Logic RAM, your character storage ROM and away you go with this week's hottest game–naturally, after having been properly instructed in the game rules through on-screen alpha-numeric messages and through pictorials also put onto your screen via local character generator hardware, again controlled by another piece of RAM which is also addressed by your friendly telephone line.
Alternatively, TV game clubs might spring up all over just as microprocessor-groups are doing right about now. More than likely some of the same people will weave through both of these areas–members will call each other and swap game programs, or maybe just trivia such as a better-looking hockey player symbol, all via their phone line, and probably through the latest LSI modem chip set right onto your $24.95 cassette deck.
Still another telephone application has you dialing the weather number just as you get out of bed in the morning, and your cooperative game microprocessor, doubling as a convenient character generator puts up the bad news on your TV screen. Clearly, I have just started to drift off into the territory which can no longer qualify for listing under the game heading–but I don't have to tell you that this flowing back and forth between games and other intelligent CRT terminal uses will become very commonplace in a few years.
So much for the telephone and TV Games. Next let's have a look at the Cable TV connection. There we have to distinguish between two technically very different environments: No. 1 today's common, one-way cable TV system; and No. 2, tomorrow's 2-way cable environment.
Let us limit this look at Cable TV Games to one-way systems. As you know, there are quite a few one-way systems in operation today, while two-way cable installations are still virtually non-existent.
We have addressed the question of how to play cable TV games–and what games to play–at Sanders at various times in the past, so I can speak from first hand experience on at least part of this subject. Let me take you through a list of several approaches to Cable TV Games:
Category 1. Interactive Sports Games with backgrounds, which might be a card table–a slot machine face–or a playing field, provided by a Cable Channel transmission. A simple example would be a hockey game played out of a TV Game device but superimposed on a colorful transmitted background.
Category 2. Interactive Sports Games as in 1. above, but with additional active symbology transmitted along with backgrounds by the cable. As an example, additional remotely generated hockey player symbols might appear on the TV screen. These would have the capability of interacting with other symbols, such as manually controlled ball players, or the ball itself.
Al Berglund, engineering planner for Walt Disney Productions, was one of the attendees at Gametronics.
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