Interview: Tom McHugh

Tom McHugh is widely credited as being the first man to ever program a game on a microprocessor, the game being Gun Fight released by Midway Manufacturing in November of 1975. At Dave Nutting Associates, Tom would innovate in bringing life to the industry’s first hardware system with games like Sea Wolf and Tornado Baseball.…

The History of How We Play Video Series

This blog has been in support of the larger project that I have been working on since 2015, a video series under the same banner of “The History of How We Play”. I wanted to give a clearer summary of exactly what this project entails as well as some of my own thought process behind…

Selects #2: Modify

Quite a gap between part one and two, but we’re back with the Selects segment! This is where I bring forward some obscure portions of research to shed some light on areas of history. Today, it’s all about the world’s most famous mods. Mods, or game modifications, are a fascinating subset of a released game…

Chicago Legacy: The Remnants of Williams Electronics

A lot of folks in Chicago, even those who love games, don’t really know the history of the city as the center of innovation. It’s easy to understand that Chicago has always been a manufacturing and transport oriented city, but to know that the coin-op industry was once a major force here would require knowing…

2017: The Losses

Yet another year passes us by, and with it so do individuals who were foundational in the video game industry. Luckily enough, I really had to reach to find those higher individuals who passed away this year, so things were much better on the whole than last year. Let’s take a moment though and remember…

The Mysteries of 2017

It’s been another great year for research and finally getting to share some of my work. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at the first part of a series I’m doing for the Video Game History Foundation to learn a bit more about how I’ve been able to uncover some of this…

Super Sales Six

[Images to be added] The coin-op industry is known for sharing staff across various companies, from engineers to presidents there’s always been a shift from one opportunity to the next within the collegiate industry. Salesman in particular often have rather diverse careers in a short period and a couple permeate the pages of the coin-op…