Mindfield, on Sun Feb 25, 2007 10:06 PM, said:
I also found it kind of odd that Bill was so concerned about Arcadia and the potential for piracy of their tapes. He called the concept "frightening." What effect would that have on Imagic, or anyone else for that matter? Seems to me from a competitive standpoint Arcadia should have been the least of their concerns unless they had somehow considered writing games for that medium.
I may be wrong about this, but based on what he said about the Arcadia allowing piracy to take place, and based on the remarks that Brian Dougherty made about the ease of copying cassette tapes, I got the impression that they were concerned that the Arcadia would become a vehicle for piracy, making it possible to transfer and copy cartridge games (including Imagic's) on tape.
It has been done, so I suppose that concern was valid, but the Arcadia would have had to sell a fairly large number of units before any such piracy could have become widespread enough to hurt Imagic's margins. I think that might have been another one of Dougherty's points: because cassettes are so easy to pirate, Arcadia wouldn't make much money off of a cassette-based system because the few games they sold would be so quickly copied, and so they weren't a competitor worth worrying about. Speaking of competitors, I didn't realize that Data Age and Imagic were neighbors, either, before I saw them singled out in that list of companies during the board meeting at the end of Part 1.
I'm struck again at how strange it is to watch the events of 1982 unfold as they happened. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see all of the factors that lead to the video game crash beginning to materialize in this documentary: all kinds of companies jumping onto the video game bandwagon looking for a quick buck, and major players like Imagic being focused entirely on securing big purchase orders from retailers and stuffing the sales channels with product. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that there was much more product being generated (by them and everyone else) than the fledgling market could absorb, and not nearly enough of it sold through to the customers. So when that excess product started coming back, and when they started building up more and more product in their warehouses in anticipation of future 1983 sales that never materialized, they found themselves with a multi-million-dollar inventory problem, and that's ultimately what did them in. And that's probably why it still isn't too hard to find sealed Imagic games some twenty-five years later: hidden stashes in forgotten corners keep cropping up even today, and I think there are still more out there waiting to be rediscovered.
Just out of curiosity, I wonder if anyone knows what became of Bill Grubb after his time at Imagic? Or, for that matter, Jim Levy after Activision? I know that Bruce Davis (who, oddly enough, succeeded both of them as president of Imagic and then as CEO of Activision) heads up
Digimarc these days, and I know what most of the programmers have done, but I don't think I've seen any post-crash information on Grubb or Levy. I think a new interview with either one of them would be fascinating: we've all heard a lot about the pioneering work that the great programmers at Activision and Imagic did, but the business side of these early software companies (including their successes and failures) deserves discussion too, and who would be better qualified to talk about it than the people who were at the very top?
Edited by jaybird3rd, Tue Mar 6, 2007 12:21 AM.
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Pity, because I'd like to finally eliminate the Quicktimes from my collection.
