It's Valentine's day, the day we celebrate romance and love, and what better way to celebrate by looking at a piece of video game history that came from the decade that knew love better than any other, the 1970s.
While the Sexual Revolution was changing the way people viewed and made relationships, The video game industry started to take shape. Everybody was experimenting with the technology to see what could be done, primitive as it may have been. And one quirky title managed to combine both of these revolutions together, that title was called Score.
The Score arcade cabinet
Score is quite historically important because it really was the first video game you could play as a female character. Yes, Before Tomb Raider, Before Metroid, and even before Ms PacMan, there was Score, Unfortunately, despite this uniqueness, the game ended up selling miserably and is considered lost today.
So whats this games story? Well, to tell it's tale we need to go back to the arcade game that started it all: Pong. In August 1972, Atari first tested their creation in Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale California, and after the test proved successful, launched the game a few months later in November. It was an instant success, earning $245-$280 per week!
The original Pong Prototype
With it success, it's no surprise that other companies saw interest to do something similar. By 1973, there were many companies both in the United States and around the world making both unlicensed Pong clones and their own unique titles, And one of those companies was Exidy.
They were founded in 1973 by Pete Kaufmann, a former employee of another company called Ramtek. They were founded in 1971 by brothers Chuck and Mel McEwan with three other aerospace engineers. At first they manufactured graphic displays and imaging hardware for the medical and aerospace industries, But after seeing Atari's Pong, they decided to make their own version.
In fact, their engineers happened to be some of the first players of Atari's Pong Prototype. According to Atari engineer and Pong designer Al Alcorn, not long after he placed the prototype Pong for test in the bar, he noticed a few of Ramtek's engineers who came in every morning at 9 to play the game. Ramtek produced Volly shortly afterwards, it was a decent success selling 2,500 units and two follow ups, Hockey and Soccer, were released shortly after.
Kaufmann was an instrumental employee at Ramtek being both a founding partner and accompanying the engineers playing Pong at Andy Capp's. Seeing the potential, he left the company and together with Ampex engineer Samuel Hawes formed Exidy to make video games. The name "Exidy" was an abbreviation of "Excellence in Dynamics".
Exidy founder Pete Kauffman in 1976
Exidy's first game, TV Pinball, arrived in 1974 and in 1975, It along three other games were demonstrated that October at the MOA Show in Chicago. The three other games were Table Pinball (the cocktail version of TV Pinball), Table Foosballer, and a driving game called Destruction Derby.
Flyer for Exidy's newest titles in 1975
The demand for Destruction Derby was so great that since Exidy was so small, they had to devote their entire production line just to make Destruction Derby. To free up production, they licensed the game to another company called Chicago Coin who produced the game as Demolition Derby.
A flyer for Chicago Coin's Demolition Derby
However there was a problem, Chicago Coin was going bankrupt. So to recoup their investment and to provide a filler game til their next game Car Polo was released, Designer Howell Ivy redesigned the game adding operator-adjustable maximum time-limit of 99 seconds and adding a change that would be shocking. In order to make the gameplay seem different, Ivy changed the cars to people and hitting these stick figures the machine would emit a scream sound. Gruesome!
Death Race Gameplay
7 months after the game was released in July of 1976, a reporter for the Seattle Associated Press named Wendy Walker noticed the game at a shopping mall arcade. Shocked by what she saw, she wrote an article in the paper discussing the games graphic content and pretty soon news outlets in the US, Canada and the UK were covering the game. Even Exidy's assertion that you weren't running over people but rather "gremlins" didn't stop the controversy.
The first article discussing Death Race from the July 3, 1976 of the Daily Oregonian
However, the controversy actually had a complete opposite effect on the game and Exidy went from selling only 200 units of this cabinet to around 3000 units. What was meant to be a filler game sparked the very first controversy involving video games and Exidy became the first video game company to use shock value as a selling point.
However, while Death Race managed to drum up sales, most of their next titles didn't manage to match its success.
Left to right: flyers for Attack, Robot Bowl, and Circus (1977) (The latter being Exidy's biggest hit of that year, as it was cloned both in the arcades and on home consoles, most notable Circus Atari for the Atari 2600)
But then in July of 1977 Exidy introduced a curious new game called Score. Like many arcade games in the 1970s, it was reskin of older title. In this case it's a reskin of Death Race/Destruction Derby again, but instead of smashing cars or running over "gremlins", In this game you and or a second player controlled a male or female bar patron with the goal being to hook up with (or "score") with as many singles as you can.
