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Intel Looks To Dominate Arcade Games
by Malcolm Maclachlan, TechWeb
June 03, 1998 (01:39 P.M.)
techweb.com
Intel, whose chips dominate the PC business, is now looking to take on the arcade game market.
The chip maker's vision is to turn arcade games into larger versions of PCs, with Intel microprocessors and a standardized architecture.
The idea is to lower prices for arcade owners, who now pay anywhere from $15,000 to $40,000 for a game. Yet Intel (company profile) is not the only company with such plans. However, its competitors may be able to deliver similar machines with more power and at a lower cost, analysts said.
Speaking at Electronic Entertainment Expo '98 last week in Atlanta, Claude Leglise, vice president of Intel's Content Group, outlined his company's vision of the arcade game of the future.
Each machine would have a standardized architecture, he said, both for the computer inside and for the cabinet that holds it. If a game is not getting much play, Leglise said, an arcade owner can open it up and load a new game off of a CD-ROM.
If necessary, the owner could easily change the set of controls, each of which is essentially a PC peripheral. The design will also allow users to easily upgrade each time Intel comes out with a faster chip.
Slap some new stickers on the box, and the arcade owner has a new game, Leglise said.
This scenario contrasts with today's system of proprietary chips and architecture on machines that are difficult to upgrade, he said.
"If you look at the arcade machines, they look like the mainframes of 20 years ago," Leglise said.
When Intel gets arcade machines into the market, they might benefit from a flood of PC games being ported to arcade versions, said Scott Tandy, director of strategic marketing for S3, maker of the Savage3D video card for PCs. If this happens, he said, companies that make video accelerators and other hardware would have to get behind it.
"The merging of the PC price structure and the ability to upgrade seems like it would be an advantage over time," Tandy said.
Intel has been working to make its vision a reality for more than a year through its Open Arcade Architecture Forum. This program includes a number of partners, including Sega -- one of the three largest makers of arcade games.
But Sega has already delivered a similar standardized platform on its current generation of arcade games, which are easy to reprogram, said Peter Glaskowsky, a microprocessor analyst with Microdesign Resources. Standardizing games is a good idea, Glaskowsky said. But while Intel brings a lot of clout to the table, he added, it may not be the best company to do it.
"It's certainly not something that the entire industry is going to unilaterally adopt," Glaskowsky said. "You
could do a better cost reduction with a different kind of chip."
Intel chips are great for general PC functions, he said, but competing chips are better at dealing with graphics and real-time functions important to gaming.
The current K6 chips from AMD, Glaskowsky said, perform better than more expensive high-performance Intel chips in gaming environments. Intel has been touting 700-MHz Pentium chips as the real driver for
arcades.
But such chips probably will not be available until late next year. By that time, Glaskowsky said, AMD will probably have 400-MHz chips that nearly match their performance.
Another viable contender comes from the PowerPC camp, he said, which can also offer more performance for a lower price. A Colmar, Penn., company called PlayPak has standardized arcade games on this
architecture, with help and investment from Apple.
Unlike Intel, PlayPak has a complete set of application program interfaces, said PlayPak president Daniel Stein. It started trial distribution of its standardized arcade boxes in the Northeast in April 1997.
PlayPak games offer a great deal of price savings, Stein said. The cabinets costs $4,599, and the software costs $1,495 -- although cabinet buyers can try out a game for as little as $325 for 4,000 plays.
This will allow buyers to evaluate if a game is likely to bring in the $300-plus a week needed to make it profitable. Such trial plans, he added, are usually not available from traditional arcade game distributors.
The company's goal right now, Stein added, is to get hit games onto the platform. PlayPak works with a number of companies that can port games to the PowerPC architecture in a couple days to a couple weeks
for a minimal cost, he said.
In fact, he said, the race could be decided by which companies launch an original arcade hit on their platforms.
"No one knows what makes a winner," Stein said. "That's the hard part for Intel and for us."
Copyright 1998, CMP Media Inc.
Paul
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