Lock 'n Chase - Licensing Explained?

[Walter Ives]

On 7/12/2023 at 6:24 AM, mr_me said:

They are all recalling memories that are over forty years old, so some discrepancies are expected.

Not only are there discrepancies from person to person, individual memories are self-inconsistent. Furthermore, they can't remember anything on their own, but let someone say something they remember differently and they're all over it. Or prime them with something they can enhance on, which is why replying to posts on this site works so well.

WJI

[BSRSteve]

On 2/18/2024 at 8:05 AM, Walter Ives said:

 

It would be interesting to pin down the time of that lunch more precisely. The arcade version of Q*Bert didn't hit the streets until October 1982, so say it took until February or March of 1983 to reach fast-food joints. That would have been a completely new era. O'Connell had long ago jumped to Fox Video Games and been replaced by Pirner. ColecoVision-man was hot on the tail of Intellivision-man, and the Denham-Prodromou-Pirner triumvirate had for months been instituting desperate measures to re-invent the company. The rank and file, however, was still completely shielded from and oblivious to the panic that was pervading the executive suite.

WJI

Well, it was an arcade in the Hawthorne Mall, not a fast-food joint. It was certainly the first time either of us had seen Q*Bert. Don Daglow had apparently passed on a package of games from Gottlieb, which included Q*Bert.

[BSRSteve]

On 2/18/2024 at 8:06 AM, Walter Ives said:

Next Data East came out with a game called Loco-Motion. Now, Mattel had an existing toy product that used that name, so it arguably had some rights to the name. So what the heck, said people at a lower-level than the triumvirate, why not assign some programmer to port that game to the Intellivision. Sure. And so it was said, and so it was done. The programming of this game, which was to be the second arcade license, was penciled in to start about July 1982. Not sure the exact date, but summer of 1982. Yup, you read the year right, 1982. Kind of late in the story, eh?

Loco-Motion was from Konami, not Data East.

[Walter Ives]

On 7/11/2023 at 10:29 PM, Rod said:

He only includes scattered bits and pieces about other groups like GI, Sylvania, marketing, Nice Ideas, Intellivision IV, Radofin or even other groups in Gabriel's department like Aquarius programming or PC programming. (not complaining, just an observation.) I've read that other groups were made up of "professional" programmers from aerospace industry who got higher pay, so maybe they were oil and water.

Don't forget the programming group in Taiwan. Bill Fisher (or Steve Roney?) was sent to bring that group up to speed and he still lives, so he's by far the best person to give the complete story about that.

 

WJI

 

[+DZ-Jay]

3 hours ago, Walter Ives said:

Don't forget the programming group in Taiwan. Bill Fisher (or Steve Roney?) was sent to bring that group up to speed and he still lives, so he's by far the best person to give the complete story about that.

 

WJI

 

@BSRSteve, Mr. Roney, is there something you can add?  Inquiring minds want to know.

 

    dZ.

[Tempest]

I thought Bill Fisher was the person working with the Taiwan programmers?  I've been talking to him trying to get the lost M-Network Apple II games they programmed over there released.  I wonder if Atari owns the rights to those now too?

[mr_me]

50 minutes ago, Tempest said:

I thought Bill Fisher was the person working with the Taiwan programmers?  I've been talking to him trying to get the lost M-Network Apple II games they programmed over there released.  I wonder if Atari owns the rights to those now too?

Did he have backup copies of the unreleased prototypes at Mattel Electronics Taiwan? Everything at the California office was backed-up and transferred to INTV Corp in 1984.

 

Since the Atari 2600 M-network titles were part of the 1984 sale, the IBM PC and Apple II games could be as well. If not than those rights remain with Mattel.

Edited June 8 by mr_me

[Tempest]

24 minutes ago, mr_me said:

Did he have backup copies of the unreleased prototypes at Mattel Electronics Taiwan? Everything at the California office was backed-up and transferred to INTV Corp in 1984.

