Bob Ogdon was a key player in the home ambitions of Dave Nutting Associates and its then-parent company, Midway. Ogdon joined DNA after college, developing several games for the Bally Professional Arcade home system before founding Action Graphics, a spinoff company of DNA focused specifically on home game development. Eventually he moved into the interactive CD-ROM space, working on several projects there with Mammoth Micro Productions. This interview focuses on that early period of Ogdon’s career.
Interviewer: I’m pretty interested in the Bally home system, and I’m just really fascinated with the unique history it has, like the really unique fan base it developed, people making stuff with BASIC and everything. I’m trying to get in touch with folks who worked on it and who’ve had experience with it and memories of it and get their stories because I want to try and put that altogether in an article or a video or something.
Bob: Okay. Well, I certainly was a big part of it.
Interviewer: Yes, I saw an old interview with you from ’82 or so, talking about the work you’d done on it.
Bob: Yes, but the best mustache. The only one I’ve ever had that looked like that.
Interviewer: It was just so good, you didn’t need it any more.
Bob: Yes, exactly.
Interviewer: What brought you to Dave Nutting Associates in the first place?
Bob: Well, it turned out I ended up getting a psych degree, and ended up having a football scholarship that got extended at the last minute. I took a lot of computer classes. They changed the NCAA rules and gave me my freshman year back, so I decided to stay, and I took all these computer classes, and at that exact moment, my wife was on vacation with David Nutting. I wasn’t married at the time, after vacation, she told him about me. The combination of psychology and computer science was rather unique and kind of a gaming type of background.
They made me an offer, I moved to Chicago and I came to work for them as my first job out of college. We came out, we weren’t married, but we got married shortly thereafter and we’re family friends of the Nuttings.
Interviewer: All right, that’s pretty cool.
Bob: David’s like the guy. He invented a lot of the pinball and gaming was his original vision, so it’s a really a privilege to work with him.
Interviewer: Did you do anything with the pinball or arcade machines while you were there or did they have you go straight to Bally Arcade?
Bob: I did some coin-op. I did a baseball [ed. note: likely Tornado Baseball]. Originally, why I came, the reason I came was to work on the Bally Arcade because it was just brand-new and they were just about to market, and they needed software engineers to come up with new games. Pinball [Bally Pin], which is mentioned in your email, was my first project when I got there.
That turned out to be a sweet little game, actually. It wasn’t that far from Pong, just more dynamic. The popular games at that time were Pac-Man, Gunsmoke [Gun Fight] or whatever the shooting ones was, where the guys would shoot each other. Pong was popular, then I came and did pinball, and that turned out to be an extremely popular game as my first one. As a math major, I was able to just come up with all the math and do it. It was very straight forward.
Interviewer: You also worked on the Brickyard/Clowns combination carts. Do you know it that was a licensed game or if that was a clone game?
Bob: Clowns, I think was actually a Bally game, and I’m not sure if Brickyard was or not. I think that was basically copying a coin down. Both of those games existed in coin, and they were basically cloned to the Arcade. Pinball was unique. Brickyard/Clowns was a copy. One of the big challenges of that time was the ROM size. The ROM was like 2K, which was 1048 times 2, and then we eventually went to 4K. I think the first 4K cartridge was football. All the other ones were 2K cartridges. That’s a huge change, doubling it.
Interviewer: Definitely, yes.
Bob: The ROMs are pretty expensive and then how we programmed it back then was, you would copy it to a ROM and try it out. If it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t, you had to try again. You had to copy it down, there were these erasable ROMs, and you put them in the closet with an ultraviolet light to erase the ROM, and then you could try it again. There was really no way of testing except for that.
We constantly had a group of ROMs in the closet being erased and then you basically just go ahead and try to make then an erasable ROM, then you would plug it into the machine, and it would do nothing. You would go, “Ah, crap.” Then you would have to build a whole series of debugging components that, if you pressed a certain button, it would do a certain thing so that you could determine whether it was working or not. It was pretty rudimentary but that was the world we were in, the early video game world.
Interviewer: I was actually interested, what was the working environment like? What sort of equipment did you use and how collaborative would you say things were?
Bob: The team was pretty small at Dave Nutting Associates. We did all the programming at the time. Maybe five to six software guys, then there was the hardware guys, of course, but the software guys, we would all have our own projects. Pinball was mine. Clowns and Brickyard, I think I helped on that one.
