As has been mentioned once or twice on the site, I have lately been very busy in working on my arcade history book. Silly me to think that the copy I had for the 1970s would just be a quick edit then off to the presses, as it’s been rather time consuming in getting it down to the final draft. As a part of that editing work, though, I realized that I was telling the same story across different chapters when it came to the advent of the CPU among video arcade games, so I decided to fork that off into it’s own chapter. If you’re interested, you can buy said chapter separately on the button below; it will help support me in this work to get it all done sooner. It gets into more detail than this post does:
While others like Keith Smith and Ethan Johnson have tackled this subject before, I unexpectedly came across something hidden between the lines of the historical record which I think is interesting. It’s not earth-shattering, as everyone already pretty much accepts as fact that Midway’s Gun Fight was the first mass-produced video arcade game to use a CPU (what an oddly specific trivia fact, haha). But I do think that, unless some new-new evidence can be uncovered, that fact should be solidified. So whilst news has entered a lull again (there was a little deluge we had at the beginning of the month, then this week nearly nothing at all), here’s some deep diving on Mirco Games’ PT-109 (another early CPU title) that goes into whether it ever actually made it to market.
A previous version of this article had Keith Smith as “Kevin.” We regret the error and have corrected it. I have also added some additional insight into the topic thanks to Ethan Johnson of The History Of How We Play; I appreciate him reaching out!
Who Was Mirco Games?
For some quick background, Mirco (yes, that’s how it was spelled, not Micro) is not a name that most arcade enthusiasts are super familiar with, since they went out of business in 1979, with their last game Hold & Draw rolling off the line in June 1978. Based out of Arizona, they started out as both a foosball table manufacturer and creator of test equipment. They jumped onto the “Let’s Clone Pong To Make A Quick Buck!” bandwagon at the end of 1973, later finding a thing for amusement card games after licensing Hit Me!, a blackjack game, from Ramtek. They also would try their hand at two pinball machines, their first being touted as the first full solid state pin, the second being a forgettable cocktail cab.
Speaking of cocktail cabinets, they sure had a penchant for making their games in this style, even releasing a racing game this way instead of in an upright. Out of all of their releases, it’s hard to say if anything they did would be remembered fondly by anyone – maybe Super 21?
I did find out a bit of interesting information on one of their releases, Scramble. I’ll be publishing some photos of that in the book and providing more details. Another interesting angle is that they had a few ex-Motorola employees working there, which is why they were jumping onto CPU tech early on – although they would end up using a Fairchild F8 processor in their early stuff instead of the Motorola 6800.
PT-109 – Did It Release?
The debate here stems from the fact that at the October MOA 1975 Expo in Chicago, IL, three video games appeared at the same event which were all powered by a CPU: Midway’s Gun Fight, Mirco’s PT-109, and Innovative Coin’s Spitfire. This causes a little bit of a problem when you’re trying to do a trivia game or book, and you ask the question of “who was first?”
I would note that I don’t care for the semantics of “which game as an experiment used a CPU first;” yes, several groups experimented with CPUs in closed prototype settings, but they were never released. Putting these on the same level as something that did make it to market is like saying that my father’s brother’s cousin’s nephew’s former roommate totally invented cold fusion in his garage, but the CIA took him out before he could show it to the world. Who cares if a tiny handful of people ever saw what you did? Getting to market is what matters here, as that’s more difficult than just inventing something.
I’m not going to repeat the entire chapter below, and I already spoiled it with Gun Fight certifiably still holding the title UPDATE: Ethan Johnson has brought up two additional CPU-based video games, The Money Game and Shark, which might line-up with Gun Fight, or predate it, so we’re back at a tie once again. I need to look more into The Money Game, but Shark appears to have begun shipping at about the same time as Gun Fight did. At least from the public’s view, Gun Fight would be the one that most people would encounter, since Midway ended up making at least 8,600 of them, whereas Shark probably didn’t break the 500 unit barrier.* Still, when it comes to “first,” well it’s not a straight-forward answer.
