Video Games: The People, Games, and Companies

   Dirk Pellet: “At first, I added a lot of magic items with their names and actions taken almost verbatim from D&D, merely adapted to the computer game Dnd, like ‘cube of force’ and ‘horn of blasting.’ Later, I deliberately avoided copying anything from other games, and made up new monsters and items and features that I had never seen anywhere else while keeping the humorous tone.”

   The work on balancing encounters continued until the two brothers realized that players had found a zero-risk strategy to power up their characters and defeat the final monster, a Golden Dragon, to obtain the most powerful item, the Orb. The brothers devised a simple yet extremely repetitive and tedious gameplay loop, which involved entering the dungeon, quickly collecting the first treasure, exiting without engaging in any combat, and repeating this process continuously for dozens of hours.

   Whisenhunt: “We never thought that anyone would have the patience and would spend the time to do such a simple thing over and over again to gain large amounts of wealth. I guess that was the precursor to videogame addiction.”

   Daleske also had to grapple with the unpleasant realization that his work was a source of stress and distraction from studies for some students. In some cases, what was supposed to be an enjoyable pastime became the reason for interrupted academic and professional careers, as well as family tensions. This revelation embittered Empire's programmer, driving him away from game development.

   Daleske: “At first I enjoyed seeing many people really thrilled and enjoying themselves while they played Empire and the other games I wrote. It gave me a sense of accomplishment of a job well done; after all, it was a struggle to mould a playable game out of a timesharing system not designed for game playing, with so few resources of memory and processing. But then, I would hear of someone no longer at college because they flunked out playing too much Empire. Friends got divorced. Others fired. I started feeling Responsible. It was my fault because I put this temptation in front of them. This was one reason I stopped designing games. I decided to not make any more games unless they had some socially redeeming value.”

   For every game programmer who stepped away from development due to life choices or daily necessities, a growing number of young people were drawn to the PLATO systems to play and potentially take up the mantle, continuing the development of existing games or creating new ones.

   In 1975, a group of three students, Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and Eric Hagstrom, made the first playable version of Orthanc available to PLATO users. As clearly indicated by its title, Orthanc was a fantasy role-playing game that was named after Saruman's tower from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The starting point for this new team of developers was clearly Rutherford's Pedit5, with which Orthanc shared many game mechanics: the 2D top-down view, automatic combat mechanics, player options (casting spells, fighting, or fleeing), the inability to flee from encounters in rooms, the death message when the player's character succumbed to numerous and ruthless enemies, and the initial character creation phase.

   In other respects, Orthanc was an enhanced and complete version of what Pedit5 could have been if Rutherford had had full access to lesson space and his software hadn't been repeatedly deleted during development. Orthanc featured significantly larger dungeons, more levels for characters and monsters, more spells, and a less minimalist interface with all necessary information available at a glance. Like Pedit5, the game's difficulty was punishing, and the risk of sudden and inevitable death was present in every room and corridor.

   Also in 1975, another major role-playing game project for PLATO began. Drawing inspiration from both Orthanc and Daleske's Dungeon, Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin decided to create a multi-user fantasy role-playing game. Interestingly, the programming took place in the same room where a second team was working on the new version of Empire. Only two terminals were available, and both were always occupied by either Duncombe and Battin working on their role-playing game or Gary Fritz and Chuck Miller working on what would become Empire IV.

   Duncombe: “We’d be sitting side by side up there in the author room, working away on our games, occasionally bouncing ideas around. There’s some of Fritz’s code in Moria and there’s some of Battin’s code in Empire. Not a whole lot, but there was definitely cross-fertilization among the game authors there. Those two terminals turned out to be the most heavily used on the entire CERL system.”

   Duncombe and Battin's game, initially inspired by the idea of procedural generation for the dungeons, remained nameless upon completion of its first playable version. They took inspiration from the previous game, Orthanc, when deciding on a name, and believed that Mines of Moria could be a suitable option. Interestingly, neither of them had read Tolkien's works or played D&D. Their knowledge of the beloved and widespread fantasy archetypes came through word of mouth and from using PLATO games inspired by D&D, a trait evident in several design choices in Moria, such as the character creation system with four abilities—Cunning, Piety, Wizardry, and Valor—measured on a scale from 1 to 100, which were quite different from typical role-playing games.