What people would do is, we would pay each other money to help us find 15 bytes, so we could fit the thing into 2K. It was really hard to get the size down because you had to come up with an algorithm that was more efficient in order to get, say, twenty bytes of code so that you could add another feature. It was a lot of working together to figure out how to jam stuff into 2K. That was the big part of the challenge.
Also, there was a lot of game play that we would play each other’s games and give feedback. It was very collaborative, actually. David would spend time with the games and playing them. Programmers, though, had their completely independent project, like pinball was 100% mine, but I would have other guys give me feedback and help me find more efficient code so I could add another feature. I think that whole early world had a lot to do with the rudimentary going a little bit further and making it a little bit better.
Interviewer: What was your development system?
Bob: The original one was, you wrote everything in assembler, and you compiled it because it was a unique chip. The chip was a Z80 and it was real easy at the time. We used the Z80, and Atari used the 6502 Motorola. We used the Zilog Z80. We would write in assembler, and we just had a compiler that compiled it into the 2K block, and you’d blast that onto a ROM and try it out. It was very rudimentary.
Then we created our own boxes and on ICE. We created our own development box which then allowed you to compile the assembler code and upload it into a file. It was home-brewed, basically systems. That was a big part of it. Everybody had their own authoring system, but it was all done in machine code. You had to know every opcode of the Z80.
IF, THEN, ELSE, and all that stuff. It’s all part of opcodes.
Interviewer: When you were working on the pinball game and, I guess, Clowns, you were jumping right into simulated physics with those. Were there any challenges in getting those to work?
Bob: I’d say it wasn’t that hard. You just had to bounce off of a certain thing, then there was a speed component and velocity. It’s all physics. College physics. I was just right out of college. Took a lot of physics.
Interviewer: Fair enough.
Bob: It wasn’t that hard, actually. It was fairly simple. Just writing the code in assembler, no one had ever written, that was unique. The physics wasn’t hard.
Interviewer: Got you. I was going to say, I think that was one of the first digital pinball games. I can’t think of too many more.
Bob: It was really early, for sure. No pinball before that.
Interviewer: Were you a pinball player before you started working on that one?
Bob: No. I mean, I played pinball for sure, but I wasn’t very serious about it. My father always didn’t like me playing pinball. Back in the day, those were kind of the bad places to hang out. I had played pinball a plenty of times, because it was popular at that time. There was very few video games. It was all pinball, right?
Interviewer: Right. I was just going to say, were you assigned to these games or did you decide to take on these projects? How was that sorted?
Bob: When I first got there, we were looking at what to do and I told them I wanted to do a pinball game. I just had the vision for it.
Interviewer: Then you did a Football game, which I played through with a friend of mine a couple of months ago. We were very impressed with it, even now.
Bob: The uniqueness of that– remember that control had the knob on top, so it had an analog control so you could actually run and point which was very unique from a control perspective. Atari just has the joystick and a button. I played football in college, that was how I paid for college, so I had a total passion and did football from day one. That was my sport.
That was actually the best game I ever made. That game, I feel. From a uniqueness to a time when there wasn’t much else out there, to a leveraging uniqueness of the control. You could be running around the right end and then turn the knob and pass back to another person a different route. You can do that today, of course, in all these amazing Nintendo games, but at that time, that was extremely unique. It made for a lot of great game play.
It was the first 4K cartridge that we did, so we had enough space in there to get all of the game’s different controls and plays that you normally couldn’t do in a 2K. Super rudimentary, as you saw.
Interviewer: I was curious, how did it get to be 4K, was that something you had to request or was that something they agreed to?
Bob: Yes, the cost of the ROMs were coming down pretty fast because the cost of memory chips were reducing rapidly, so it finally got to a point where you could do that.
Interviewer: Of course, I can’t imagine you trying to fit the whole game into 2K.
Bob: You couldn’t do that game in 2K.
Interviewer: It had the menus to choose your moves. That was just very impressive. Were you inspired by any other football games that were out there?
Bob: No, there weren’t any. I don’t think there were any. That was one of the first football games that were ever made.
Interviewer: I think you are right. I can’t remember the exact timing and everything, but either way–
Bob: Yes, it was in the late ’70s. I got there in ’78, I think I did it in ’79.
Interviewer: They also had you do the Space Invaders version for Bally, too, is that right?
Bob: Yes, that was just a copy. We did that with a few of us, nothing original on that.
Interviewer: Do you have any insight on whether that was like– because they did eventually change the name of the game and I was curious if you know anything about why they did that?
