Cinematronics

~ the goodbye ~

Cinematronics was dissolved in October 1987, the year I turned three. Its entire working life ran from Pong clones to laserdiscs and was over before I could read, so this is a company I know the way most people know it now, through the games rather than the name on the side of the cabinet.

It was incorporated in San Diego on 1 April 1975 by Dennis Partee and Gary Garrison, two players from the San Diego Chargers, together with Jimmie Dale Pierce, who ended up running it. The first product was an unlicensed Pong clone sold around the local area. Flipper Ball followed in 1976 and Embargo in 1977, neither of which made money, and by the spring of 1977 Garrison had sold his share to a mortgage broker named Ralph Clarke.

What saved it was a game it did not design. Larry Rosenthal, an independent engineer, had built a recreation of the old mainframe game Spacewar! out of logic chips, running on a custom monitor that drew lines rather than scanning pixels. Cinematronics was close enough to bankruptcy to agree to manufacture it for a five percent royalty per cabinet. Space Wars shipped at the end of 1977 as the first commercially available video game using vector graphics. It became the best selling coin operated video game of 1978 at around 7,000 units, and the money from it kept the company open.

Rosenthal left in April 1978 and took the documentation with him, which left Cinematronics holding a license to hardware it no longer knew how to build. An engineer named Bob Long had copied the operating codes, and a new hire called Tim Skelly used them to build Starhawk for March 1979. Rosenthal's own company, eventually renamed Vectorbeam, was bought outright by Cinematronics on 1 June 1979. The factory was sold on to Exidy that November. In 1980 Cinematronics sued Atari over the vector patents it now owned, a case that settled out of court.

Star Castle in 1980 was the high point, over 10,000 cabinets and most of a year in production. The company moved into a newly built 78,000 square foot facility in El Cajon in June 1981 and then could not find enough product to fill it. In August 1982 Security Pacific Bank foreclosed and Cinematronics entered Chapter 11. It stayed in bankruptcy for the rest of its existence.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the laserdisc bet ~

Still operating in bankruptcy, Cinematronics took a proposal from Advanced Microcomputer Systems for a game that ran off a LaserDisc player with animation by Don Bluth Productions. The three companies formed a separate entity called Starcom to hold the rights to it and anything that followed. Dragon's Lair arrived in 1983 and gave a bankrupt manufacturer a national reputation as a technology leader, on the strength of a cabinet that played a cartoon back off a disc.

It bought time and nothing more. Space Ace followed in 1984 with the partnership already coming apart, and the laserdisc category collapsed roughly as fast as it had appeared. Dragon's Lair II was location tested and then shelved. It did not reach arcades until 1991, as the last arcade release of The Leland Corporation, which by then held whatever was left of Cinematronics.

~ the second act nobody remembers ~

With the vector hardware abandoned, the company rebuilt around raster games, hiring from Sega/Gremlin across town after that studio shed its internal development team. In 1985 it introduced the Cinemat, a standardized cabinet whose software and control panel could be swapped out for a fraction of the price of a new upright. Nintendo's VS System and Capcom's CPS were built on the same reasoning. World Series: The Season in 1985 was a genuine hit and a technical leap for a company most of the industry had written off.

Nothing after it sold. The Chapter 11 ran long enough that contemporary reports called it the longest in California history, and on 30 March 1987 Pierce sold the company to Tradewest, an arcade licensor run by Leland Cook and Byron Cook, with John Rowe. The assets went into a newly formed entity called The Leland Corporation. The legal shell of Cinematronics was dissolved on 21 October 1987.

~ where the games went ~

Tradewest kept the catalog, Midway bought Tradewest in 1994 and kept it, and Warner Bros. holds it today through its purchase of Midway. The games outlived every one of those owners. They survive now mostly through emulators, which have to reproduce a display that drew lines instead of scanning a grid of pixels.

One loose end is worth naming, because it confuses people who go looking. An unrelated company called Cinematronics LLC existed in the 1990s and made Full Tilt! Pinball, one table of which Microsoft licensed and shipped inside Windows for about twelve years. Same word, completely unrelated company.

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