   Moria featured a first-person view instead of the typical top-down 2D perspective, placing the player in front of a monitor that displayed the simple lines of a 3D dungeon in a wireframe with a central vanishing point. Up to ten players could join a group, with one member acting as a guide for movement. The procedural creation algorithm created a vast world that divided the game world into five regions, each with sixty levels composed of 30 blocks arranged in a 5x6 grid. Each block, in turn, consisted of a grid of 36 squares in a 6x6 layout, featuring corridors, rooms with doors and secret accesses, and, of course, monsters to defeat and treasures to retrieve. Group movement occurred block by block: when the party entered a block, individual members were free to move independently within the block's squares, fight monsters, or collect treasures. When confronted with formidable monsters, the party could utilize the internal messaging system to seek assistance, enabling whispers among group members or a collective shout of "help!" for everyone to hear. Combat was similar to Pedit5 in that it occurred automatically, giving the player only the option to choose an action, but there were more moves available: 6 compared to Pedit5's 3. Players could fight, try to deceive the monster for a surprise critical hit, pray for divine intervention, cast a spell, attempt to bribe the opponent to save their lives, or try to flee. The system would then calculate the outcome based on the character's attributes and the enemy's strength. Moreover, combat occurred in near real-time; if the player didn't select an action within a certain time frame, the program would automatically make the monster attack. After each battle, the guide could move the group to the next block to continue the adventure.

   Inspired by Moria, in 1977, Jim Schwaiger, with help from John Gaby, Brancherd DeLong, and Jerry Bucksath, decided to start writing his own computer role-playing game, Oubliette. Like many of his fellow game developers, Schwaiger had encountered D&D but was not very impressed. He found the dice rolling tedious and was frustrated by what he saw as a significant waste of time due to game setup, character creation, and all the preparatory phases of tabletop RPGs. Schwaiger's goal in creating his computer game was to simplify players' lives, cut down on downtime, transfer the dice-rolling burden to the computer in real time, apply the rules, and provide players with an adventure.

   In many ways, Schwaiger's work was the most faithful electronic representation of D&D to that point. From character creation, it was clear the developer had tried to compress and free the tabletop experience from downtime and tedious management operations into the PLATO terminal. D&D heavily inspired the rules system, which allowed players—even those with minimal experience in tabletop RPGs—to become instantly familiar with character attributes, classes, races, and alignments. The available items, progression levels, number of enemies, and area sizes were impressive; they were comparable to Moria and far superior to Pedit5 and Orthanc.

   Like Moria, Oubliette was designed for collaborative online play. Solo play was possible but extremely difficult. Players, encouraged by challenging encounters and a hostile world, could form parties with up to 12 players and venture out of the city. Movement was similar to Moria: the leader moved the entire team, and all party members could observe the group's movement through the wireframe first-person view. Unlike Moria, however, the group stayed united and in formation.

   A list of players represented the team in a scheme that would be copied for decades: the first were at the front line, the last were in the back, and the rest were centre. To avoid surprise attacks from behind, a well-organized team had the sturdiest and best-defended members at both the front and rear, as recommended by the initial guide.

   When the team encountered an enemy (or a group of enemies), combat began. It was in semi-real time, like in Moria: each player had a few moments to decide their action, after which the computer showed the combat's outcome, with the fastest fighters acting first. Players could choose from an even longer list of possible actions (Fight, Parry, Spell, Hide, Run, Seduce, Bard Charm, Dispel, Call for Help, and Use Item), and in challenging battles, team coordination was crucial for success. Rounds were swift, and within seconds, each player had to read the combat outcome, decide the optimal strategy for their character, and issue the necessary command.

   Drawing inspiration from previous experiments, Oubliette was an incredibly innovative game, defining some of the characteristic features of later role-playing games and, thanks to PLATO's technology, foreshadowing the first MMORPGs of the 1990s. Besides its interactive and multiplayer nature, Oubliette had many features that would become standard in the CRPG genre: in the city, players could hire mercenaries, join guilds to gain specific advantages, climb guild ranks (paying in gold) to excel over other players in a sort of permanent leaderboard, heal teammates or resurrect the lifeless bodies of players who had fallen in the dungeons, and even gamble. The dungeons were less anonymous and more intriguing due to the large number of secret doors, traps, and hidden hatches capable of sending the unfortunate group to a lower level, where more insidious dangers awaited.