Bob: I don’t know. It’s certainly on the rise of Space Invaders at Bally. I think at some point they sold the system to another company. Maybe at that point in time they made them change the name because of the licensing rights from Japan were just to Bally.
Interviewer: Yes, it could be.
Bob: The way they sold the system, and it was no longer owned by Bally.
Interviewer: That could be. I was just curious, I wasn’t sure if you had any insight into that. Did you work at any games for the machine that didn’t come out? I know there was a drag racing game and a demolition derby game– that one came out– like a backgammon game.
Bob: Yes, didn’t those all come out?
Interviewer: Not all of them. Some of them didn’t.
Bob: I assumed they all did. I can’t remember. It’s been a long time.
Interviewer: Were there any other games you worked on for the machine that you remember?
Bob: Yes, we created the Wizard of Wor. That was a really great one. That came on after Bally sold it. Then another one was a game that was a fighting game, I forget what we called it. It was a shooting game where you’re driving a spaceship and you’re shooting forward and up and down [ed/ note: this is likely Cosmic Raiders]. That was a copy of the coin-op. Do you remember Wizard of Wor, which was a coin-op game? With the alien? Came after the movie Alien? You would shoot that guy, it could see in the dark, and then appear. Anyway, that was a really popular coin game which I actually did in Coin op. And then I turned around and made it for the Bally Arcade system.
Interviewer: I know that one is actually really similar to the arcade one. I was wondering if you were able to copy any of the code over? I don’t know to what degree you had to really adapt the game to the home hardware.
Bob: It wasn’t too bad. It turned out to be a really good version of it. I took it from the coin, it was pretty straight forward.
Interviewer: At some point, you also started up Action Graphics. Could you tell me a little about what led to you doing that? What was the relationship between that and Dave Nutting Associates?
Bob: Well, what happened was, the Bally Arcade was sold to another group, had star and space in their name, do you know it?
Interviewer: Astrocade, I think it’s called.
Bob: Yes, Astrocade, thank you. Dave Nutting came to me and said, Bob, I know your comments. I was managing this whole shop, doing a lot of coin at the time. He says, “I know you really like doing consumer. I’ll give you a portion of the ownership if you want to go and run a software group called Action Graphics to create games for the Astrocade. You have an exclusive contract to create all their games.”
So I did that, and then at that time, I also started working for other companies including Fisher-Price and created a lot of different games. I created a ton of games, but they were mostly for Commodore 64 and the Atari and ColecoVision systems. They were for different publishers. We worked for Astrocade, we worked for all the main video game players in the market. We were one of the shops that was in the business of creating video games on a for hire basis. One of our big customers was Epyx. We did Pitstop, and the most popular game I did was Winter Games, which was doing well in Europe, big successful game, and that was an Epyx product.
Interviewer: You said Winter Games?
Bob: Winter Games. It was a simulation of the Winter Olympics.
Interviewer: Yes, I remember that.
Bob: The first big game was Decathlon, that was done by [Activision]. That Decathlon game was very popular, so I was kind of like the morrow of Decathlon, but done for the Winter Olympics. Decathlon was Summer Olympics. It was very graphical. It was really one of the most graphically interesting games for the Commodore, so it was super successful for that. It was 10 different skiing events.
We moved on from arcade into that space, built a pretty successful gaming company and then in 1982 or ’83, is when the big crash of Atari happened and the gaming market went in the can. This was when I built Winter Games, which was fortunate because it was a successful game paying a lot of royalties, so it gave us a reasonable exit as we were walking away from the gaming world at that point. We started chasing CD-ROM.
CD-ROM was the next evolution of what you could do. Instead of having 4K or a 15K floppy on a Commodore 64, you could actually do 360 megabytes on CD-ROM. That was enticing.
Interviewer: That’s a lot of space. What sort of stuff were you doing with CD-ROM at the time?
Bob: I created a variety of publishing products for the Japanese. I worked with Fujitsu, Sony and JVC in Japan. I helped them create their CD-ROM offerings. I did a lot of work with Fujitsu, creating a lot of products for their Japanese market and the US market for their FM Towns CD-ROM machine. Sony came out with the concept of creating a Bookman, which was a CD-ROM player with a little screen that you could read a book on, which was way before its time. We helped them create that.
Then Washington Post hired us to create Newsweek magazine, to create a [unintelligible 00:26:51] create Country Living magazine as well. All interactive magazines, so it’s kind of the concept of interactive, before the internet, interactive concept. We had Newsweek where you could click on something and see a video. That was the big aha. No one had ever done that. CD-ROM allowed you to integrate audio and video together. We created that, and then we sold that business to the Washington Post. It became a division of the Washington Post, because they owned Newsweek.
