General Computer Corporation

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

~ the goodbye ~

General Computer started in 1981 as a side business run by MIT students who operated arcade machines around the dorms and got tired of them going stale. Their answer was Super Missile Attack, a board that plugged into Atari's Missile Command and gave it new behavior. Atari sued that August, General Computer countersued, and the case ended in a settlement that reads from here like the best outcome anyone in that position has ever negotiated: Atari dropped it and hired them at fifty thousand dollars a month for two years, exclusive, on condition they never did the kit trick to anybody else's game again.

What Atari got for the money was real. Food Fight and Quantum came out of the arrangement. A third game, Nightmare, never shipped. General Computer also did the Atari 2600 versions of Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede and produced more than half the cartridges for the 5200. Then it designed the chip architecture of the Atari 7800, which made that machine the first Atari console designed outside the company.

The 7800 is where the relationship stopped working. It was built through 1983 and 1984 for a June 1984 rollout, and on 2 July 1984 Warner sold Atari's consumer division to Jack Tramiel, who halted everything. General Computer had not been paid for the console, Warner and Tramiel spent months arguing about whose debt it was, and only in May 1985 did Tramiel relent and pay. The machine sat in warehouses until January 1986.

By then the company had already left. The 1984 pivot was to Macintosh peripherals and then to printers, and the printers turned out to be the long business. The name became GCC Technologies, the address became Burlington and later New Bedford, Massachusetts, and laser printers went out under that name until 2015, when the company was wound up. Thirty-four years in total, four of them spent on the thing it is remembered for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ crazy otto ~

While the Atari suit was still live, General Computer was quietly finishing a second kit, this one for Pac-Man. Crazy Otto was done and ready to sell when the settlement closed off that route entirely. Kevin Curran picked up the phone to Dave Marofske at Midway, which held the North American Pac-Man license, and framed it as a favor: here is the kit, here is what happened to Atari, would you rather buy it than fight it. The deal was signed on 29 October 1981.

Midway put it out in 1982 as Ms. Pac-Man, the first game in the series Namco did not make, after running through Miss Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man on the way to a name people could say. Namco's president Masaya Nakamura was brought in late and gave notes on the character. It topped the American upright cabinet charts for most of 1982. By 1987 the game had grossed 1.2 billion dollars, and by 1988 it had sold 125,000 cabinets. Namco collected the same royalty on each of those cabinets that it had collected on Pac-Man.

~ the royalty that outlived the company ~

The 1981 handover was for royalties rather than a flat fee. That turned into a fight with Midway over merchandise money, settled in 1983 on terms confirming the General Computer people got paid whenever Ms. Pac-Man was used commercially, and Namco made a further agreement with them in 2008. Bandai Namco holds the copyright. The royalty obligations underneath it were never fully cleaned up.

So in August 2019, four years after the company stopped existing, AtGames bought the royalties owed to the General Computer group. Bandai Namco sued, claiming AtGames was presenting itself as licensed; the case was dismissed with prejudice on 27 October 2020 with the terms sealed. Since the 2022 Arcade Archives release of Pac-Land, Ms. Pac-Man has been removed from re-releases and replaced by a character called Pac-Mom. Nobody has given an official reason. A dissolved Massachusetts printer company is the most convincing one available.

~ the case you opened yourself ~

The piece of this that lands nearest to me is the HyperDrive, and it lands as a price. In 1985 an internal hard disk for a Macintosh 128K cost 2,795 dollars, fitted by a dealer, and Apple had to publicly confirm in June of that year that having one installed would not void the warranty. The hardware culture I grew up in ran the other way entirely. By the time I was posting on donanimhaber and frmtr with my component list sitting in the signature, upgrading meant buying the part and opening the beige case yourself, and paying somebody thousands to perform surgery on a sealed computer would have read as a joke. The first business General Computer went into after games was selling exactly that surgery.

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