Chapter Seven
The Dodge City

of Video Games

“Twin Galaxies Arcade is the font where video players worship ... .”

The Toronto Sunday Star

(March 27, 1983)

Though everyone in Ottumwa felt “That’s Incredible” did not give Twin Galaxies enough coverage in the show, the rest of the nation disagreed. Twin Galaxies became a national phenomenon. For the next six months – until the end of the summer – Twin Galaxies enjoyed its sunniest period. We had become the world’s only video game tourist attraction.

The Toronto Sunday Star, March 27, 1983, edition put it nicely: “Ottumwa, IA, may not seem like one of the bright spots on a map, but for thousands of video game addicts, it’s the most important town on earth.” Eddie Adlum, publisher of RePlay magazine, added to this thought in his April issue when he wrote: “There are other arcades in the country with more machines than Walter has on his floor, but few have the player-base loyalty that he enjoys.”

I was now referring to Ottumwa as the “Dodge City of Video Game Playing” during phone interviews with radio stations. Somehow UPI learned of this novel PR angle and liked it enough to send Pat Noble to Ottumwa to do a feature story on the world’s most famous arcade. She arrived unexpectedly in early February and loved the imagery of fast guns drifting into town, seeking to establish reputations as gunslingers of the video game world.

From the moment the story passed over the wires, on February 18, 1983, Twin Galaxies became the premiere vacation destination of thousands of kids across the U.S. and Canada. The article first appeared in the Arkansas Gazette with the headline: “Ottumwa, IA: ‘Dodge City of Video Games.’” Within a few days, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Houston Post, and San Francisco Sunday Examiner carried it, too. It even appeared as late as June 24, 1983, in the Prince George’s Journal.

One day at Twin Galaxies, a lady loomed out of the crowd and asked me to approach a man in the arcade and say, “I don’t understand, I didn’t think ministers played video games!”

When I did this, he laughed and said, “Oh, you’ve been talking to my wife. She always teases me about my video game playing.” He explained how they were traveling from North Dakota to go back east and how he had dragged the family completely out of their way to visit the world’s most famous arcade. “The whole family thought I was nuts,” he said, “but I just had to come, if only to see it this one time.”

Tourists were mobbing Twin Galaxies every day and I was even signing autographs and posing for photographs on a regular basis. A man from Minnesota hung around all day until I came in. He wanted a picture of us together in front of the famous scoreboard wall.

The attraction of Ottumwa was irresistible to some. Sue Adamo, in her Video Games Magazine feature on Twin Galaxies published in the April 1983 issue, noted that players would leave better equipped arcades to travel to Iowa at great expense because “Ottumwa is calling.” And, with the superstars in town, the high scores could change any minute. Fifteen-year-old James Marino, of Long Island, NY, was quoted by the media while at Twin Galaxies as saying, “I held the record in Stargate for ten minutes once.”

As my ambitions soared with our fame, I didn’t take our success for granted. One of the first things I did was contact three different Hollywood producers with movie ideas – and two responded by sending their screen plays for our approval. Twin Galaxies was being considered by these producers as either a filming location or as an actual part of each story line.

Our stars didn’t shine in Hollywood, however – or so I thought until 1992, when Lennie LaBagh, a lawyer friend in Fairfield, IA, said, “Hey, Walter, you made the movies!” It turned out that a movie script referred to Twin Galaxies in a low-budget production called “Hollywood Zap.”

The movie’s hero, a drop-out from the New York financial world, left his old life behind to pursue a legendary video game player named the “Hollywood Zap.” As the world’s most skilled Zaxxon player, the Zap was constantly on the move, taking on all challengers, while staying one step ahead of the hero.

When asked how he had learned of the Zap’s existence, the hero says, “I know of him, because the Twin Galaxies scoreboard in Iowa says he is the best player.”

Television producers showed interest in our fast guns, too. In May, 1983, a New York TV production crew called wanting some good players in the New York City area for TV commercials. I recommended a few local players and, later, one of them called back to tell me that he was getting paid $1,000 per day for playing games while being filmed.

In addition to the movies and TV, Twin Galaxies almost embarked on a national radio career, too. A Columbus, OH, radio syndicator, Jameson Broadcasting, signed a contract to produce a radio show based on the scoreboard. Twin Galaxies was paid $1,500 in advance but no show was produced. Jameson said the show idea nearly sold but the radio networks signed on with a rival group instead of Jameson Broadcasting.

