A batch of previously unseen videos from the Golden Age of coin-operated gaming for you this week.

Lyle Raines was one of Atari Coin-Op’s most influential employees. He arrived at Atari with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of California in Berkeley, where he graduated in 1973. He had a big hand in the creation of Asteroids (arguably Atari’s biggest arcade hit) and went on to become a senior executive of the Coin-Op division helping steer the company through its golden age years of the late 70s and early 80s.

Whilst being known as a quiet unassuming figure, his influence is well documented, bringing conceptualised ideas through to commercial reality on the arcade floors.

I’ve dug out a couple of videos and thought they were worth sharing here. Note this is largely unedited b-roll footage (which sort of adds to the authenticity and charm) and as far as I know, were never screened on TV.

The first is interesting in that Raines initially showcases and talks through vector graphic development. Of note here is that the rotating spaceship that is shown, appears to be one of the 3D models developed for use in Tomcat – an unreleased concept idea based on jetfighters led by by Jed Margolin. You can read more about Tomcat from my previous post here.

Raines goes onto demonstrate a light pen used to create on screen characters in raster games. Hardly groundbreaking stuff today, but back then, this was cutting edge graphic development!

Its an interesting watch…

This next video, probably shot on the same day, sees Raines talk more generally about Atari’s Coin Operated successes. He starts by talking about how a game is developed and what makes a game ‘fun’. He then goes on to talk about the issues Atari had with piracy at the time.

His comments on his involvement with Asteroids are super interesting. Raines discusses his input in the early stages of the game and the realisation that players were dominating gameplay and playing for hours. An interesting tidbit is he mentions that Atari had an overall target for players’ game length of three minutes.

As an aside, the second interview with Lyle Raines takes place in Atari’s legendary ‘Game Room’ at its corporate headquarters. In the background are Asteroids and Red Baron cabinets. This room showcased the latest and greatest Atari Coin-Op releases.

Very few images or videos of this room are out there, but below is some brief footage of Atari staff playing the line up of games in the room at the time:

Some cool stuff there, including a Hercules pinball table in the background.

Anyway, that’s your lot for this week. I have a bunch more footage from the golden age that I’ll be sharing in future posts – so keep an eye out…

Thanks for checking in!


Tony