As one of the largest arcade players exits, a new wave of alliances is sweeping the entertainment industry with arcade developers and personal computer manufacturers meeting to discuss the next generation of gaming machines. Albuquerque, New Mexico-based arcade software specialist American Laser Games Inc is to pull out of the arcade business altogether, focusing instead on the growing home entertainments market, starting with its best-selling favourites, Mad Dog McCree and Drug Wars. This is a significant and painful change for American Laser Games, said president Robert Grebe. We enjoyed many years of success and prosperity in the arcade business, but the arcade market has been in a downward spiral since March 1994 and there’s no end in sight. Meanwhile, a string of announcements from games companies such as Namco Ltd, Sega Enterprises Ltd and Atari Corp points to the growing belief in the personal computer as a future system for much of what is estimated to be a $15,000m computer games market. Number one arcade company, Namco Ltd, has joined NEC Corp to develop games for the personal computer based on VideoLogic Ltd’s PowerVR technology. Last year, NEC signed a 50:50 joint development agreement with VideoLogic Plc to build the PowerVR chip sets, which are claimed to provide Windows95 with three-dimensional computer graphics superior to those now available on 32-bit game consoles. However, Trevor Wing, VideoLogic’s vice-president of marketing, muddied the picture, claiming that the deal with Namco had inspired them to try supplying hardware into arcade machines early next year. The PowerVR chips, being scalable, can be run in parallel for faster, more powerful arcade machines, he said. VideoLogic claims a single chip set can run at up to 2m polygons per second when PowerVR chips are used in parallel. NEC will begin sample shipments of PowerVR chip sets to personal computer manufacturers in March and Namco will market PowerVR software worldwide in May. Namco will release titles Tekken and Air Combat22 for PowerVR and has already demonstrated a pre-release of its Rave Racer title written for PowerVR at the Comdex exhibition in Las Vegas last month. VideoLogic also plans to build a single chip accelerator for consoles next year. Tad Otsuki, general manager of Namco, said We are confident that PowerVR has the highest level of performance and functionality among the current three-dimensional graphics chip sets available or under development. Faced with the possibility of creating yet another proprietary system, Wing said that he wanted the PowerVR to be taken up as a standard. The technology, he said, will support the Standard Graphics Language and Microsoft’s Direct3D graphics standard for Windows95. VideoLogic’s move represents a reaction to Intel Corp’s Native Signal Processing strategy in which Intel hopes to shift much of the functions of peripherals boards onto the central processor. This is part of a larger strategy, said Wing. Boards are very important to us but we’re more into silicon. Also this month, Sega Enterprises Ltd entered the US personal computer game software market through its US subsidiary, Sega of America Inc, with Windows95 titles taken from the company’s 16-bit games system. Meanwhile, Atari is to use January’s 1996 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to launch its new software division dedicated to developing titles for Windows.
