Cinematronics
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| Industry | computer and video game industry |
|---|---|
| Fate | Purchased by Tradewest and renamed Leland Corp. |
| Successor | Leland Corp. |
| Founded | 1975 |
| Defunct | 1987 |
| Headquarters | El Cajon, California |
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Key people
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Jim Pearce: co-founder; Tom "Papa" Stroud; Larry Rosenthal; |
| Products | Space Wars, Dragon's Lair |
Cinematronics Incorporated was a pioneering arcade game developer that had its heyday in the era of vector display games. While other companies released games based on raster displays, early in their history, Cinematronics and Atari released vector-display games, which offered a distinctive look and a greater graphic capability (at the time), at the cost of being only black and white (initially).
Cinematronics Inc. was founded in 1975 by Jim Pearce, Dennis Parte and Gary Garrison in El Cajon, California, although early on Parte and Garrison sold their shares to Tom "Papa" Stroud. Cinematronics' first games, a Pong clone, a Flipper Ball copy and their first original game design, Embargo, were released in 1975, 1976, and 1977, but they were not particularly notable. The company really began to prosper after the Space Wars game came into production about a year later.
Larry Rosenthal, a student of MIT, had written his master's thesis on Spacewar! and wanted to create a version of the computer game that could be placed in arcades. Rosenthal had created a processor that was powerful enough to run a proper version of Spacewar! and yet inexpensive to produce. He named his TTL-based technology "Vectorbeam". After building a prototype, he shopped the machine around to various game companies, looking for a distributor.
At this same time Cinematronics was looking for their next game. The timing was perfect for the two: Cinematronics was running out of funds and looking for any deal to land a new game and Rosenthal was selling a game. The deal was made and the game was released as Space Wars.
Space Wars was the first arcade game to utilize black & white vector graphics, which enabled it to display sharp, crisp images. Space Wars had graphics which were far more detailed than the raster displays of the time. Cinematronics shipped over 30,000 units and was a top seller in 1978.
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