Interviewer: That’s pretty wild.
Bob: That was in 1994. So, anyway, we’re kind of leaving video game world now. So that’s where I went. When we left video games, I decided to go into media.
Interviewer: What was that again?
Bob: Instead of staying in video games, I decided to go into the CD-ROM media world, which was basically interactive.
Interviewer: What was your working relationship like with Astrocade? I talked to someone who worked there and he said he’d come through like once a week to chat with you folks on what was going on, but I don’t know beyond that.
Bob: You talking about Tom Meeks?
Interviewer: Yes.
Bob: Yes, he was the best. We were partners and you work hard and it’s a great relationship. You know, it was kind of a system that didn’t have the economics to work within the market. It got killed by Atari. Atari was a [unintelligible 00:28:54]. They weren’t able to make the economics work. It’s pre-Nintendo, the Atari VCS. Then Commodore, and ColecoVision.
Interviewer: They had a lot of competition out there for sure.
Bob: Yes, it kind of all exploded. They just bought an old system on its way out and nursed it. We created a bunch of games for them which was fun but it was too small a world [unintelligible 00:29:43].
Interviewer: I know John Perkins did some work with you folks and since he passed away, I was curious to find out what you remember about John and what he was like to work with and what sort of stuff you did with him.
Bob: John was an amazing, talented engineer. He built the game called– where cannons shoot across over the mountain and it would, you know, whatever that board game was? I can’t remember.
Interviewer: Oh, the Artillery Duel game?
Bob: Yes. He built that for me as a consultant and I said, “This is just really beautiful and brilliant. You need to come and work for me.” I talked him into moving to Chicago, which he did and he then brought his girlfriend at the time, ended up married to her so she was the first marriage of our little company, his girlfriend then his wife and they both worked for me, wonderful people. Travis is a superstar, he’s got some talent. He managed all my engineers and wrote a lot of code and stuff.He was one of the great people in the world. We loved him. Unfortunately he passed.
Interviewer: Yes, were you close with him after–
Bob: Oh, very, yes, stayed very tightly in touch with him, good friend. He worked with Nutting afterwards too.
Interviewer: Yes, I heard he was involved in one of those early video game type things, I’m blanking out what the name of it is. The NEMO, I think?
Bob: Right.
Interviewer: Yes.
Bob: Right.
Interviewer: Tom was talking to me about that one, just praising it–
Bob: I don’t know much about that but he was involved in that kind stuff, yes.
Interviewer: Yes, Tom was praising him, he was like, he was a brilliant engineer for the solutions he came up with that all these other people were paid all this money couldn’t figure out.
Bob: Yes, he was a super smart guy, good person too.
Interviewer: Since you did this work on all these different platforms, how do you feel that they compared to the Astrocade, just from a development stand point?
Bob: When you get down– when you started getting to the ColecoVision and started getting back into the Astrocade level. Commodore 64 was super rudimentary, the Atari VCS is super, super rudimentary which made it very difficult but the economics worked for it because you could buy the machines so cheaply that it became a massive hit. It wasn’t just the – the economics and market penetration are so valuable. Coleco never really got the major penetration but it was pretty significant.The Commodore was at an international play, so you could make a lot of money in Europe with I don’t know– their crappy pieces of hardware.
Interviewer: Yes, it really seemed like the Bally was ahead of it’s time in a lot of ways.
Bob: Yes, the video chips were significantly better and they had the ability to do more things.
Interviewer: Did you ever mess around with the Bally BASIC that Jamie Fenton came up with or the add-on computer?
Bob: The add-on, yes, a lot of people liked that. That’s the first time anybody ever had the ability to write their own stuff, pretty cool.
Interviewer: Were you involved at all with either of those projects?
Bob: No.
Interviewer: Okay. I guess looking back, what’s your impression and experience of working that stuff at the time or back then?
Bob: Incredible, talented, creative people. Dave Nutting was super creative and talented. Jamie [Fenton], she was a brilliant engineer. She was really fun to work with. At the beginning of that creative program, prior that, you’re either the programmer, which was just very– didn’t have the creative components, very technical or you’re creative, you were never in between. That was the marriage of those two roles.
The people that were there were just a strange combination of super creative and super technical people, very interesting people. Very inspiring and fun to be around as far as a breakthrough. The whole computer was the start– gaming started because of the machines were just starting. It was interesting. It was a fun time to be a part of it. I was very privileged that I was.