The cabinet was changed too, as they replaced the steering wheels, gear shifts, and gas petals for joysticks and a small switch above to allow you to select between male and female genders. It also had a an optional dispenser that could be attached to the game and reward players with tokens for their high “score”s.
The flyer for Score (1977)
It can be assumed that Exidy made the game to lighten their image a little bit after the publicity of Death Race, but this is unconfirmed. However despite it's innovations, the game sold poorly, Likely because since many arcade games like Score ended up going into places like bars and bowling alleys (places were people would try to date anyway), most people would prefer to try and hook up for real. As a result the game sold very few units and are extremely rare to find today. In fact, No working machine has been found, nor has any screenshot of the game been captured and due to its hardware, It can't be emulated in the popular MAME emulator.
You see Score, like many arcade games of the 70s, used Transistor–transistor logic or TTL components on its PCB, so rather than use a microprocessor, the entire games logic is handled by transistors and discrete logic chips.
TTL logic arcade games were common through most of the 1970s. Even though the first CPU, The Intel 4004, debuted in 1971, a CPU would not be incorporated into an arcade game until 1975 with the release of Midway's Gun Fight, with CPU based arcade games gradually replacing TTL logic games until TTL Logic games were phased out sometime in 1980.
Now that's not to say that it's impossible emulate TTL logic arcade games, in fact there's even an emulator called DICE that can emulate a few TTL logic games like Pong and Breakout, but being that there's no working Score machine to study and recreate, it wouldn't be possible.
Or would it? Maybe to recreate Score, you don't need a working machine at all. Remember how I said Score was effectively a reskin of Death Race and Destruction Derby earlier? Well, it turns out that there already has been an attempt to recreate Death Race on a home console that was released the same year as Score, and that system was none other than the Atari 2600 (Or Video Computer System or VCS when originally released).
The first model Atari 2600 nicknamed the "Heavy Sixer" (1977)
In 2007, Enthusiast Fred “batari” Quimby designed a Atari 2600 programing language for enthusiasts called Batari Basic and included with it was a simple variation of Death Race called Zombie Chase.
In 2016, Another Homebrew enthusiast named Steven Hugg, ported Batari Basic to an online Javascript based Homebrew game development environment called 8bitworkshop and included with it came a rebranded version of Zombie Chase called Duck Chase.
Being that the games are pretty much the same, I figured that I may be able to hack up Duck Chase into a version of Score. All I had to do is just changed up the sprites and some of the color codes and I could get a very crude version of Score and sure enough with some experimenting, I got it working! So, without further ado, let's take a look at what I got.
Ok so obviously this was more of a hack than a proper conversion as it still makes car noises and has car controls, however this was something that had to be made in a shorter period of time than necessary due to my current scheduling. But i'm sure you get the idea and currently my basic hack is the closest anyone has gotten to having a playable version of Score.
So what did I change to get this game up and running? Well the first and most obvious thing is the sprites while designing the male sprite was easy, the female sprite required some speculation to think of what it may have looked like. Remember there's no screenshot of the game working so we have no idea what the sprites looked like, however I do have good idea what they may have looked like. How? well look at the original marquee, specifically the female characters in the marquee:
What Hairstyle do you see that's the most common among them? Ponytails right? and being that the sprite base i had (based on the recreation of the original Death Race shown earlier) was already 8x8, a ponytale could fit on the female sprite just fine.
The Male and Female sprites
The second change is changing the game from color to black and white, much like the orignal was. this was far simpler to do, all i had to do was just find the parts of the color codes and change them to right colors. There was also a code for 2 barriers that were selectable to be on or off by using the right difficulty switch, which i switched to always on by switching the colors.
While the game is playable, there are a few things to make this into a true port:
- Change the controls to used proper 4 way movement
- Add a 2 player mode
- Add the gender switches for both players
- change the number of CPU players from 1 to 2
- change the graphics, fonts, and sounds
The latter of which would be somewhat difficult due to both the 2600's hardware, and Batari Basics limitations. I will continue to meszs around with it and maybe someday we may have a fully playable score to play but untill then, Happy Valentines Day, and ill see you next time!
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