American Laser Games

» see algames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The company came out of law enforcement. Robert Grebe was running a firm in Albuquerque called ICAT, the Institute for Combat Arms and Tactics, which built branching video simulators to teach police officers when to fire and when not to. The training system had a projector, a real weapon rigged to a sensor, and film of situations that went one way if you shot and another way if you did not. Grebe worked out that the same machine, with the moral weight taken out of it, was an arcade game.

Mad Dog McCree shipped in 1990 and it did not look like anything else on a floor full of sprites. Inside the cabinet sat a Sony Lasermax laserdisc player and an Amiga 500 with a genlock, so the computer could paint a crosshair and a score on top of full-motion video without touching the video itself. The film was live action Western, shot with actual actors on an actual set, and the man in the black hat waited for you at the end of it. You pointed a plastic revolver at a screen and people fell over.

The catalog kept the same shape for five years. Who Shot Johnny Rock in 1991, Space Pirates and Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold in 1992, Crime Patrol in 1993 with a sequel about drug enforcement the same year, The Last Bounty Hunter in 1994. Home ports went to Sega CD, CD-i, 3DO and DOS machines with a CD-ROM drive, and the company backed the 3DO hard enough to sell a modified 3DO board as an upgrade kit for arcade cabinets that already existed. It also sold light guns, including the 3DO Game Gun and a PC version whose accuracy was bad enough to be its own review.

I do not remember standing in front of one of these. Turkish arcades in the early nineties ran on cheap boards in generic cabinets, a lot of them secondhand and a lot of them running things nobody had licensed, and a machine with a Sony laserdisc player and an Amiga in it was a different order of capital expenditure. What I associate with an arcade from that era is a Neo Geo cabinet and a bootleg fighting game, not a filmed cowboy. The technology that made American Laser Games famous is exactly the technology that kept it inside a small number of rich markets.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The design constraint was total and nobody could argue with it. Everything you could possibly do had to have been filmed in advance, so the game was a tree of video clips with a seek time between them. A laserdisc player can jump to a chapter fast, but not instantly, and the whole craft of an ALG game was hiding that pause inside a moment where a character was reaching for a gun or a horse was turning around.

That is also why every one of these games is short and why you die constantly. There is no state, only position in a tree. The machine cannot remember that you were clever earlier, because clever earlier was not filmed. What players got in exchange was photographic reality at a time when the alternative was a few thousand pixels, and for about four years that trade looked like the future.

~ the slide ~

Then it stopped looking like the future, quite suddenly. Polygon hardware got good enough that a drawn world could do things film could not, which is respond to you. Full-motion video went from selling point to punchline across roughly two years, and the arcade business as a whole was sliding at the same time as home consoles caught up with it.

American Laser Games ended direct manufacturing of coin-op machines in november 1995 and turned toward the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation. It did not work. Revenue in 1996 came in at roughly half the 16 million dollars of the year before, which is a fast way to run out of a company.

~ what really happened ~

At the end of 1996 a third of the staff went and Jan Claesson replaced Grebe as president. Every game in the mainstream line was canceled except Shining Sword, which was then canceled too. What the board kept was HeR Interactive, launched in may 1995 as a division called Games for Her Interactive, whose first title McKenzie & Co came out that same year into a market that the industry press at the time was calling girls' games and treating as a fad.

It was not a fad. HeR was spun out as its own company, moved to Bellevue, Washington, and in 1998 started a series of Nancy Drew adventure games that ran to more than thirty entries. In 1999 the spinoff bought the parent. American Laser Games was bought out by the division it had created as a side bet, which is a rare and slightly humiliating way for a company to end, and the Albuquerque operation stopped.

~ the long tail ~

In 2000 HeR sold the development and publishing rights to every American Laser Games title to Digital Leisure, a Canadian company that has been reissuing them ever since. Mad Dog McCree has come out on PC, on DVD players as a TV game, on Wii, and eventually on phones, and there is a version playable now, which makes it one of the better preserved catalogs of its era despite the company being gone for a quarter of a century.

What survived is not the games so much as the argument. Every few years somebody decides that real actors and real footage will make a game feel closer to a film, and rediscovers that filmed material cannot answer back. American Laser Games got there first and got about five years out of it, which is more than most of the people who tried it afterward.

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