   One of Oubliette's unique features was its original magic system implementation. The organization was fairly typical, dividing spells into seven levels and categorizing them by type (magical or priestly). However, instead of the usual names inspired or copied from D&D, Oubliette's spells had very original names that immediately showed a sort of creation mechanism based on common syllables, prefixes, and suffixes.

   Jim Schwaiger: “One of the more purist players of the game, David Emigh, was a graduate physics student and also an amateur linguist. He created a language just for the game, including carefully deriving word roots, so the spells have a consistency and poetry you would not expect if you simply made up names. It is similar to what Tolkien did with his elven language, except that according to legend, Tolkien created the language first and then developed a story around the language, while David crafted the language to fit our game.”

   Like other PLATO games, Oubliette's development spanned a long period of time, continuing until 1982. Schwaiger also faced academic difficulties due to the significant effort he put into creating, maintaining, and constantly improving his game. He decided to seek help from fellow students, primarily Gaby, and collected continuous feedback from the most enthusiastic players. Given the nature and function of the PLATO system, pinpointing the precise implementation of the spell system in its final form with David Emigh's contribution is impossible. Still, it likely dates back to the first two years of its development, 1977–78, when Oubliette was swarmed by students, including one who was particularly impressed.

   His name was Robert J. Woodhead.

   Woodhead was seventeen years old when he attended Cornell University in 1976. The son of two entrepreneurs, Woodhead had grown up in a rural town north of New York, near the Canadian border. While many students elsewhere in the United States had access to early computer systems, young Robert was less fortunate; his first encounter with computing was much humbler, through a study aid named CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation). This kit was entirely paper-based, devoid of electronics, consisting of an operational instruction manual and a series of perforated cardboard cards. The student had to act as the CPU, manipulating the cardboard cards to perform the operations a real computer would execute, tracking registers, and simulating program execution. Ingenious though it was, CARDIAC was a low-cost but limited aid, far inferior but also less expensive than the increasingly numerous single-board computers offered to students, professionals, and hobbyists.

   Fascinated by computers—and later by D&D—Woodhead decided to attend university to study computer science. Upon his arrival at Cornell, the PLATO system captivated him. His university had only two terminals connected to the network, and Woodhead soon became a regular in the small lab, dedicating much of his free time to gaming. The popular titles at the time were Empire and Dnd, and Woodhead spent a lot of time on both, significantly impacting his academic life.

   The PLATO network had become a small but growing community of students, technicians, researchers, and professors who sometimes knew each other in person but mostly connected from geographically distant institutions, known only by their nicknames. Woodhead's nickname was not among the most loved. Collaboration among developers, inclusion of new members in informal teams working to improve existing games, drawing inspiration from others' games, and even creating games with significant similarities—like DND with Pedit5 or Orthanc with Dnd—were commonplace and accepted without issue in the PLATO environment. However, according to Pellet and the DND team, Woodhead seemed to have crossed the fine line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

   According to Dirk Pellet: “Sometime around 1977, Robert J. Woodhead [...] through means unknown to the dnd authors, obtained a copy of the source code to the current version of dnd (probably 6.0 or 7.0). He ‘created’ ‘his’ own game from it, in a file called ‘sorcery.’ It had essentially all the same features of dnd except the messages, monsters, and magic items had different names and pictures (although identical functions). Apparently the illicit copy hadn’t included the charset. The elven boots were socks, among other alterations. When the dnd authors were informed of the existence of Woodhead’s copy, and took a look at it (including looking at the source code in a monitor mode with a concerned sysop), the copy was promptly deleted.”

   The event earned Woodhead the unfriendly nickname Balsabrain, as well as considerable hostility from many PLATO users. The incident didn't deter the young man from gaming, or at least it didn't bother him too much. Spending too many hours at the terminal caused his academic performance to plummet, leading to the same fate many others had faced before him: expulsion from school. However, this happened not before he managed to experiment with many of the popular games of the late '70s, including Oubliette, and gain experience in programming, just in time for the commercial release of the three microcomputers of 1977.

   When the feeling of being at a dead end began to transform into certainty, Woodhead realized he needed outside help. He found it, curiously, in the person who had been one of his most relentless adversaries up until that point.

