26 Dec
2012
26 Dec
'12
6:13 a.m.
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 1:18 AM, Tom Sparks <tom_a_sparks at yahoo.com.au>wrote:
Tom, cost of production. This is per our direct talks with Bushnell and
Dabney for the Atari book (Atari Inc. - Business is Fun). In fact, Curt and
I had the pleasure of driving around with Ted Dabney to some of the
original locations for a day while he reminisced everything. It had nothing
to do with the number of terminals to make a profit, the cost of the mini
alone would have prohibited them from sales in the coin industry at a time
when typical coin-ops cost in the $500-$1500 range. For even the cheapest
mini at the time (the Data General Nova they considered), you're talking
around $4000 just for an entry level Data General Nova - without enough RAM
let alone the cost of the terminal stations. They decided fairly quickly
that besides the Nova being too slow to run the game on multi-terminal
stations, the cost was way too prohibitive. And this was precisely why
Nolan felt Pitt and Tuck's Galaxy Game (around $17,000) wouldn't go
anywhere, it was impossible for it to scale to mass sales let alone the
cost in upkeep on loctaion. Let alone how long it would have taken an
operator to even begin to recoup those kinds of costs.
--
Marty
Certainly, as I said, he and Dabney were inspired
by the PDP-6 version of
Spacewar they saw at SAIL. They were originally going to go the
mini-computer route and have an actual copy of Spacewar running on a coin
modded mini, which turned out to be too expensive to have mass produced.
it more of cost issue, the mini was not able to run the number of
terminals that was needed to recover cost of the mini
I think it was two terminals to break even, three to make a profit