Midway Games

So we have this novelty song that's climbing the Billboard charts.

Bally Midway was moving millions of home units of the game on various ports, and Ms. Pac-Man was already on her way to becoming just as big of a phenomenon as her husband.

Now, if you want to know more about Pac-Man, we already told its full story, you know, how Awatani built the character and how what was a struggling company turned just a pizza with a slice missing into one of the most recognized shapes in the world.

That's all the way back.

They knew immediately that it was going to be something because of how popular it was.

It was insanely popular, in case you didn't know.

Namco and their license distributor, Bally Midway, were not interested in licensing it out yet.

That character, as far as they were concerned in 1980, was barely off the showroom floor.

It's actually a massive American media franchise.

Um, and it started way back in 1992 by a company called Midway Games.

And, um, I had been watching a lot of interviews, uh, with the, with Ed Boon and, um, John Tobias, uh, the two creators of Mortal Kombat.

Um, just trying to get my head around how this thing started and why it started.

Yeah, he did the, the artwork for that.

Mm.

Um, and he came on to work at, at Midway Games, and he was, like, 20.

Oh, right.

Top arcade games of the end of the 70s included Atari's Asteroids, Super Breakout, and Missile Command, and the Japanese company Taito's Space Invaders.

Bally Midway entered the arcade business by partnering with the Japanese company Namco, formerly Atari's distributor in Japan, and importing Namco's game, Galaxian.

Now, Namco revolutionized the arcade scene when it introduced the first video game celebrity, Pac-Man.

Early Golden Age games lacked a named protagonist, but with the launch of Namco's Pac-Man in 1980, the character-based game was born.

And out of college, I had a little ad agency, you know, and I was doing cartoon work for local newspapers and bars and, you know, getting paid in beer and popcorn.

And I saw an ad one day for the Bally Midway Company here in Chicagoland.

And they were looking for an animator.

And I'm thinking, what does a pinball company want with an animator? Oh, I know.

And they were all little things, depending on the programmer you're working with.

It was very peer-to-peer at

Bally Midway back then.

No one was called the game designer.

And it is this.

Midway Games originally produced and developed Mortal Kombat until they were acquired by Warner Brothers and reestablished under what name, named after a location in Mortal Kombat? This wasn't fun.

I should have stayed

in Pokemon.

I mean, I've done things for phones, but I worked on like big AAA games.

I worked at Midway Games in Chicago.

So I was on the NBA Jam team.

We did a baseball game called Slugfest.

Long time ago.

Next up on September 5th, 2007, Stranglehold was released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows, developed by Midway Games and Tiger Hill Entertainment in collaboration with director John Woo.

Woo.

The game served as a spiritual sequel to Woo's 1992 film Hard Boiled, reuniting players with Inspector Tequila for a series of increasingly destructible gunfights built around slow-motion dives, dual-wielding pistols, and environments that could be shot apart piece by piece as cover crumbled around you.

is your other unlock question.

Midway Games sandwiched NBA Jam between the first two installments of what franchise that recently saw its 12th main series title release in 2023 and has had two movies released in the last five years? Okay, now slow

down, Brewer.

Slow the fuck down.

We had a Blitz in our arcade cabinet in our office at Dimension Publishing.

At Midway, we obviously had one in our kitchen as well, but we had the uncensored hard drive that the NFL was not allowed to go into market.

It was hyper-violent, and it had all kinds of F-bombs in it.

Hello, friends.

My guest today spent more than 30 years on the business side of games, deciding which games got made on which platforms, under which business models, and betting his career again and again on which of those platforms and business models were about to eat the last one's lunch.

He got his start at Electronic Arts in the early 90s, back when EA was a boutique and the industry was small enough that a 24-year-old kid could sneak into a trade show, walk up to a booth, and turn that afternoon into a career.

From there, THQ, Midway, Capcom, through the great licensed franchise decade of console games, then on to Playdom on the eve of Disney's $763 million acquisition.

where he had to learn a new language in a week, and in his own words, told his wife he's pretty sure he was going to get fired inside of two.