That aside, as I’ve dived into the topic, I believe that PT-109 never saw production, and the prototype game that was at the show is all that ever existed of it. That is something I’ve never seen anyone take a deep look at, so I will here. Meanwhile, there are various attestations in the media that Midway’s Gun Fight was hitting both distributor show rooms and operator game floors by November of ’75.
If you have been following the site here for a while, then you will know that many times, we have covered games that appear at an event like Amusement Expo or IAAPA, where they show up once and are never seen again. Battleship, Spider-Man the redemption game, Ticket Pinball, Mario Party Challenge World, among several other examples. It’s not a one-off thing where, for one reason or another, a game making it to a show is not a guarantee that it reaches the market. Yet game databases often treat a “show debut” or “existence in MAME” as production (they need to stop doing that).
In the case of PT-109, I have come to believe that it is a part of this group, because outside of four mentions that I can find of the game between Cash Box and Play Meter Magazines, then an article in March 1976 in a tech magazine called EDN (note: Ethan also adds that PT-109 is mentioned in the January 1976 issue of Vending Times), PT-109 completely disappears from the historical record like it was Gerado’s music career after Rico Suave.
I have spent way too much time scouring through classifieds and other parts of trade mags, only to find nothing about it; it is not present on any price list either. Mirco didn’t promote it with ads when they should have been, instead touting a Pong clone from 1974 and a new game called Skywar as you see from this ad below that appeared in places like Cash Box Magazine in July 1976. It’s very odd behavior to ignore a game you’ve spent money on manufacturing if you’re actually producing them and trying to sell. Yet, they and the amusement media don’t ever bring it up again after January 1976; the tech magazine in March also didn’t mention that it was shipping, just that it was using a CPU and that made it noteworthy.
Every game except for PT-109 that is
In regards to that Pong clone, Challenge, it received UL Certification, which is actually a first among any arcade game. But is that a bigger accomplishment than getting a video game to work on a CPU? Hardly. Mirco was far more excited about that than they were about something like PT-109, which is a tell that they didn’t actually get PT-109 to work right, and seeing little excitement about it at MOA, they decided to cut their losses and move on to the next thing. I have found zero ads for it too, despite Mirco having no problem taking out ads in various trades at the time. Here’s an ad for Challenge that was published on Feb. 14th, 1976 – which is exactly when they should have been promoting their fancy new CPU-powered game, not a two year old game:
At that MOA show at the center of all of this, Mirco grabbed a ton of industry attention thanks to the appearance of the first “full” solid state pinball machine, Spirit of ’76. But the game didn’t work, and that was a problem when you had orders coming in thanks to the hype. To quote Mr. Olsen as quoted on a 2015 blog post from Keith Smith, where I’ve added the “smoking gun” emphasis that PT-109 was not shipping concurrently with Gun Fight (which was on location by Nov. 75); also note that “both games” he’s referring to are Spirit of ’76 & PT-109:
[Cash Olsen] Interest was very strong and we were riding on a big bubble after the show. Apparently, large orders were written and unrealistic delivery dates promised. We went back to Phoenix with a great deal of pressure because both games were still in prototype status; nothing was finalized and ready to turn over to manufacturing. The next several weeks were spent readying a couple of more prototypes of each game for delivery to the first customer; I believe it was [C.A.] Robinson in California. The [sales] price that …[Mirco] committed to was well below the cost of manufacturing the games as they currently existed…the silkscreens of the glass and …[playfield] of the pinball machine were of particular concern. Sourcing of the plastic and electro-mechanical parts of the play field was not firm and Bally/Midway seemed to control most of them. As shown at MOA, they used seven screens, …[which] caused the cost to be excessive. (2015)
Hook, meet sinker.
Even if PT-109 did see a small production run, it’s clear that it was not first-to-market nor concurrent to Gun Fight. We can also run the logic of Midway having a huge resource advantage in manufacturing that Mirco did not have, that the response at the show was so great that they put the game into production immediately.
