Exidy

~ the goodbye ~

Exidy was founded on 30 october 1973 in Palo Alto by H. R. Kauffman and Samuel Hawes, and the name was a contraction of Excellence in Dynamics, which tells you roughly what kind of decade it was. The company built coin-operated machines. Its first real product was a driving game called Destruction Derby in 1975, licensed out to Chicago Coin because Exidy did not yet have the manufacturing to ship it in volume.

Then it built the same idea again under its own name and put a monster in it. Death Race shipped to arcade distributors in april 1976. You drove a car over small humanoid figures the manual called gremlins, they made a noise when you hit them, and each one left a tombstone that stayed on the track and made the next lap harder. In july an Associated Press reporter named Wendy Walker saw the machine in a Seattle arcade and wrote about it, the wire carried the story everywhere, and by the end of the year the game had been condemned on 60 Minutes and in the New York Times. Exidy said afterward that the coverage produced a large jump in sales.

This was the first time a video game caused a national argument in the United States about whether video games were doing something to the people playing them, and it happened eight years before I was born, on a continent I would not see for another three decades. What reached Turkey later was the argument, not the cabinet. By the time the same fight arrived over Mortal Kombat and then over Counter-Strike, which is the one I was actually inside of in an internet cafe in the early 2000s, nobody remembered that the template had been set by a monochrome car game with a screaming pixel in front of it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the games after the scandal ~

Exidy was not a one-hit outrage machine. Circus in 1977 was a Breakout variant with acrobats and a see-saw that turned up in living rooms all over the world as a clone. Star Fire in 1978 was a sit-in Star Wars game in everything but license, and it is credited as one of the first arcade games that let you put your initials next to a high score, which is a small thing that changed what an arcade cabinet was for. Mouse Trap and Venture came in 1981, Crossbow in 1983.

Chiller in 1986 went back to the Death Race well deliberately, and it is genuinely unpleasant in a way the 1976 game is not, being a light gun game set in a torture chamber. Very few operators would take it. The final traditional video game was Who Dunit in 1988, after which the company moved to poker and redemption machines, which is where coin-op money actually was by then.

~ the other exidy ~

In 1978 Exidy tried to be a computer company. The Sorcerer was a Z80 machine on the S-100 bus, developed with Paul Terrell of Byte Shop fame, and it did one thing better than its competitors: 64 characters across a line of text when most home machines gave you 40. Its software came on ROM cartridges housed in 8-track tape shells, because those shells were cheap and already in mass production.

It sold poorly in North America against the Apple II and the TRS-80, and then found an odd second life in Europe and Australia, where it kept a devoted user base for years. Exidy sold the computer division to Biotech Capital Group in 1981 and went back to arcades.

~ how it actually ended ~

The 1983 arcade crash took the market out from under everybody, and Exidy went into bankruptcy in 1985. Gene Lipkin came in as president from Atari. Sega looked at buying the company and did not. What was left kept trading, kept building gambling and redemption hardware, and stayed under Kauffman's control until it was voluntarily dissolved in 1999.

Nobody wrote about the dissolution. The interesting death had already happened twice: once in 1983 when the arcade business collapsed, and once in 1976 when a small company in Palo Alto found out that being denounced on national television was the most effective advertising it would ever buy.

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