Among the more interesting bits of media coverage we enjoyed during this period was in the February issue of Blip Magazine, published by Marvel Comics. A two-page spread introducing Twin Galaxies and its scorekeeping responsibilities was penned by George Sullivan for Marvel’s youngest readership.

One of Twin Galaxies’ greatest media coups was realized when USA Today carried our scores in the “Lifeline” column on April 22, 1983. “Lifeline” carried us again in the July 1, 1983, edition when Tom Asaki faced off with Nibbler in his quest for the first billion-point game. The headline said: “Records, like Promises, are Not Always Meant to be Broken,” as it related the story of his third failure on Nibbler.

Among Twin Galaxies’ greatest devotees were the Canadians. I was on Canadian national radio shows many times each week. I remember, for example, being on the “Scott Robbins Show” on Toronto’s Q-107 in April and hearing live call-ins from virtually every major city in Canada.

The Canadian media was more interested in high score attempts than their counterparts in the states. They went wild when a Canadian beat an American for a high score title. The Canadian media made Ottumwa a distant mecca to kids in Canadian towns like Burnaby, Lloydminister, Saskatoon, Dawson’s Creek, Calgary, Winnipeg and Port Alberni.

We weren’t overlooked by the big boys, either. When Alice Noble’s UPI article went out in February, The Toronto Star called to do their own version of the story. The Star was extremely enthusiastic and encouraging. “Twin Galaxies Arcade is the font where video players worship,” they wrote. I told the reporter that “Ottumwa” was an Indian word for video game and he included that in the article as a quote.

On over a hundred live radio shows, I warned the listeners that Ottumwa was not a normal midwestern city, but a town of video game gunslingers and Pac-Man-hardened drifters, who could whip you in Tempest or Defender, as well as Donkey Kong and Centipede. I promised that the summer months would find the best players in the world in town to show off their prowess and challenge each other to showdowns.

My prediction proved to bear fruit. When school let out in June, the gunslingers began to arrive to challenge each other. Computer Games magazine, upon learning about the impending gunfights, offered to give feature coverage to each showdown.

The Think Tank Arrives

First, Chris O’Brien, a fourteen-year-old kid from the Sacramento, CA, area arrived to prove that he had surpassed one million points on Ms Pac-Man. He was accompanied by his manager, thirty-year-old Doug Nelson, a Californian who had invested heavily in the book rights for this kid’s playing techniques.

The two came to Twin Galaxies to promote their forthcoming strategy book on Ms Pac-Man and to face down the cries of “fake” coming from other Ms Pac-Man players. O’Brien was actually quite good, having gotten well over 200,000 points, but the “Bozeman Think Tank” from Montana had also arrived to challenge him. The three members of “The Tank” were scoring close to 400,000 at the time, but O’Brien was claiming that he had broken Ms Pac-Man wide-open with a big million.

Tom Asaki, Spencer Oueren and Don Williams – all from Bozeman, MT – were masters of the grouping technique, a strategy used only by advanced Ms Pac-Man masters. Grouping employed a slow, calculated approach to Ms Pac-Man that kept the monsters piled on top of each other to better keep them under control. Grouping was the safest method to achieve high scores. O’Brien, on the other hand, described his technique as “fast thinking and experience.”

The Think Tank started out studying Ms Pac-Man together at the Games Are Fun Arcade in Bozeman, MT, but then decided they needed their own machine to master its intricacies. So, they bought one. In those early days, a fourth friend (Joe Wingard from Whitefish, MT) was a member of the group, having been the first to reach the 201,000 mark in June of 1982. But then Joe faded away from the club.

Twin Galaxies first heard from the Montana players in early 1983. They had been achieving high scores since late 1982, but had never been reporting their scores to Twin Galaxies.

“We saw Twin Galaxies’ high scores in the magazines in 1982,” explained Tom Asaki, “and thought, ‘Wow! how will we ever get scores that high.’ Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, but the 347,000-point high score reported on Ms Pac-Man was false. We didn’t learn until later that people had been lying to Twin Galaxies about their scores.”

So, the Think Tank rolled up their sleeves and said: “If they can do it, so can we.” And, with the belief it could be done, they figured out Ms Pac-Man.

