Blockade is an arcade video game developed by Lane Hauck for Gremlin and released in November 1976. It is a two-player game where each player controls the direction of an arrow on the screen which creates a trail behind it. The object is to avoid any walls surrounding the playfield or trails created by each player for a select amount of turns. Blockade spawned many clones which came to be known as snake games.
The game was designed by Lane Hauck, who prior to joining Gremlin had taught himself to code and met with the team at Gremlin before their entry into the arcade game market. After experimenting with a physics problem in assembly language, he created a game where a trail was left behind a player that disallowed them to return to a position they had already visited. After showing the concept to the staff at Gremlin, it was developed into a video game, test marketed and released to great acclaim at the 1976 Music Operators of America in Chicago. As Gremlin were new to developing arcade games, before they could release it publicly, several other companies such as Atari, Inc., Ramtek and Meadows Games released their own variations of the game, leading to many pre-sales being cancelled for Gremlin.
Gameplay
Two players each control one of the arrows on the screen.
Blockade is a two-player game where each player controls the direction of an arrow on the screen. Each player utilizes a set of push button controls to change the direction of the moving arrow. When it moves, the arrow leaves a trail of blocks behind which form a continuous wall. Anytime the player collides with a wall created by either player or the barrier wall on the screen, an explosion sound is heard and the symbol flashes and a point is rewarded to the opponent.[4]
After a pre-set number of crashes happen to the player, the game ends.[4] The pre-set number is set by the operator of the arcade, ranging from 3 to 6.[5]
Development
Gremlin was a San Diego–based coin-op arcade manufacturer that started in 1970.[6] Designer Lane Hauck, a physics and engineering graduate of UCLA and Cal State, purchased a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 computer to teach himself Assembly language.[6] Hauck played games on the system such as Moo and began to grow interested in simplifying complex technology to make it more affordable. He soldered together twenty-five logic circuits to create a handheld device that could play Moo. He later made other small machines which could play games like Blackjack.[7]
At the time, Gremlin was in the market of Wall games, which were rectangular paintings and displayed one static picture, such as a series of lights turning on to simulate a game of baseball.[7] No staff at Gremlin knew anything about microprocessors at the time, and when meeting at Gremlin's office, the staff met Hauck which led to him developing a Wall game for them called Fooswall that used microprocessors.[7][8]
Hauck felt it would be fun to explore a physics problem he referred to as the Drunk and the Lamppost, where the “drunk” starts out near the lamppost and can move in any direction, at random. The problem involved predicting the direction the drunk will tend to move. To test out the problem visually, Hauck wrote a program in which the computer randomly picked either an up, down left or right direction to move an arrow. On a display screen, Hauck stated that "the thing flitted around a little bit and sure enough, as physics predicts, the thing stayed close to the lamppost."[7] Growing bored with the project, he felt it would be more interesting if the drunk could not move to a square he visited before and made it so a square lit up and would remain illuminated even when moving the arrow to a new square and eventually get trapped. Hauck did not expect this result and it led to him developing a game where two players move and try to avoid hitting each other, creating a trailing maze behind them. Hauck commented that "It showed me that the video game is not only highly interactive for the player, but also for the designer. After awhile, the model is teaching you some things!"[7]
Hauck later added small touches, such as electronic beeps that sounded when the arrows moved and an explosive noise accompanying the arrows crashing.[7] He showed it to one of Gremlin founder's Frank Fogleman.[9] Fogleman liked the design, and agreed to do a public test of the prototype under the name Blockade.[8] Hauck recalls that Blockade was the very first name which came to Fogleman's mind, and after purchasing a cabinet and monitor, they tested the game at a miniature golf course. They recalled that they "watched very carefully and we saw a lot of people put money in it and have fun with it. It was exciting."[7] Following successful tests, Hauck worked on turning it into a full game.[8] By November 1976, Gremlin had refined the prototype and Hauck developed it into a four-player version titled Commotion.[7][10]
Release
It was shown at the 1976 Music Operators of America (MOA) Expo in Chicago, where Gremlin received 3000 orders of the game.[8][7] Hauck recalled that their team realized they did not know anything about wood cabinets or television monitors.[7] At the time of Blockade's release, counterfeiting was high and public demand for the game was not as long-lasting as the company had hoped.[8] As they adapted to this new material and tech, other companies released similar games such as Atari, Inc. with Dominos, Ramtek with Barricade, Bally with Checkmate (included in the Bally Astrocade), and Meadows Games with Bigfoot Bonkers.[7][11]Barricade was so similar to Blockade that Gremlin threatened to sue Ramtek, and dropped their suit after Ramtek agreed to not release the game.[12] Dennis Koble of Atari stated that Blockade was "really fun and very popular and, as was common in those days, everyone had to jump on the bandwagon."[13]