For additional proof, aside from the game mysteriously being absent in both media mentions and Mirco’s own ads in the coming months, C.A. Robinson did hold their own post-MOA event, so that their customers in California who couldn’t make it to Chicago could see the latest new stuff. They were one of the biggest distributors of the 1970s, and Mirco was one of their lines. Cash Box attests multiple times that Spirit of ’76 was at that event (as was Gun Fight and several other games), but PT-109 was never included on that list. Here’s one example:
Their silly name also made the writer of Cash Box misspell micro-processor
The only evidence we have of the game existing is a single appearance at the MOA’75 and a flyer being made for it. A flyer likewise is not evidence that a game reached production; you can also find many prototype games on The Arcade Flyer Archiv; or if we jump over to the home market, there’s Atari’s infamous example of touting Asteroids as the pack-in game for the Atari 5200 and that never shipped, despite having ads, flyers, even boxes made for it.
I would also be curious from the emulator crowd – is there any PT-109 ROMs out there? From a little looking, I’ve not seen any, and if I read this right, it’s undumped. If not, that seems to raise another flag in favor it either never being released, or seeing super low production numbers (which I do hold as a possibility).
Due to the lack of evidence that the game was promoted at all by Mirco into 1976, including zero mentions of it in any classified as either a new or used unit, I believe that they did what many, many companies have done, even as recently as IAAPA 2025 – a game was shown, a flyer was made for it so it could be promoted at the show, but demand was non-existent and/or the game had too many problems or some other issue arose, and so they cut their losses by quietly cancelling it and moving on to the next thing. In this case, it was the flight combat game released months later called Sky War.
* According to Ralph Baer in his book, Videogames: In The Beginning, he wrote down on a chart of sales that Shark only sold 400 units, 200 for the upright, 200 for the cocktail. However, that shouldn’t be taken as The Final Gospel, as it is unclear where he got his numbers and he rounds everything. Still, he did produce that document for legal reasons (Magnavox suing all sorts of companies over Video Tennis clones), so it has more weight to it than just any rando picking numbers out of the air, and it’s clear that Shark would not make waves in the industry, whereas there are attestations from Midway that they did reach at least 8,600 sales, possibly more, on Gun Fight.
Prove Me Wrong – Please!
That all said, I am happy to change my mind with evidence. A lot of you out there are collectors; or putting this out there might be found from someone who worked at Mirco who can provide some new insight. Maybe Mr. Olsen was misremembering things, but I think his statement fits nicely with the facts – Mirco didn’t have the resources that a company like Midway had, and putting a pinball into production is a far more complex task than a video game. That one obviously took precedent, as Play Meter Magazine lathered the accomplishment of Spirit of ’76 with praise in their November 1975 issue, which contributed to the pressure that Olsen and the rest of Mirco was under to get the pin right. It’s also worth noting that there was a head-to-head pinball machine at the same show by a company called Komputer Dynamics that also used a CPU and took out ads in Play Meter, but it never shipped either.
If we can find evidence, say of an existing unit where there’s a serial number that indicates that it’s one of many, then I’ll adjust my stance, but unless such a thing does exist, I’ll stick with my guns that it never saw mass production. I also think that this solidifies Gun Fight’s place in history as the first video arcade game powered by a CPU, that actually made it to market.
It is too bad that it never got released – a lot of companies were copying Atari at that point on their games like Tank and Jet Fighter, so applying that concept to assault boats was different at least. I do think that a critical error they made that also is what likely resulted in little attention at the Expo (and afterwards) was that they didn’t put it into an upright cabinet. That’s the problem with cocktail cabinets in general, but especially at this point in the ’70s – there was so little to distinguish one from another that unless you were literally standing right over it, you wouldn’t know if it was something interesting like PT-109 or just another one of the dozens of Pong clones out there.
That’s my case – what do you think?
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