   Similar to Woodhead, Andrew Clifford Greenberg attended Cornell University and pursued numerous passions and interests, such as computing and D&D. Unlike Woodhead, Greenberg did not face expulsion from the university, despite his passions and interests slowing down his studies. However, the most significant distinction between the two was that, whereas Woodhead was a student who squandered excessive time playing on PLATO, stealing memory and system resources, Greenberg secured a post-graduation job as a system administrator, ensuring the smooth operation of the computer system, which the other young man persistently disrupted with his games masquerading as false lessons. The two had known each other for some time: Woodhead was the irresponsible student who played too much, and Greenberg was the system administrator who repeatedly had to intervene to delete the other's games and temporarily block him.

   However, they had both created an Apple II RPG, which helped resolve their differences. Greenberg got the idea of adapting D&D for computers from a dorm mate when he complained about being tired of the usual games. The student then got to work on his Apple II with the only language he had available, Basic, and after several months of work, the program was playable and interesting, but the execution was extremely slow and the available resources were exhausted, severely limiting the potential for expansion and improvement of the game.

   Nonetheless, some versions of his Wizardry, as he had called it, had passed from hand to hand until they reached Woodhead, who was surprised that his eternal adversary, whom he called a spoilsport, could have made something so fun. By comparison, his own game was much less interesting, starting with the name Paladin.

   Thus, Woodhead approached Greenberg to propose a collaboration. Thanks to Fred Sirotek, resources at the fledgling Sir-Tech were not lacking, and the young man was able to offer an intriguing contract to his fellow student. Starting with the well-designed and easily expandable data structure for Wizardry, Woodhead took on the task of programming the game in Pascal, while Greenberg concentrated on design.

   Woodhead: “I did almost all of the programming of the original Wizardry game and the scenario editors that created that database it ran off. Andy used those editors to create the first few scenarios, and he and his friends [...] playtested them. This was an obvious division of labor since I had a lot more time than he did, having been kicked out of Cornell for a year for fooling around too much on the computers and neglecting my grades. And finally, my company released the program onto the market. Had Andy and I never gotten together, most likely his Wizardry would never have evolved into a marketable product, because of all the other demands on his time, and my Paladin would probably have made it to market but would not have been nearly as good as Wizardry was, because of his story skills and the efforts of his playtesting team (who it would not be unfair to credit as the "third" author of the game). Fortunately, it was one of those "right people in the right place at the right time" kind of things.”

   Oubliette served as the starting point and greatest inspiration. From this game, they retained the first-person perspective and the three-dimensional dungeons, the vast maps where a key part of the gameplay involved the need to orient, explore, and move precisely, the party system, and the combat mechanics with numerous enemies. Oubliette was a multi-user game where each user controlled a single party member. Even in 1980, it was unthinkable to propose a similar product to the small but growing population of Apple II owners, so the decision was made to proceed as they had with Galactic Attack, by cutting the multiplayer functionality and entrusting the control of the entire party of heroes to a single player.

   Woodhead: “Wizardry (and Paladin and the original BASIC Wizardry) were our attempts to see if we could do something similar on the puny personal computers of the day. For example, the idea of the 6-character party was a way of simulating multiplayer interaction when in fact there was usually only one person playing the game. But at the same time,the fact that only one person was playing the game allowed us to putin a story (and lots of cute ornaments) that raised Wizardry beyond the "hack-hack-kill-kill-loot-loot-run home" style of game.”

   What had initially been a necessary choice also presented an intriguing opportunity, capable of providing the player with several layers of strategic depth. As the sole controller of a team of six characters, the player had an endless array of choices, customizations, and strategies right from the party creation phase. As the adventure progressed, this variety only increased, since the player had to equip the characters, level them up, and synergize spells and abilities.

   One of the weaknesses of PLATO-based role-playing games was the lack of a real story. For both single-player and multiplayer versions, the programmers had not felt the need—or had not had the means—to provide users with adequate motivations for dungeon expeditions, aside from a fairly general goal, such as acquiring 20,000 gold coins to retire from adventuring. The lack of a clear objective reduced the gameplay experience to a repetitive pattern of entering the dungeon, fighting monsters, grabbing treasures, and exiting the dungeon. While this was sufficient for many, it eventually became boring for all but the most dedicated players. Even the dungeons, although vast and, in the case of Oubliette, rich with secret doors, traps, pits, and a large variety of monsters, eventually felt empty and anonymous, large but not diverse.

