Page 7 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #38 FREE Edition

interference in the video caused
by the neon STARCADE! sign.
If that wasn't enough, the Pilot featured 24 contestants, divided into three Teams of eight each. Team members would compete at the same time. The Pilot featured five games: Atari’s Centipede, Williams Electronics’ Defender, Bally/Midway’s Pac-Man, Stern Electronics’ Berzerk and a new game from Nintendo called Donkey Kong.
We enlisted the help of Nolan Bushnell (Atari/Chuck E. Cheese) to find the first contestants. Auditions were held throughout California, Texas, and Florida
at Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza
Time Theatres, then owned
by Nolan. We worked with the manufacturers and the local distributor to get the 29 video games we needed for the shoot - 8 Defender, 8 Centipede, 8 Pac- Man, 3 Berzerk, and 2 Donkey Kong. That alone was quite an accomplishment.”
The game show's format started with a trivia question about video games, and then the team with the correct answer would get to pick one of the five arcade games
to play and get a high score in
a limited amount of time. The second team would then try to get a higher score. The trivia and the score were added together, and they came back for two additional similar rounds. Name the Game was also played with the contestants given short clips of 4 video games and having to name them.
The team with the most points
at the end of the three rounds then played in the bonus round, where they had to play one of the remaining games and beat the score set for them. If they beat the score, they won everything from an arcade game to a jukebox or a vacation. Of course, I would have chosen the video game if given a choice! The prizes for
the contestants were easy to
get and came from the arcade manufacturers, our friend Nolan Bushnell, toy and computer manufacturers, and others.
For the pilot, Mavis told us
that “The Overall Winner of the competition won the chance to play a brand new video game, Donkey Kong, against a Celebrity player. This was just for fun.
There are no prizes at stake here. For this, the celebrity was Larry Wilcox, who then appeared on the TV show "CHiPs." Larry had never played Donkey Kong (few people had... it was a brand-
new game). Actually, we don't think Larry Wilcox had played many video games at all. We put a Donkey Kong in his dressing room so he could practice a
bit prior to the show. It was probably the only thing that kept him on the set during our marathon taping session... that and the magic that seemed to be associated with the show even then.”
From Mavis: “The Original STARCADE! Pilot aired Sunday, Sept 13, 1981, at 6 pm on KRON TV in San Francisco, California. With virtually no promotion,
it received a 6.7 rating for the first 15 min, increasing to a 7.2 in the second 15 minutes. JM Production Company received over 100 telephone calls that day and an equal number the next day... and that became the prototype to sell the concept to NBC television ... and later to Ted Turner (WTBS & CNN)... but
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