Games - Cinematronics

Home > Listing Index > Games > Cinematronics

	Games - Cinematronics

Cinematronics was a pioneering arcade game developer that had its heyday in the era of vector display games. While other companies released games based on raster displays, early in their history, Cinematronics and Atari 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.

Meager Beginnings

Cinematronics Inc. was founded in 1975 by Jim Pearce, Dennis Parte and Gary Garrison in El Cajon, California, although early on Parte and Garrison sold their shares to Tom "Papa" Stroud. Cinematronics' first game, Flipper Ball, released in 1976, was fairly unsuccessful. The company would not be widely noticed until Larry Rosenthal was brought on board one year later.

Cinematronics' first success

Rosenthal, a student of MIT, had written his master's thesis on Spacewar and wanted to create a version of the computer game that could be placed in arcades. Rosenthal had created a processor that was powerful enough to run a proper version of Spacewar and yet inexpensive to produce. He named his TTL-based board "Vectorbeam". After building a prototype, he shopped the machine around to various game companies, looking for a distributor. Rosenthal demanded a 50/50 share of the profits, a figure that caused nearly all companies to pass on the deal.

At this same time Cinematronics was looking for their next game. The timing was perfect for the two: Cinematronics was running out of funds and looking for any deal to land a new game and Rosenthal was selling a game but insisted on a ridiculously high profit share. The deal was made and the game was released as Space Wars.

Space Wars was the first arcade game to utilize black & white vector graphics, which enabled it to display sharp, crisp images. Space Wars had graphics which were far more detailed than the raster displays of the time. Cinematronics shipped over 30,000 units and was a top seller in 1978.

Rosenthal, feeling that he was still not receiving enough money for his innovations, left Cinematronics. When he attempted to take his "Vectorbeam" technology with him, Pierce and Stroud sued. The men came to an agreement outside of court with Rosenthal selling his technology to Cinematronics.

Vector games

With the "Vectorbeam" board under their control, Cinematronics released a series of vector graphic arcade games including Starhawk, Warrior the first one-on-one fighting game, Sundance and Tail Gunner.

Cinematronics experimented with color overlays on some of their games. In Star Castle, the overlay gave color to several elements of the game with fixed positions. In Armor Attack, the overlay was itself a part of the game: the overlay was a top-down view of a small set of city streets, and the player drove a jeep through the streets fighting tanks and helicopters.

Cinematronics created Cosmic Chasm, a color vector game. Other games were developed based on the same hardware system (based on Motorola's 68000 chip) but were never released, including a 3D color vector game.

Laser disc games and beyond

In 1983 Cinematronics was responsible for releasing Dragon's Lair, one of the earliest laserdisc-based arcade games. During the time Dragon's Lair was being created, Cinematronics filled for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In order to finish the project they partnered with Advanced Microcomputer Systems (later renamed RDI Video Systems), who later tried to sell a home version of the laser-disc machine. While RDI's home console, the Halcyon, was a failure, the Dragon's Lair arcade was a huge success. Cinematronics followed it up with the similar sci-fi-themed laserdisc game, Space Ace. In about 1985 some prototype animation material for a Dragon's Lair sequel was produced, but due to the lack of an agreement between Cinematronics and the animator, Don Bluth, this material sat unused for years, eventually becoming part of the Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp game in the 1990's.

About 1984, Cinematronics started releasing games which used raster display, such as Express Delivery and other raster games based on a new hardware platform called the Cinemat System, which was designed to be reusable with replaceable software, control panels, and cabinet artwork.

About 1987, Cinematronics was acquired by the Leland Corporation and continued to make arcade and PC game software. Ultimately, they were sold to Maxis in 1997 to develop the unreleased Crucible (after developing Full Tilt! Pinball) and were last seen making a game for Accolade in 1997.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Cinematronics ]

Searches on eBay