   Having lost the multiplayer component, Greenberg and Woodhead felt the need to counterbalance by introducing a real mission. This could integrate with the creation of more varied dungeons, featuring customized zones with specific purposes. Moreover, what Greenberg and Woodhead were working on was more than just a game; it was a game system capable of running different adventures, and Dungeons of Despair, as they had decided to call it, was potentially just the first of many adventures that Sir-Tech could publish and sell.

   They did not develop a particularly original or elaborate plot, but they imbued it with a subtle sense of self-irony that not all players would immediately understand; this sense of humour would persist in subsequent games. Everything the player needed to know was contained in a few lines on a sheet of paper included in the box: “The evil wizard Werdna has stolen a valuable item from the treasure rooms of the mad overlord Trebor. He has placed it somewhere deep in the dungeons of Trebor's castle, and left fearsome monsters there to guard it. Your mission is to develop characters powerful enough to explore the deeper levels of the dungeon and recover the item.”

   Werdna and Trebor, two powerful characters locked in battle (incidentally, the names of the two programmers, Andrew and Robert, spelled backward), dominated the magical world of Wizardry, using the adventurers as pawns and sending them to their doom in the dungeon beneath Trebor's castle. The brutal difficulty of the game had a sensible explanation: Trebor had no interest in the adventurers' survival. Only a small portion—the strongest and luckiest—had any hope of returning to the surface.

   This premise allowed Woodhead and Greenberg to create a complex dungeon with increasing dangers, traps and secret doors, permanently dark areas, teleporters, hidden messages in the form of wall carvings to gather snippets of information, and some special static encounters. Consistent with the material from which they drew inspiration, the game was extremely complex, dominated by chance, and pushed the player to destroy hordes of enemies to gain the experience necessary to dare to descend to the next level, with no guarantee of not seeing their team—lovingly built over dozens of hours—wiped out in an instant.

   Despite not being complete and adequately tested, the program was playable by September 1980, and two months later, it made its public debut at the New York Personal Computer Expo. The public was enthusiastic, and many visitors asked for a copy of the game, which was not yet ready for distribution.

   At that point, the biggest issue was that Woodhead's interpreter, USDC Pascal, came with a compiler that could create a bootable floppy disk with a runtime system to execute the program. However, the runtime system required 64K of RAM, an amount of memory only achievable by completely filling the Apple II's three internal slots and purchasing an expensive Language Card to upgrade from 48K to 64K. The publication of Galactic Attack also experienced significant delay due to the need for a 48K runtime system. While waiting for this tool, Greenberg and Woodhead took the opportunity to improve their game, work on balancing skills, spells, and monster strength, and resolve numerous bugs.

   For this task, they ended up employing friends and acquaintances, asking them to play as much as possible, experiment with new combinations, try every possible action, and report any malfunctions encountered. Each time they received a report, Woodhead and Greenberg returned to work to identify the problem and fix it, rewriting code, adjusting tables, and modifying the strength of spells and monsters.

   Not everything went smoothly. Gygax's company received news of the module's provisional name, Dungeons of Despair (DoD), and expressed disapproval due to the game's resemblance to the title of Dungeons & Dragons. TSR moved quickly, and Sir-Tech had no choice but to change the name, returning to Greenberg's Basic game, supplemented by the title of the first adventure module: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

   At the next event, Applefest 1981, the Sir-Tech team returned to present their game. In a brilliant move, the developers brought special copies containing only part of the content present in the full version. Despite this, the public was enthusiastic about the game, quickly snatching up the available copies. All signs indicated that success was practically certain.

   It was at this point that Fred Sirotek's experience came into play. Woodhead, Greenberg, Norman Sirotek, and even his brother Robert, who handled marketing, were eager to publish their game and start selling. Fred Sirotek, however, had some doubts—not about the product itself, but about its packaging.

   Norman Sirotek: “He insisted that the program could not be released until the instruction manual was readable by people without computer backgrounds.”