 

Since the Atari 2600 M-network titles were part of the 1984 sale, the IBM PC and Apple II games could be as well. If not than those rights remain with Mattel.

He did but I think he gave all his stuff to the Strong Museum.   He kept some backups but I'm not sure if he has backups of all of them.  The licensed stuff can't be released, but I think all the unreleased stuff (for the Apple II anyway) were all original ideas.

[mr_me]

9 minutes ago, Tempest said:

He did but I think he gave all his stuff to the Strong Museum.  Not sure if he kept any backups or not.   I'll have to ask.

He might know if the copyrights were part of the original 1984 sale since he was one of, if not their first, technical consultant for INTV Corp.

Edited June 8 by mr_me

[BSRSteve]

15 hours ago, DZ-Jay said:

@BSRSteve, Mr. Roney, is there something you can add?  Inquiring minds want to know.

 

    dZ.

It was Bill that set up the Taiwan office.

[Cee Cee]

On 7/6/2023 at 7:26 AM, Walter Ives said:

The suits believed that arcade players recognized games by title and didn't particularly care about the name of the manufacturer/distributor. They further believed that because arcade game manufacturers didn't advertise to the public and Mattel did, players would come to associate the game titles with the Mattel name rather than with that of Data East. This subtrifugal identity appropriation was convoluted from 1982 on with the idea that on Mattel was going to position its titles as being platform independent. None of the implementations were to be considered canonical, not even the arcade version.

 

WJI

What a DUMB decision on their part. The most liked thing about their inferior competitor, was all the arcade ports, and it was Intellivision's BIGGEST criticism! This was the very first of the very few arcade ports Mattel would ever do for this system. They should have been screaming from the rooftops: WE NOW HAVE ARCADE GAMES, TOO!

 

Coleco wisely got that memo, before they came in and ate the other half of Mattel's lunch that Atari was too full to eat. Coleco acknowledged all their arcade ports, and included not only the wordmarks from the arcade cabinets, but images of the arcade games themselves on the boxes of all their ports. I'm sure that helped sales, where as poor decisions like Mattel's to hide the fact that Lock 'n Chase was an arcade game, hurt sales, and why over 40 years later, people like this OP still don't know that they were playing a port of an arcade game on their Intellivision. In fact, you'll find at least one person just like him in virtually any discussion about Lock 'n Chase for Intellivision.

Edited June 15 by Cee Cee

[mr_me]

On 6/15/2024 at 9:59 AM, Cee Cee said:

What a DUMB decision on their part. The most liked thing about their inferior competitor, was all the arcade ports, and it was Intellivision's BIGGEST criticism! This was the very first of the very few arcade ports Mattel would ever do for this system. They should have been screaming from the rooftops: WE NOW HAVE ARCADE GAMES, TOO!

 

Coleco wisely got that memo, before they came in and ate the other half of Mattel's lunch that Atari was too full to eat. Coleco acknowledged all their arcade ports, and included not only the wordmarks from the arcade cabinets, but images of the arcade games themselves on the boxes of all their ports. I'm sure that helped sales, where as poor decisions like Mattel's to hide the fact that Lock 'n Chase was an arcade game, hurt sales, and why over 40 years later, people like this OP still don't know that they were playing a port of an arcade game on their Intellivision. In fact, you'll find at least one person just like him in virtually any discussion about Lock 'n Chase for Intellivision.

Locknchase was a very obscure arcade machine and itself a ripoff of a popular arcade game. Either way people would see the Intellivision cartridge as a Pac-man ripoff. However, I do agree had Mattel Electronics gotten the Space Invaders license rather than Atari in 1980, for example, it would have made a big difference. 

 

Still, in 1981 Mattel Electronics took a large chunk of Atari's share of the console market despite having no arcade licenses and costing nearly double. In its best year in 1982 it still sold more cosoles than Coleco's best year in 1983 also while priced significantly higher.