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Death Race Dr251 In 1976, a company called Exidy released a game loosely based on the 1975 movie Death Race 2000 (Sellers 88). Death Race put the player into a car; the goal was to run over stick-figure skeletons ("gremlins," the design team called them) that ran around the racetrack. "They called them gremlins, the rest of the world thought they were stick people, real people, and the idea of the game, of course, was to kill them," said former Exidy employee Eddie Adlum (Kent 91). Death Race was the first game to raise concerns about video game violence (90). Exidy employees maintained that the objects in the game were monsters, but the stick figures were open to interpretation and many interpreted the game to be a primitive hit-and-run murder simulation. Death Race touched off a fire of controversy. It was covered in magazines such as the "National Enquirer" and "Midnight," and was criticized for being sick and morbid by the National Safety Council and NBC's "Weekend" news show. "60 Minutes" even did a show on the psychological impact of video games (Deuel). Many arcade owners simply would not buy Death Race machines because of the controversy, but Exidy still did well, selling over 1,000 machines. "The end result was that Exidy sales doubled or quadrupled," said Adlum (Kent 91). "It seemed like the more controversy…the more our sales increased," said Exidy president Pete Kauffman (92). In fact, arcade games in general actually benefited from all the coverage being given to Exidy and Death Race. "Death Race was released at a time when the arcade circuit was floundering, and everyone's machines started selling better due to the attention" (Deuel).

Tim Skelly Before becoming a researcher with Microsoft Advanced Technology Research group, Tim Skelly spent fifteen years in the video game business. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1973, he filled the time preceding the invention of the personal computer by producing and directing for film and television. Skelly's career shifted directions when in 1977 he opened what was probably the world's first computer gaming center. Using the experience he had gained programming and designing games for personal computers, he went on to create a series of more than a dozen successful arcade video games for Cinematronics, Sega, and Mylstar Electronics. These included Armor Attack, Star Castle, Reactor, and the very first cooperative two-player video game, Rip-Off. Later, after the crash of the video arcade market in 1983, Skelly branched off into screenwriting and the design of interactive laser disc programs. He returned to the game business in 1985, when he cofounded Incredible Technologies (IT), a company that designed, developed, built, and sold a broad range of interactive software. Besides IT's high output of computer- and cartridge-based games, projects included interfaces for medical equipment, animatronic devices for a Japanese location-based entertainment center, and all software and hardware for the original BattleTech (now Virtual Worlds) Centers. Clients included Williams Electronics/Bally Midway and CAPCOM. During this time, Skelly conducted a personal study of the appeal of video games. This later became the basis for his successful series of "Seductive Interfaces" tutorials given at several ACM SIGCHI conferences -- tutorials designed to enable UI designers to apply the engaging aspects of video games to nonentertainment products. