In October 1980 Williams, then best known for pinball tables, brought a video game to the Amusement and Music Operators Association show in Chicago. It had a joystick and five buttons at a time when one or two was normal, and the operators who tried it, Eugene Jarvis recalled, “played for ten seconds and died”. They wrote it off as too hard. The game was Defender, and it made Williams one of the leading arcade companies of the early 1980s. Over the next three years the same small group of programmers and a few newcomers gave the company Stargate, Robotron: 2084, Joust and Sinistar: fast, crowded, loud games that asked a lot of the player.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1943, by Harry Williams, as the Williams Manufacturing Company in Chicago; reincorporated as Williams Electronics, Inc. in 1974.
- Owners: the jukebox maker Seeburg from 1964; independent from the early 1980s; a public company as WMS Industries from 1987.
- Video games: Paddle Ball in the Pong era; then Defender (1981), Stargate (1981), Robotron: 2084 (1982), Joust (1982) and Sinistar (1983); licensed Moon Patrol from Irem.
- Hardware: its own boards built round the Motorola 6809, with a second processor for sound.
- 1988: bought the amusement game division of Bally, including Midway.
- End: left pinball in 1999 for casino slot machines; bought by Scientific Games in 2013 and merged into it in 2016.
Pinball and the tilt
Harry Williams had been in the coin-operated business since the pinball boom of the early 1930s, when pin games were, as the pinball writer Roger Sharpe put it, “made of wood, nails and a dash of paint”. Writing after Williams’s death in September 1983, aged 74, Sharpe told the story of the tilt. In 1932 Williams watched a player in a drugstore thump the bottom of one of his games to make the balls go where he wanted. He first hammered nails through the underside, then built a small ball balanced on a pedestal that stopped the game if the machine was shaken. He called it the “Stool Pigeon”, until he heard a player complain that he had “TILTED” it. In Contact he added the first electrically powered kick-out hole, and then, as a joke on his partner, a doorbell that rang when the ball dropped in. Put side by side with a silent Contact, the machine with the bell took double the money.
The company that bore his name kept making pinball tables after he left it, under a series of owners. By the 1970s it was, as Edge put it, a “leading pinball manufacturer”, and it moved early into electronic sound. Paul Dussault, Williams’ director of special projects, told Videogaming Illustrated in 1983 that from 1978 Williams was “the first company to use a ‘dedicated sound board’ with its own microprocessor”, when others were still using electro-mechanical chimes. The same system gave the pinball table Gorgar its voice, which the magazine called “the first talking game”. Jarvis programmed tables here too, among them Firepower.
Defender and the Williams hardware
Williams had tried video games once already. Its first, the two-player Paddle Ball, followed Pong, and Pro Tennis and Pro Hockey came after it, but, Edge wrote, the company “quickly reverted back to pinball tables”. By the end of the 1970s it wanted back in, and Jarvis, who had decided after playing Space Invaders that he wanted to make video games, was given the job. The story of Defender’s ten-month development is told in its own entry. Joystik called it “the biggest success of 1981”, and Jarvis later reckoned there were 60,000 Defender machines in the United States, each taking about 2,500 quarters a week.
Its hardware set the pattern for the next games. A Motorola 6809 at 1 MHz drove a bitmapped screen, and a second processor, a Motorola 6808, ran the sound as a “slave” to the main one. When the game wanted a sound it sent a code to the sound board, whose own program fed numbers to a digital-to-analogue converter; the explosions in Sinistar, Williams’ software engineer Michael Metz explained, were “just ‘white noise’—random numbers being thrown out of a digital computer”. Later games on the same design, from Robotron on, added Williams’ own blitter chips to move graphics, a job the 6809 did alone in Defender.
Vid Kidz, Joust and Sinistar
After Defender, Jarvis and Larry DeMar left to form their own company, Vid Kidz, but went on working for Williams: Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster were Vid Kidz games that Williams built and sold. Williams also licensed games from Japan, among them Irem’s Moon Patrol and Make Trax.
Joust came from inside. Its designer, John Newcomer, had joined Williams from the toy industry in the autumn of 1981 and had never worked on a video game. He did not program, draw or make sounds. “I’m fairly good at telling a story,” he told Video Games, “and that’s what a video game is all about.” He wanted a flying game, and a flying game that felt like flying: “If you’re going to fly like a bird, you should feel like a bird.” The result was knights riding flying birds, a flap button to beat their wings, and a two-player mode in which the players could work together or, in the “gladiator” wave, earn 3,000 points for knocking each other off. The magazine counted it as only Williams’ sixth video game of the period, after Defender, Stargate, Robotron, Make Trax and Moon Patrol. Williams’ vice-president Ron Crouse described the method as a team with one creative leader, and seven programmers, artists and sound people worked under Newcomer on Joust.
Sinistar (1983) was the one people remembered hearing. The player mined crystals from asteroids to make bombs while enemy workers used the same crystals to build the Sinistar, a huge face that, once finished, spoke: “I live!”, “I hunger” and “Run, coward!” Videogaming Illustrated’s editors voted its effects the best of 1983. Metz said the team recorded twenty or thirty minutes of speech in a studio and spent three or four weeks editing it down; the sound board stored and replayed it through a CVSD (continuously variable slope delta) modulator, and the sit-down cockpit version played two sound programs through four speakers. Not every critic was won over: Joystik called Sinistar “another good idea that was poorly executed”.
Midway and the 1990s
After the arcade slump of the mid-1980s, Williams grew by buying a rival. In 1988 it bought Bally’s amusement game division, and with it Midway, the company that had brought Space Invaders and Pac-Man to America. From then on Williams’ video games mostly came out under the Midway name, while its pinball tables carried both the Williams and Bally names. Jarvis, back at Williams from 1987, made NARC, which Sinclair User singled out as the surprise of the 1988 operators’ show, and Smash TV (1990), and the same Chicago studios produced Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam. The story of those games is told in the Midway entry.
Pinball had a last boom. In the British trade magazine Leisure Line‘s pinball chart for June 1992, every one of the top ten tables came from Williams or Bally, led by Bally’s The Addams Family and Williams’ Terminator 2.
Later history
WMS Industries, as the company had been called since it went public in 1987, bought Atari Games in 1996, floated Midway on the stock market the same year and spun it off completely in 1998. The pinball business went next. Its Pinball 2000 tables, which combined a playfield with video images reflected over it, did not sell well enough, and in 1999 WMS stopped making pinball to concentrate on casino slot machines, a business it had entered earlier in the decade. It stayed in that trade until Scientific Games bought it in 2013 and merged it into the parent company in 2016. The WMS name survives as a slot-machine brand of Scientific Games, renamed Light & Wonder in 2022. The Williams video game library had already passed to Midway, and when Midway went bankrupt in 2009 most of its assets went to Warner Bros.
Sources
- Roger C. Sharpe, “Harry Williams: Rememberances of a Coin-Op Legend”, Video Games (Pumpkin Press) vol. 2 no. 4, January 1984, pp. 47–51: Williams in the early pinball industry, Advance, the tilt and “Stool Pigeon”, Contact, the kick-out hole and the bell, his death on 11 September aged 74, and “the company that bears his name—Williams Electronics”.
- Dreamcast Monthly, issue 2, October 1999, p. 42: Harry Williams and Williams Manufacturing, Paddle Ball, Pro Tennis and Pro Hockey, the purchase of Bally’s amusement game division in 1988.
- “When Videogames Ruled the World”, Edge issue 217, August 2010: Williams as a leading pinball maker that had “dabbled in videogames in the wake of Pong”, Defender at the October 1980 AMOA show and the operators’ reaction, Jarvis’s estimate of 60,000 machines and 2,500 quarters a week.
- Joystik, vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, “Innerview: Eugene Jarvis”: “the biggest success of 1981”.
- “Arcadia”, Videogaming Illustrated, November 1983, pp. 39–40 and 71: Sinistar’s sound and speech, Michael Metz and Paul Dussault, the dedicated sound board from 1978, Gorgar as “the first talking game”, the 6808 and 6809, the DAC, white noise, the CVSD, the studio recordings and the four-speaker cockpit version.
- Video Games (Pumpkin Press) vol. 1 no. 7, April 1983, pp. 28–30: John Newcomer and Joust, his quotations, the waves and the team of seven, Ron Crouse, and Joust as Williams’ sixth video game after Defender, Stargate, Robotron, Make Trax and Moon Patrol.
- Joystik vol. 1 no. 5 (dated April 1983), p. 10: Sinistar review (“another good idea that was poorly executed”).
- Sinclair User issue 83, February 1989: NARC from Williams at the AMOA show.
- Leisure Line, June 1992: pinball chart, Bally and Williams tables in all ten places.
- For Defender’s development and hardware, Jarvis’s career and Vid Kidz, the 6809 boards and their blitters, Moon Patrol, and Midway after 1988, see the Defender, Eugene Jarvis, 6809, Irem and Midway entries and their sources.
- “WMS Industries”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the 1943 founding and 1974 reincorporation, Seeburg’s ownership from 1964, the public listing as WMS Industries in 1987, Atari Games and the Midway spin-off, Pinball 2000 and the end of pinball in 1999, slot machines, Scientific Games in 2013 and 2016, Light & Wonder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMS_Industries