During their research, Spencer became the first Ms Pac-Man player to ever achieve a perfect game. To accomplish a perfect game means you have to “eat” every monster that turns blue until you reach the advanced boards where they no longer change to blue.

Twin Galaxies first heard from the Think Tank when Tom Asaki suddenly made a quantum leap forward for the group. In an arcade in Great Falls, MT, Tom put together a game that resulted in a score of 393,000 points. Fortunately, six people were watching as witnesses. The Think Tank now knew they were the best. The new Twin Galaxies high score at that time had now risen slightly to 388,000 points and they had beaten it. They were ecstatic.

Ironically, the 388,000 score that The Think Tank was chasing, proved in time to be a fraud. Asaki, Oueren and Williams had been chasing ghosts – ghosts who had inspired them to believe that boundaries didn’t exist on Ms Pac-Man.

In the course of the Ms Pac-Man face-off, Chris O’Brien was barely able to muster a score near the 230,000 level. On a pleasant note, however, Don Williams took a liking to Chris and taught him a bunch of Ms Pac-Man tricks that boosted his score to the 270,000 level. Chris O’Brien went home a greatly improved player – and no longer claimed one million points.

As for the champs, Tom Asaki, Spencer Oueren and Don Williams respectively scored 419,950, 411,000 and 351,000 during the showdown – the three highest Ms Pac-Man scores in the world at that time.

As the summer began, a few of the game manufacturers became impressed with our media exposure and offered to loan us games to use in the showdowns. The original Sega company from the golden age – not to be confused with today’s manufacturer of the Saturn home system – was the first company to take Twin Galaxies under their wing.

In June, Sega gave us an indefinite loan of their four current titles: Championship Baseball, Star Trek, Buck Rogers and Congo Bongo. Not to be outdone by Sega, Williams Electronics trusted Twin Galaxies with two copies each of Joust, Moon Patrol, Motorace USA, Sinistar and Bubbles. The games were to be returned in December – except for one copy of Bubbles which was donated to Ottumwa High School as a research tool for the electronics lab.

Not surprisingly, the nation had developed a raging passion for marathoning video games at this time. And, the most promotionally-minded players began to choose Twin Galaxies as the place to prove their marathon skills. Time and time again, I was required to stay up all night (or nights) to watch a visiting superstar raise the world record on Q*bert or Robotron to astronomical heights.

Tom Asaki was the most dedicated marathoner of them all. After the Bozeman Think Tank thoroughly deflated Chris O’Brien’s Ms Pac-Man claims, Asaki stayed on to play Nibbler.

Until Nibbler came along, no video game had ever given a score of one billion points. Most scoring counters turn over at 100 million or less, but not Nibbler. Nibbler would extend the score to nine billion before turning back to zero.

Twin Galaxies was offering the high score crown to whomever could break the magic billion mark. Many players started around the nation, but all failed. Over time, Tom Asaki came to Twin Galaxies again and again to attempt the first billion-point score.

As Asaki’s quest for one billion points gained national attention, Rockola Manufacturing took a keen interest in the outcome. When we suddenly found ourselves with no working Nibbler, Bette Lockhart, Executive Assistant to David Rockola, rushed to Ottumwa with a two brand new games: a freshly uncrated Nibbler machine and an equally-as-new Eyes game. With little urging, Rockola offered a free Nibbler to the first champ who eclipsed one billion points.

Tom Asaki’s heroic efforts were carried by the national wire services as he bombed out on numerous consecutive attempts. His attempts, in order, went like this:

838 million – Tom lost his last man after forty hours.

 707 million – Tom lost by going over 127 maximum stored men (the machine automatically eliminates your saved up men when you accrue more than 127 total men).

793 million – This was the heartbreaker as the joystik broke during this game. The Nibbler was frozen in the top left corner of the screen. Scoreboard expert, Bob Bradfield, got under the playing field and started hitting the joystik with a screwdriver, trying to free the Nibbler, suddenly the game blanked out and came back on.

120 million – This try resulted in another broken game. Asaki said, “I just sat there and watched my men die.”

When Steve Harris passed out in Twin Galaxies’ back room from fatigue during one of Tom’s marathons, a photograph was snapped of him lying on a mattress, looking seriously disheveled. Computer Games magazine somehow published the photograph and labeled it as Tom Asaki, asleep after the game. (Ha! I have since sold this photograph five times, once claiming it to be Madonna and identifying it as Elvis four other times.)

