Porky's, Six Pack, The Entity, Tough Enough, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and of course, 9 to 5.
Now as you can probably gather, most of these games were cancelled before they were even released. Porky's did end up getting a release on both the 2600 and Colecovision, and The Entity did make it into the prototype stage, but the rest were never made.
Left to right: Porky's (1982) and The Entity prototype (1983)
Six Pack, Tough Enough, and The Day The Earth Stood Still might earn some looks another day, but for now, lets look at 9 to 5. While a gameplay mock up doesnt exist, there is a short description in Foxes Press Kit saying: "A secretary's work is never done: dictation, typing letters, filing, and it all has to be done on time. Now, the boss wants coffee, and time is running short. Can she keep up with the pace?".
With that description, its clear that the game was suposed to be based of that one specific scene in the movie where Lilly Tomlin's character, Violet, needs to make coffee for Dabney Coleman's Character, Frank Hart Jr. and in the process mistakes the sweetener for rat poison thinking that she poisoned him. Seems a little bare bones to me, as I feel it would have been a better fit to base it of the famous fantasy sequences from all three characters in the film so you could have 3 levels, but hey, it works.
So with that description, what kind of game would it have possibly been like? Well, in my head im thinking something along the lines of the game Lost Lugage by Games of Apollo, which itself is was a take on the Kaboom! formula.
Lost Luggage (1982)
It also may be something allong the lines of a maze game. Not a dot collection game like Pac-Man, but more something along the lines of Konami's Turnpin or Brouderbunds Spare Change where you have to move the character to sections in the game to to certain tasks.
Left to right: Turnpin (1981) and Spare Change (1982)
Now there are some clues from behind the seen that can give some insight. According to Alien Megaforce and M*A*S*H programer Doug Neubauer, Foxes games were typically developed within 3 months and were only 4K in size. Those could also be the reason why they didnt think to base it on the fantasy sequences, as they might have just not have had the time or ROM space to make any idea they had work.
So with all of this said, here are some mockups of the two concepts of what the game may have been like with the Collection game on the left, and the Maze like one on the right.
Of course this is all just speculation, what the game may have actully been like, we may never know! But anyway, what happened to Fox Video Games?
Well naturally, the Video Game Crash of 1983 hit Fox hard and experienced terrible financial losses by overproducing cartridges of their video game M*A*S*H . While O'Connell expressed interest in the digital distribution of video games being developed by Romox Inc., 20th Century Fox decided to pull the plug on the division and left the video games industry in 1983.
They also ended up taking Sirius Software down with them as they never ended up paying the royalties they owed them for development of their games, Resulting in Sirius shutting down in 1984.
10 years later in 1994, Fox revisited the video game buisness with a new division Fox Interactive publishing games based of properties like Die Hard, The X-Files, And The Simpsons. publishing games for consoles, the PC and the Mac, before being sold to Vevendi in 2006.
So thats ends our look at what could have been 9 to 5 for the Atari 2600. While it certainly may have not ended up being a great game, especially since it was very early for movie liscenced games and most movie based games even today aren't known for being memorable, it certainly stands as an interesting history peice just like the movie its based on. While 9 to 5 the movie stands as a historical snapshot of the harsh realities of women in the workforce from the 1970s going into 1980, the concept of 9 to 5 the game stands as a historical snapshot of when the video game industry was still new and publishers were rushing out with the most outrages concepts with hopes of coming out on top. that wraps it up for my entry today, as always, Thanks for reading! see you next time!
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