U.S. Games

~ the last words ~

U.S. Games was four years old and selling handheld electronic sports games when it changed course. Donald Yu had started it in Santa Clara, California, and through 1981 handhelds were the whole business. In January 1982 the company switched to video game software only, putting its first cartridge, Space Jockey, onto the Atari 2600 that same month, initially under the brand name Vidtec.

Three months later Quaker Oats bought it. The logic, as Quaker's chief executive William Smithburg put it, was to explore the possible fit of video game technology with the Fisher-Price toy business and to strengthen distribution for both. Fisher-Price was stagnant and exposed to a falling birth rate, with most of its year riding on the fourth quarter. General Mills, meanwhile, owned Parker Brothers, which was doing extremely well in exactly this market, and that comparison does a lot of work in explaining why a cereal company was buying a cartridge house in April 1982.

Fourteen distinct titles came out under the label in total, which collectors count as nineteen because several shipped in both a beveled case and a standard one. Andy Bergman, a ten-year Fisher-Price veteran, was brought in as manager of product design and contributed nine of them, Eggomania and Gopher among them. Sales for calendar 1982 were six million dollars.

Then the market turned over. Quaker pulled out in the spring of 1983 and took a $1.9 million write-off on the assets, and Smithburg's statement was that they had not foreseen the rapid oversaturation of the market and had concluded that continuing without major investment was not viable. He also conceded that retail demand for cartridges had gone from outpacing supply to saturation, and that sales had been very disappointing. The company had been in the video game business for about eighteen months.

~ the record ~

~ which month it died ~

Nobody can give you a day, and the month is contested. Arcade Express ran an item headlined "U.S. Games Bites the Dust" on 27 March 1983. Suzan Prince, writing in Video Games that September, says Smithburg announced the discontinuation in April. Weekly Television Digest reported the plug pulled in its issue of 2 May, carrying the write-off figure. One hobby site asserts 26 June and cites nothing.

Those are four different dates for one closure, and the spread is a record of how these things surfaced in the spring of 1983: a trade paper noticed a company had gone quiet, and the parent confirmed it weeks later with a number attached. The year is solid; the month depends on which source you take.

~ the cartridges nobody wanted ~

Prince's account is unsparing about which ones failed. Squeeze Box and Towering Inferno were retail bombs, and a buyer's assessment of Eggomania was that it was cute but it goes nowhere. An official at Crazy Eddie, the discount chain, said he thought they were getting a little bit desperate. The company was left holding a large and apparently unwanted inventory, and by the low point in spring 1983 stores were moving some of its cartridges for as little as five dollars each.

The last deal it made was for the Pink Panther, a license Bergman had wanted. No game was ever developed. That is the closing position: a cartoon license in hand, and an owner with oatmeal to get back to.

~ the stock went to france ~

The titles did not quite stop existing in 1983. Carrere Video picked a number of them up and sold them in continental Europe from late that year, under its own name, well after the company whose logo was on the box had been written off a balance sheet in Chicago.

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