A few years ago, I wrote a short series about my experiences growing up during the video game revolution that started in the 1970s. I hope to finally publish this series later this year, once I have time to find related video clips and photos.
But before I get to this, I thought I’d set the mood with a bit of video game-related trivia about Sub-Etha Software…
As you may know, Sub-Etha Software was not a gaming company. We mostly did application and utility software. However, we did release a graphical adventure game and a Space Invaders-style game, and did resell some games written by others.
In May 1993, at the 2nd annual “Last” Chicago CoCoFEST!, Sub-Etha Software announced something rather silly: a PONG programming contest. (Yes, Pong — the mother of all video games, released by Atari in 1972.)
According to my Fest report of that event, awards were to be given “based on memory efficiency, speed, originality, special effects, and playability for RS-DOS, OS-9, or OSK”. The winner was to be announced in October that year at the Atlanta CoCoFest.
TODO: link to fest report somewhere
I created a small OS-9 Level 2 demo program that played Pong on a text screen, along with details about the contest.
The winner was GNOP byChris Hawks of HawkSoft. This MM/1 (OS-9/68000) program kept the ball frozen in the center of the screen, while the entire box play area scrolled around it, with the paddles having to be controlled as the whole playfield moved. This was a very original take on Pong. HawkSoft made this program available for $5.
This, alone, makes for a cute story, but there’s another tidbit I do not know if I ever shared.
In 1993, Atari Corporation was still around. Their last home computer, the Atari ST, was being discontinued while the company turned its attention to a new video game system: the Atari Jaguar. The Jaguar would debut in November that year as the first home gaming system to use 64-bit chips (back in the day when the cutting edge gaming systems were all claiming 32-bit). Although the Jaguar never really caught on, it had some phenomenal games and was, at least initially, manufactured in the USA by IBM.
But I digress.
The point is, Atari was kind of between successes at the time (and actually would cease to exist just three years later when it was “reverse merged” with a hard drive manufacturer). For some reason, I thought it might be fun to contact Atari and see if I could get permission to legally use the name “Pong” for an official Color Computer version.
That’s right. I was actually trying to license Pong for the CoCo!
I contacted Atari about this (I don’t remember how, but I expect it was via a telephone call) and I recall whoever I spoke to was open to discussing a proposal, but I never pursued it further. Admittedly, I was really just wanting permission to use the name, as Sub-Etha would not have had any resources to pay any significant licensing fee. (Actually, it’s possible I may have contacted an Atari rep via the GEnie online service since they had an active presence there back then.)
I regret not following up on this silly idea. If I had been able to work something out, the CoCo could have been forever listed on the Wikipedia page as one of the only (if not the only) “official” Pong games that ever existed not done by Atari (or whoever owns them today).
Interestingly enough, Pong did make a comeback in 2012 when Atari released a 40th anniversary “Pong World” game for iOS. This version actually started out as an entry in a Pong Indie Developers Challenge where $100,000 was up for grabs to the best new versions of Pong.
Perhaps if Sub-Etha Software had offered that kind of prize (rather than the $1 we offered the winner), we would have had more entries back in 1993.
So there you have it… Another bit of “almost was” history from Sub-Etha Software. Apparently, we had a good idea, but had it 19 years too soon and without enough money to get people interested ;-)
Somehow, though, I don’t expect even the MM/1 could have pulled off any entries as fancy as some of the finalists did in 2012.
Addendum
1993 wasn’t my last encounter with Pong… While working for RadiSys, the company that bought Microware (creator of OS-9), we were working with a CPU virtualization company on a product that would allow the real-time OS-9 to run concurrently with Linux on a multi-core CPU. The idea would be the OS-9 side could be used for intense real-time operations, while Linux could be used for application level user interfaces and such.
A Pong demo was created, that showed OS-9 running one paddle and Linux running the other. (I do not recall having anything to do with this demo, but I found it amusing enough that I posted a video of it to YouTube back in 2006.)
I don’t know if this product ever came out or was ever used, but maybe the new owners of Microware OS-9 still have some Pong code kicking around their offices somewhere… ;-)
Until next time…