Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 191

Ml EDITIONS Wednesday. March 18, MM SE The Arizona Republic Extra IS: i a iro 'Fasti: Pood' YOURSELF Guilty Makes Sense! Video-game players eating up latest entry to market Energy Savings Hake Seasel $24900 WHISPER II Lite Kits Optional Quietness Makes Sense! 1535 East University Drive, Mesa, Arizona 85203 1 a car or restaurant or bowling alley by anybody using it to make a profit. "That probably holds up a game more than anything in getting it to the manufacturer." According to Jansen, there are 15 or 20 game companies today making software for play on Atari, Sears and other systems. Atari has sold 12 million 2600 VCS models. Fast Food, unlike the real kind, is not cheap.

The cartridge retails for $31.95. "We personally feel game cartridges are overpriced," Jansen said. "When Atari and Activision, the grandfathers of video games, started things off, they charged about $30 for their game cartridges, and people couldn't get enough of them. "To sell for less now would make people think something is wrong with your product. But eventually prices will go down." MONDAY thru FRIDAY 9:30 SAT.

10:00 to Jl til t4? 3. 30 TIMEX 1000 COMPUTER Canon' Mm. $795 'TIMEX45 REBATE WITH THIS AD. graphics over from record albums to video-game packaging. "Selling records and video software both require lots of point-of-purchase sales people who know the games, in-store play, posters.

In fact, we've had the most success selling game cartridges at record stores." Jansen was asked to go back to the pivotal hamburger. "Woodman took his idea to a freelance programmer named Don Ruffcorn. He lives in Scotts Valley in the Santa Cruz Mountains and leads a wonderful life," she said. "Electronic designers are really the new artists in the sense that they don't work in a corporate environment and may have an inspiration, say, at 10 at night, and work until 3 in the morning on it. "Basically what they do is paint a graphic picture of a game on a silicon chip (like oil or water colors applied to canvas).

"It took Ruffcorn about three months developing Woodman's idea for Fast Food. Ruffcorn fiddled around with it and threw a couple of things on chips and eventually came up with a graphic design. "Then Woodman added the purple pickles." When a player has gobbled six purple pickles, he 'burps' and his turn is finished. His score is the total calories he has eaten. Every so often the lettering 'You are getting fatter' appears on the screen.

The cartoon figures built into Fast Food and other Telesys games are an important selling point, Jansen said. "Our space orbinaut in Cosmic Creeps has a round face and wears a little helmet. The kids he tries to save before the Earth disappears wear little shorts. Little green guys have antennae with eyes on the end of them. They're so ugly they're cute.

"We try to bring character and personality into the games not just destruction." Coming up with the right game title is not always a piece of electronic cake, Jansen explained. "You give the accountant four or five names and it costs about $300 a name to make sure it hasn't been used by other video people, game people, or for Programmed Automation Plus Shutter-Priority Sophistication. System Integration nCanonx Arm By Peter Rose Republic Staff Who is making money these days? The people behind video games, right? The creators of manipulative little electronic creatures who howl through the imagination of a million kids and youthful adults. Perhaps you have had an idea, yourself, for a deceptively simple but tantalizing preferably addictive little video game that players would carry home like loaves of bread for their Atari screens. Jack Woodman had such an idea.

A video nut in his late 40s, he designed the basics of a game called Fast Food while munching a burger somewhere in that urban tangle of freeways and tract housing south of San Francisco. Resplendent with root beer (3 calories), milk shakes (7 calories), french fries (10 calories), cheeseburgers (20 calories), and eight other fast-food fatties shot toward Mighty Mouth (a pair of twitching jaws which must avoid gobbling bad, purple pickles), the game became the first on the market produced by Telesys, a Fremont, Calif, company, last May. Last year Telesys came out with two other games, Coconuts and Cosmic Creeps. Its California staff of 8 has directed the sale of 2 million game units made in Hong Kong. In its first year of operation, the company is making money.

Its fourth game cartridge, Star Gunner, has just reached retail shelves, and two more are due this spring. So, instant video success has come to Woodman, now the company's vice president of marketing, and to company president Rich Taylor, and to others including Lindy Jansenj the company's director of public relations, advertising and promotional activities. Jansen, a 28-year-old college graduate and native of San Jose, recently visited Valley cities during a promotional tour. She explained what happened following that pivotal hamburger munched by Woodman. "First of all, I should explain, I'm from the Silicon Valley, and when you grow up there, you want to get into electronics or computers or something like that because it has been so important to our growth," he said.

jansen compared that interest to someone in Hollywood wanting to get into films or how it must have been in Detroit when U.S. cars were king. "Woodman and Taylor had been with CRT, a distributor of records in Sunnyvale, and they wanted to get a start in the new computer revolution," Jansen said. "Other former record people like Jim Levy, the president of Activision, and Bob Rice of Data Age made the same switch to video games. The consumer market is the same and they brought the Programmed automation to focus-and-shoo! convenience.

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