Who Needs Kojak?

REWIRE YOURSELF

Who Needs Kojak?

by Richard Robinson

Atari and Fairchild are manufacturers of amazing home computer games. For $150, either of them will sell out a brown plastic computer with an umbilical control cord to clutch and an adaptor to turn your TV set into a computer display terminal. For a few dollars more, you can select any dozens of tape cartridges with computer programs recorded on them. Each cartridge program is one or more TV games you can play instead of just lying there watching normal TV with your mouth open.

Tired of Star Trek? Buy the Space Wars or Space Mission cassette, plug it into your TV game box and your TV set lights up with a star field, with you controlling the path of the computergenerated space ship and able to fire laser rockets at enemy flying saucers.

Too many Kojak reruns? Buy the Combat program and you can fire rockets, shoot mortars, and blow up your opponent.

Miss WWII? The Air-Sea Battle cassette program is like stepping right into your TV set during Victory At Sea. When you're at the controls you can sink ships, bring down planes, and just have a glorious time as the computer generates full color displays of your own private war.

I'm amazed they haven't come up with a Son of Sam game, but they do have rifle ranges and other sharpshooting programs so at least you can practice at home.

Isn't it wonderful that NASA and the Japanese and Texas Instruments should spend 10 years refining the integrated circuit to the point where a sophisticated computer can be sold for $150 and all we get out of it are games like Atari's Tank II ($64.95). To quote from Atari's literature in copy that runs next to a color photo of two young boys hard at playing Tank: "...we figured out how to make Tank an even gutsier video game...It's a fun game. Of course, each game is only a battle. The war goes on forever. Tank II has landmines and bunkers...If war wasn't hell, who'd play it?" Now I have condensed the paragraphs into one, but you get the idea. The game comes in attractive olive drab.

Get the picture?

Yes, we see.

Many of Atari's games (and I'm picking on them because they just introduced itheir new line-up of video games) are designed to give you an opportunity to sublimate activites which are either illegal (stunt cycle, war, street racing), immoral (war, air-sea battle), or beyond human reach (space wars). They seem to have stopped just short of a rape-pillage-torture cassette, thank God.

Now Atari isn't a war games company, they have many program cassettes that are exciting, innovative, inspirational, mentally challenging and fun. Atari invented and owns the word Pong so they are capable of excellent programs such as their Video Olympics cassette and their Ultra Pong machine. The same goes for Fairchild. Fairchild has one cassette that lets your computer draw an ever-increasing color mosaic design on your screen that goes on all day making the most intriguing designs which you can step in and manipulate if you like. Fairchild also makes a tic-tac-toe game and a blackjack game (your TV set deals the cards, you choose the stakes. You can double your bet and loose your shirt to your TV set), and a variety of hockey, ping-pong and the other boring sports games that started it all.

The computer game machines are made to be fun, they are fun—even Jet Fighter and Combat Zone— but to my mind it seems unfortunate that electronics should be used to sublimate violence and destruction. It's not just a game, and it's not funny to make toys for kids that teach them the rewards of blowing up their friends' tanks before they blow up theirs. Nor is it any funnier to give adults a chance to sit home getting off on air-sea combat.

I will end this column with the last paragraph of a letter written by Nolan Bushnell; Chairman, Atari, Inc., and mailed with the press releases announcing Atari's new video line:

"Learn all you can from the press kit, then take the afternoon off, go to a department store and play the Atari games. Disintegrate asteroids, drop bombs, blow up tanks. Only after you've experienced the sheer joy of slaughtering your best friend, will you know the true meaning of fun."