Photon: The Ultimate Game on Planet Earth

Photon was the name of the first commercial lasertag arenas. The company also came out with a home lasertag game, and there were various media tie-ins: a TV show also called Photon and a series of novels by Peter David.

George Carter III came up with the idea for Photon while watching Star Wars when it premiered in 1977. In 1982, research and development started in earnest, and the first Photon center in the Dallas suburb of Garland, Texas, opened in March 1984. The first franchisee opened in Toronto in June 1985. The architect for Photon was J.C. Collins.

The home units were introduced in 1986 as an Entertech product, at the same time as the Lazer Tag brand units of competitor Worlds of Wonder. Both companies were very successful in the Christmas shopping season of 1986.

By 1987, 70 franchise licenses had been sold and 45 arenas were operating.

In 1989, lack of financing and loss of franchise revenue forced the corporation to sell off its assets and cease operations.

In 2007, a new Photon center was constructed in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. It opened on July 1, 2008, but on September 9, 2008, after less than 9 weeks, lack of business revenue forced the center to cease operations.

In 2014, a former Photon operator has begun an IndieGoGo campaign to bring Photon back for a reunion party.

While primitive compared to technology today, entailing wearing 15 pounds of battery packs and equipment, Photon was one of the first video game-like experiences that one could play in the real world. The arenas featured multiple levels, catwalks, mazes, and an observation deck from which people not participating could cheer their friends in the game, or get target practice by shooting players from special token-operated emplacements. (Shots from observation deck guns did not affect the game in any way at most arenas.) This contrasted sharply with competing laser-tag centers, whose fields were small, single-level, composed of clusters of free-standing painted cardboard barriers, and typically contained no observation area of any sort. Also, in Photon, players were allowed to roam at will through the entire playing field rather than be restricted to team-specific zones.

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Wikipedia