The Rise and Fall of Ramtek [1974]
26Ramtek was perhaps the most successful of early Pong clone manufacturers. Subscribe to Blown Cartridges for more retro game review videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoDQj54Gd-w8RTdukMrQScQ?sub_confirmation=1
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Charles McEwing maintains that unlike most of the other companies that would get in on the pong fad, Ramtek didn't disassemble and reverse engineer Pong to create their clone, Volley - instead, they designed it from the ground up.
And unlike most of the other manufacturers, Ramtek had no experience in the coin-op industry - instead, they had to learn as they went.
Accordingly, after Volley they continued to innovate - not new types of game as Atari was trying (and failing) which we'll talk about in our next video, but new spins on the ball and paddlestar formula.
In 1974 they released Wipe Out. Similar to Atari's Elimination, it was a last-player-standing paddle game where you had to defend your goal against the other players or be eliminated. Wipe Out, however, added what they called the "frustration bumper" in the middle of the screen - which, iff hit, would send the ball careening off in an unexpected direction.
It sold well on its own, and Ramtek also licensed it to Midway, who produced their own version as Leader.
Howell Ivy's first project for Ramtek was Clean Sweep, one of the company's biggest hits. It was a ball and paddle game with a pinball-like twist, featuring a field of dots the player had to collect in order to win. This was a single player game, one of the first created, and implemented two other major innovations.
First, it was one of the first games to incorporate Read-Only-Memory to store a paddle graphic more complex than the usual single bar. Secondly, it used RAM to keep track of the dots. Clean Sweep sold 3500 units, earning Ivy enough that he could afford to leave the Air Force to work for Ramtek full time.
Ivy's next project was baseball, adapting the old electromechanical bat games to the new ball and paddle genre. It featured both multiple types of pitch, and some of gaming's first human characters in the form of controllable fielders. The form factor was also new - it was released in a low cabinet designed to give players the feeling of looking down into a baseball stadium.
Baseball was one of the most complex games released to date, requiring two circuit boards. Like the earlier Wipe Out it was also licensed to Midway, who called their version Ball Park.
Midway licensed a third title from Ramtek at around this time, TV Flipper, a pinball-inspired game with a grid of 5 x 4 targets on the screen and more long the sides, though they declined to put this one into production themselves.
Ramtek's first non-ball game was called Trivia... a multiple choice game whose questions were encoded on swappable 8-track cartredges.
Hit Me
They followed this up with Hit Me, one of the first Blackjack games, Sea Battle in 1976, a multiplayer game of ship to ship combat, and Barricade - a clone of Gremlin's hit blockade forced out of production by a trademark infringement lawsuit.
1977 Saw the release of a space combat game Star Cruiser, a dueling game like Computer Space that used driving-game style controls, and M-79 Ambush, a shooter that incorporated a controller based on the Army's weapon of the same name.
By 1978 however the Video Game market was going through its first bust cycle due to a flooded pong market and made worse by increased competition and blatant copying. Ramtek abandoned the video game market to focus on old-style electromechanical games with a modern twist - the microprocessor.
They released Dark Invader - a space themed shooter that used lasers and mirrors, ptting the player against enemy ships made out of high speed spinning wires, and GT Roadster, a projection-screen driving game using Super 8mm film. Their last game project was 1979's Boom Ball, a twist on skee ball that had players shooting the balls out of cannons.
Despite the general success of these games, Ramtek's Games division continued to bleed money, and in 1979 it was sold to the division's manager - Ramtek's cofounder Mel McEwan, who founded Meltec to continue producing Boom Ball. Ramtek, meanwhile, focused on continuing the production of medical imaging hardware, CAD machines, and PC Monitors for the burgeoning home computer market.
And that's Ramtek.
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