From the moment I first encountered a coin-op video game, all I wanted was to play as much as I possibly could. When I was nine years old, though, I was kind of dependent on Mom and Dad to give me a lift to the local bowling alley or arcade—and, needless to say, that didn't just happen every day, so I spent a lot of my formative years wishing there was a way to play more frequently.I begged my parents for a dedicated Pong system or Pong-clone—and they always refused. They knew I'd get tired of it pretty quickly (even though I swore I wouldn't). So, it wasn't until I was working as a paperboy and able to save up my own money that I got my first home video game system: the Atari 2600.
There were a lot of cool (for the time) games on the 2600, but what I was really interested in was home versions of the games I played in the arcades. Luckily for me, Atari was dedicated to licensing coin-op games and turning them into home versions. The first titles for the 2600 were adaptations of Atari coin-op games of the 70s—Video Olympics (all of the Pong variants) and Breakout were the types of games the 2600 was designed to play. Other early Atari coin-op games, like Skydiver were also fairly easy to convert. But it wasn't until Atari grabbed the home video game license for Space Invaders that the Atari 2600 really began to take off. People bought the 2600 just to play Space Invaders. After the success of this title, Atari snatched up all of the best coin-op licenses, many of which were exclusive to the 2600. And, with a vast library of their own coin-op games to draw upon, Atari was the game system for those of us who wanted to bring our arcade game experience home in the days when owning an actual coin-op game wasn't even a thought that crossed most peoples' minds.
One of the most prominent 2600 programmers when it came to converting coin-op titles to home systems was Rob Fulop. Rob joined the company in 1978 as a summer intern in the coin-op division, where his first assignment was building a sound effects editor that was used to generate sound effects for Atari's short-lived pinball lineup. The following year, after graduating from UC Berkeley, Rob went to work full time in the home division. His game credits include the 2600 conversion of Night Driver and the Atari 400/800 version of Space Invaders. In addition, Rob also designed and programmed the home version of Missile Command, a coin-op classic that is among many collectors' favorite games today. I recently talked to Rob about the challenges of taking an arcade classic and bringing it to the home market. We also discussed his views on the video game market today as compared to the classic era.
It was announced yesterday that FOX is going to make a movie based on the Atari classic, Missile Command. This isn't simply a case of a movie studio calling "DIBS!" on a property; they've gone and hired writers for the thing.
