Kee Games

~ the eulogy ~

Kee Games closed in 1978, six years before I was born, and none of its cabinets ever reached a Turkish arcade floor. The interesting part is not the hardware anyway. Kee Games was a lie that Atari told its own distributors, and the lie went well enough that it ended up running Atari.

The problem it was built to solve was contractual. Arcade distributors in the early seventies signed exclusive territorial deals, so a manufacturer could sell into a given city through exactly one of them, and every other distributor in that city was closed to you no matter how good the game was. In September 1973 Nolan Bushnell worked with Joe Keenan, a friend who lived down the street, to set up a second manufacturer in Los Gatos. It was named after Keenan. It advertised itself in the trade press as Atari's competitor and claimed to be hiring away Atari's disgruntled engineers.

None of that was true. Bushnell assigned Atari staff to work at Kee, including Steve Bristow, Bill White and Gil Williams, and supplied them with the parts to build the machines. The early Kee catalog was Atari's catalog with the names changed. Elimination was Bristow's own Quadrapong, a project he had left unfinished at Atari. Spike was Atari's Rebound with one extra button on it labeled spike. Formula K and Twin Racer were Gran Trak 10 and Gran Trak 20.

The arrangement came apart in 1974, and rather than fight about it Atari absorbed the company in September of that year and kept Kee running as a separate operating division. Keenan was made president of Atari in the same move. Warner Communications bought Atari in 1976 and shut the Kee division down in 1978. Bushnell left that December, Keenan followed a few months later, and the two of them went off to run Pizza Time Theatre.

~ the dossier ~

~ the bluff ~

What makes this worth remembering is that the deception was aimed at the middle of the industry rather than at the public. A player dropping a quarter into Elimination in 1973 had no stake in who manufactured it. The people being fooled were distributors who believed they had negotiated something scarce, and the fraud consisted of doubling the number of doors a single factory could walk through in a given city.

Atari eventually stopped hiding it. From Tank II in 1975 onward the Kee label carried an Atari disclosure on it, and the division carried on for three more years as a plain second brand with nothing to conceal. That is the ordinary fate of a successful bluff: it stops being a bluff and becomes a product line.

~ tank ~

Kee's first original game was Tank, released in November 1974 and designed by Steve Bristow, who had worked on Computer Space before any of this started. Lyle Rains developed it and Peter Takaichi built the cabinet. Two players drive tanks around a fixed maze, shoot at each other, and avoid a minefield of X marks in the middle, and a round runs about a minute. It sold over 10,000 units.

Atari was in serious financial trouble in 1974 and Tank is a large part of why it survived the year. The game's dual-joystick controls also outlived the cabinet: those sticks became the standard Atari 2600 controller in 1977, and the 2600 pack-in game Combat is Tank with the maze redrawn. Kee kept producing through the second half of the decade, ending with Sprint 1 in January 1978 and Ultra Tank in February, and then the division was gone.

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