Another player – Tim McVey, local Ottumwan – had all the same bad luck that Asaki did. He finally won the Nibbler game from Rockola when he reached 1,000,042,270 points on his seventh try. His first six tries ende up like this:

168 million – Tim ended when a turned-off circuit breaker erased the score.

403 million – Tim dropped from fatigue after 22 hours.

113 million – Tim lived but the joystick died.

716 million – Tim lost his last man after 31 hours.

410 million – Tim watched as the screen blanked out – it was suspected that someone pulled the plug.

208 million – Tim was feeling great before a turned-off circuit breaker erased the game.

On his seventh try, Tim won a brand new Nibbler game when he scored 1,000,042,270 points. To honor McVey’s achievement, the City of Ottumwa declared January 28 to be Tim McVey Day. I made posters and hung banners in celebration. Computer Games magazine published a feature article on the event in their July 1984 edition written by Paul Stokstad. The most beautiful touch came when McVey’s elderly mother cried tears of joy for her son. Officials from Rockola attended the ceremony and awarded McVey his own Nibbler game as a prize. McVey later traded it for about $200 worth of game tokens to a rival arcade down the street.

Meanwhile, marathoning was the rage in Ottumwa. Kids were coming from all over the country to keep Walter Day up all night. It was partly out of self-preservation that I started implementing the new rules now known as the Twin Galaxies Tournament Settings (TGTS). In time, under the new rules, marathons would be banned. Marathons, I was convinced, were unhealthy for the players (and for me, too) and didn’t really prove who was the best.

On top of the threat to the players’ health, marathons are the toughest to score. Most games have score counters that turn back to zero after one hundred thousand points; later, the counters turned over at one million points. This means that the witnesses have to watch the score counter turn over to zero again and again. Each time it turns over, the fact has to be logged on a time sheet. Unfortunately, the games have to be watched and witnesses have to be trusted to stay awake and be honest.

During the Dodge City period of Twin Galaxies, there were one or two marathons going on every day somewhere in the world. I would be interviewed, for example, by the Australian, Irish, or Israel media as part of an average day – all about marathons attempted in their homelands.

Much of the Twin Galaxies rulebook was written from incidents we faced while judging marathons. For instance, one person once walked away in the middle of his game and his friends played it for him to keep it going.

The obvious rule: No one else touches the controls during a high score attempt or the game is forfeit.

To help verify scores, I started a network of Scoreboard Correspondents (still going on today). These were zealous players who lived and breathed video games. Todd Walker, of Milpitas, CA, for example, was witness to a Missile Command marathon which committed every possible violation. The machine was blanking out, the score was being improperly logged and the kid was taking off time for naps. Walker then entered the room and announced that he was an objective witness sent by the scoreboard. When he called them on the carpet for the many irregularities he saw they went nuts. He courageously stood his ground and then reported to me. The kid’s supporters deluged the scoreboard with protests for a week.

The Dodge City era ended with a flourish of magazine articles. The nicest summation of this period was published by Computer Games magazine in their December 1983 edition, which had a feature story on the players who came up through the ranks at Twin Galaxies. Written by editor Steve Bloom, the article included a large color photo of the players photographed at Twin Galaxies during the LIFE magazine session.

Entitled, “Video Game Superstars! How They Turn High Scores into Big Bucks,” the piece went on to discuss the trials and tribulations of Eric Ginner, Leo Daniels, Steve Sanders and Walter Day as they tried to make their mark in the video game world.

Leo Daniels, for example, was offered a magazine contract to write articles on game tricks known only by the experts. He was paid $100 per trick. None of the other players could get Leo’s tricks to work. “Man, he’s got to be making these tricks up,” laughed Ben Gold. “They’re bogus!” When I asked Leo about it, he would just smile and say, “These tricks are only for experts.”

Steve Sanders got at least one really weird job through Twin Galaxies. AETNA Life Insurance called and asked for a star player on Pac-Man. On my recommendation, they flew Sanders to New York City to play Pac-Man for an educational video for third grade students. Only his hand appeared in the video.

Twin Galaxies’ Dodge City era put the players on the map. High score competitions flourished and the video game superstars had become big news. And, with a little luck, I didn’t have to stay up too many nights monitoring marathons.