NARC used a lot of custom hardware to give players an in-your-face experience that was not thought possible. In the late 80's/early 90's, WMS Industries would put out High Impact Football and 2 other games under the Williams name: NARC and Smash TV, both of which were noted for their chaotic action and ultra-violence. In 1988, they acquired their competitor and arch-rival Bally/Midway. In 1987, Williams went public and changed it's name to “WMS Industries”. Due to this, in the 80’s, they chose to focus mostly on pinball, which brought them great success. Further putting salt in the wounds, in 1986, Joust 2 failed to catch on in marketing testing, and was delayed and then later produced in extremely limited quantities. Turkey Shoot and Mystic Marathon came out after some delays in 1984 and were met with little enthusiasm. a 3D space jet shooter game that was never released!), Williams let several of their game developers go and became extremely cautious about what games it put out and licensed. After that calamity and a few prototypes that went nowhere (such as Devastators. In 1983, the Video Game Crash happened and put the American game industry in a panic. Following the release of Blaster, Jarvis would leave the video game industry for a few years to focus on his educational pursuits. The game studio he founded, Vid Kidz, would have all 3 of it's games published by Williams: a sequel to Defender called Stargate (also known as Defender II in some releases) Robotron 2084, a combat video game that made use of two 8-way directional joysticks and Blaster, a not-that-successful 3D shooting game. Jarvis would leave Williams soon after the release of Defender, but he wouldn't stray too far. They put money and resources into R&D to make games such as Joust (their second biggest hit) and publish titles for other developers, such as Moon Patrol on behalf of Irem and Make Trax. They opened up a new production facility. They were able to buy themselves independent from their parent company, Seeburg. With hundreds of millions of dollars in it's pockets from Defender, Williams Electronics expanded. Defender took a while to catch on with players, but in spite of it's challenge, it eventually became a massive hit for Williams and one of the highest grossing arcade games of it's day. Besides the 2 way stick, there was a whopping 7 function buttons unheard of in it’s time. In terms of it's control scheme, Defender was much more advanced than any game that came before. With tropes such as outer space, laser weapons and defending humans from alien invaders, the influences are there, but it was still important to Jarvis for the game to have it's own identity. Eugene Jarvis, one of their top pinball programmers (formerly of Atari), was chosen to head the development of their next game project: one that would eventually become Defender.įor Defender, Jarvis was asked to imitate Asteroids and Space Invaders. Towards the end of the 70s, the video arcade industry EXPLODED and Williams decided to tackle it full time. These were some of the first games to have sound and programming on them, allowing for new types of play that was not previously possible. Williams spent much of the mid to late 70's developing some of the earliest solid state pinball games.
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