   Woodhead and Greenberg used the delay imposed by waiting on the 48K runtime to write a very detailed and well-crafted manual. The manual and the game's packaging, enhanced by several humorous fantasy-themed illustrations by Will McLean, boasted a production value far superior to any other contemporary game. In a market still dominated by games packaged in Ziploc bags with manuals consisting of a few typed sheets, Wizardry was a visually appealing, well-packaged product, and the manual was complete with all necessary information, making it enjoyable to read thanks to McLean's amusing cartoons.

   Sir-Tech successfully commercialized Galactic Attack with the release of the long-awaited 48K runtime system, freeing Woodhead and Greenberg to concentrate on compiling Wizardry in its new 48K version. As Galactic Attack sales started to gain momentum, prompting Robert Sirotek, Norman's younger brother, to leave his studies and dedicate himself to Sir-Tech's marketing, the two programmers realized that they still needed to rework the program to compress it into 16K less memory than previously used. This task was anything but simple and involved new cuts and complex decisions, including the omission of a control system that would have prevented certain malfunctions, such as the bug that granted infinite experience to characters attempting to identify an item without having one.

   Upon the game's release, Wizardry achieved phenomenal commercial success, prompting several customers to purchase an Apple II specifically to play it. Sales picked up quickly, reaching nearly the level of Visicalc, confirming Woodhead's theories about the profitability of the computer game market.

   Despite the explosive success, Greenberg and Woodhead did not remain idle. They continued to work on improving the game, and one of the first significant changes was the implementation of a system to recover lost characters. Following in the footsteps of Oubliette and the PLATO role-playing games, Wizardry had a real-time game state-saving system. The program updated the information on the save disk upon the annihilation of a team, requiring the player to either forfeit hundreds of hours of gameplay or form a second team to retrieve the corpses of the first team and transport them to the temple for resurrection.

   Some players tried to avoid disaster by quickly removing the disk from the floppy drive, but in this case, the party, although not annihilated, remained unplayable in a "lost" state, in some ways worse than death. The same thing happened in cases of hardware problems, software crashes, or power disconnection.

   In subsequent versions of Wizardry, Greenberg and Woodhead implemented a system to recover these characters, as well as a paid service for the public to recover characters with forgotten passwords. Given the high stress on floppy drives, players were asked to create one or more data disks to save their characters, and in any case, they could request replacement master disks (those with the actual program) by mail, paying the fees.

   The abstract combat system based on the party list, enemy groups, and spells gained enormous popularity thanks to Wizardry, even though it was very similar to Oubliette. While the PLATO game could only be played by a very small audience, constrained to extremely expensive and scarce machines, playing Wizardry required only a platform costing a little over a thousand dollars. Over time, though not with due speed, Sir-Tech worked to bring Woodhead and Greenberg's game to other more affordable and widespread platforms, opening it up to an even larger audience and proposing subsequent modules to continue the adventure started in Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

   Even Jim Schwaiger attempted to bring his Oubliette to computers in 1983, but without achieving the commercial success of Wizardry, which by then had become a model for creating role-playing games. It would take many years to uncover the true sequence of events that led to the creation of Wizardry, which was previously only known to a select group of former PLATO users. Wizardry popularized a game model that was older than Woodhead and Greenberg's, but it had the advantage of improving the formula and being the first to bring it to computers, potentially pushing the boundaries of mere inspiration. This was particularly evident in their game's magic system, which was nearly identical to Oubliette's and based on sequences of syllables, prefixes, and suffixes. Dirk Pellet noted in his History of PLATO games on Cyber1: “Balsabrain learned that if he wanted to plagiarize PLATO games, he would have to do it OFF of PLATO. He put that lesson to use by plagiarizing Oubliette when he "created" "his" game of Wizardry and began to market it.”

   The story of Wizardry was emblematic of a new way of creating games and the imminent end of the pioneering era of computer game programmers. There would still be many successes created in garages by a single developer capable of selling tens of thousands of copies, but the industry was changing rapidly. This was also thanks to seasoned entrepreneurs like Fred Sirotek, ready to enter the video game market and impose a change of pace by investing in packaging and aiming to create products that were visually appealing, enjoyable to collect, and easy to use. Soon, fun would no longer be the only deciding factor. With the increase in supply and the establishment of new sales channels beyond hand sales at fairs and by mail, the computer game market was maturing quickly.