In the chair with...
DOUG MACRAE
He put a bow in Pac-Man’s hair and made nuclear war even more deadly. Doug Macrae, founder of General Computer Corporation, concludes that being a college dropout has its perks
Words by Paul Drury
Doug Macrae was different from most studying at the famous Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) – he had a car, a girlfriend and an arcade business. Whilst still a student, he founded General Computer Corporation (GCC) with fellow undergraduate Kevin Curran and produced ‘enhancement kits’ for both Missile Command and Pac-Man, the latter evolving into the biggest-selling coin-op videogame of all time, Ms PacMan. His company would go on to produce dozens of titles for Atari’s home consoles and even develop an actual console for the company, the Atari 7800. You can see Doug and his GCC buddies in 2020’s Netflix documentary, High Score, telling their tale with very broad grins.
We always liked the fact that the bestselling coin-op in history, Ms Pac-Man, was actually a hack. Is this an example of the ‘genius steals’ maxim?
That’s a good quote but it was more that we were engineers. We looked at the original PacMan game and said, “It has some flaws and we’d like to fix them.” It wasn’t like, “Wow, we have this great creative idea!” We were looking at it as a product.
You had some of these ‘products’ right?
My brother purchased a Gottlieb Pioneer pinball machine and put it in his fraternity. When he graduated, he gave it to me to operate. I was a sophomore at MIT, brought it into my dorm and set it up, and it started collecting quarters. A lot of quarters. So I bought a second pinball machine… but as the machines get used, they need a lot of repair and so I brought on a partner, Kevin Curran, who was an electrical engineer. I was a mechanical engineer so together we were able to fix most of the problems. We reinvested the quarters into new pinball machines and also videogames. RipOff, Asteroids, Battlezone… we had about 20 cabinets on campus in the end.
That’s quite an impressive business venture for two undergrads.
Yeah, it paid for our tuition [laughs]. We would split the revenue 50/50 with the dorm where the machines were… their half of the revenue went into the ‘party fund’ so everyone loved our videogames because they were supporting the parties!
A win-win situation! How did you move from operating arcade machines to hacking them?
It really started when we purchased a Missile Command game. That game was really popular with MIT students. It was played 2,400 times in the first week! The machine cost us $2,500 so we’re going, “Wow, we’ve earned back almost 25% of the cost of the machine already!” We purchased a second one and then a third one because they were doing so well. Then in the second week, they had about 1,600 plays. 1200 in the third, 800 after that… it was an alarming downward curve.
Players must have been getting better at it?
Yeah, games were lasting much longer and people weren’t staying up late to play this brand-new game. We knew there was a speed up kit for Asteroids, which just made it faster, but we didn’t think that was fair to players, plus there wasn’t one for Missile Command. So, in March 1981, while most college students were partying down in Florida on Spring Break, we decided to create a modification kit for Missile Command.
You beautiful nerds. How do you even go about modding an arcade game?
We knew we’d have to reverse engineer the entire code of the game to understand how everything works. We needed an in-circuit emulator to take the place of the microprocessor… and they cost $25,000. We borrowed the money from my parents, who didn’t have much of a clue about videogames but said it sounded interesting.