Months later, when Gremlin's Blockade was distributed in November 1976, the market had shrunk, leading to the game releasing only a small fraction they had presold at the show.[7][14] This left Gremlin with a large inventory of circuit boards, cabinets and monitors.[8] The company had no legal recourse at the period against the clones of the games.[7] After the team from Gremlin returned from Chicago, they began filing patents for Blockade, and received faster consideration from the patent office due to the market of clones already released. It took a year and a half to win the patent, which Hauck stated at the time "no one even remembered Blockade. The net effect is that in the game business, patents are absolutely worthless."[7]
Reception
In November 1977, Play Meter ranked the top highest ranking arcade games from the past 12 months. Blockade was Gremlin's highest ranked game, tying for 10th place along with Indy 4 by Atari.[15]
From contemporary reviews, Ray Pasziewicz, a Baltimore coin machine operator, said he specifically praised Blockade at the MOA show, noting the games competitiveness and that "I stood there and played it for a long time and I was excited over it."[16] In a report in Play Meter magazine, Ralph C. Lally II said Blockade was "probably the most played game at the show," and that the game was an "excellent example of a good game based on a rather simple concept" declaring the game great and "could just well turn out to be the Tank everybody was hoping for this year."[17]
From retrospective reviews, in his book The Video Games Guide, Matt Fox gave the game a four out of five star rating, stating he could forgive the game for its visual simplicity due to its vintage and that the game had a "timeless quality", declaring it "simple, competitive, addictive fun."[18]
After witnessing a mother and daughter play Blockade and constantly hit each other and laugh at them exploding, Lane Hauck developed the arcade game Fortress.[7] By 1977, Gremlin had no major hit arcade games following Blockade which led to the company being purchased by Sega on September 29, 1978.[8]
Dennis Koble, the developer of Atari's Dominos, said his game was not derivative from Blockade. He said in a 2020 interview that prior to Gremlin's release, he had seen similar games on ARPANET and CompuServe.[21]
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1976 had new titles such as Road Race, Night Driver, Heavyweight Champ, Sea Wolf and Breakout. The year's highest-grossing arcade games were Namco's F-1 in Japan and Midway's Sea Wolf in the United States.
1974 saw the expansion of technology and public awareness of video games in all sectors. A proliferation of companies creating commercial video games in the coin-operated sector attracted attention from mainstream press and prompted the diversification of games beyond strict Pong derivatives. The first three-dimensional games were developed for linked graphical terminals which would not be widely commercialized. Some of the first efforts to create video game consoles after the release of Magnavox's Odyssey became available in the United States and Europe.
1973 saw a substantial increase in the amount of video games created and distributed in multiple sectors. In coin-operated games, a craze for Pong-style games ignited the first fad for video games both in the United States and other countries such as Japan and the United Kingdom. Time-sharing networks saw greater proliferation of popular programs through type-in listings. The PLATO network played host to some of the earliest massively multiplayer games.
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Tank is an arcade game developed by Kee Games, a subsidiary of Atari, and released in November 1974. It was one of the few original titles not based on an existing Atari property developed by Kee Games, which was founded to sell clones of Atari games to distributors as a fake competitor prior to the merger of the two companies. In the game, two players drive tanks through a maze viewed from above while attempting to shoot each other and avoid mines, represented by X marks, in a central minefield. Each player controls their tank with a pair of joysticks, moving them forwards and back to drive, reverse, and steer, and firing shells with a button to attempt to destroy the other tank. The destruction of a tank from a mine or shell earns the opposing player a point, and tanks reappear after being destroyed. The winner is the player with more points when time runs out, with each game typically one or two minutes long.
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Gremlin Industries was an American arcade game manufacturer active from 1970 to 1983, based in San Diego, California. It was acquired by Sega in 1978, and afterwards was known as Gremlin/Sega or Sega/Gremlin. Among Sega/Gremlin's most notable games are Blockade and Head On, as well as being the North American distributors for Frogger and Zaxxon. The company's name was subsequently changed to Sega Electronics in 1982, before its operations were closed in 1983.
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Surround is a video game programmed by Alan Miller and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari Video Computer System. In the game, players navigate a continuously moving block around an enclosed space as a wall trails behind it. Every time the opposite player hits a wall with their block, the other player earns a single point. The first player to reach ten points is the winner.
Death Race is an arcade driving video game developed and released by Exidy in the United States, first shipping to arcade distributors in April 1976. The game was a modification of Exidy's 1975 game Destruction Derby in which players crashed into cars to accrue points. In Death Race, the objective became to run into "gremlins" to gain score. The game could be played with one or two players controlling different cars. The original working title for the game which appeared on some early advertisements was Death Race 98.
Lally II, Ralph C. (December 1976). "Play Meter Plays the New Games, Volume II". Play Meter. Vol.2, no.14.
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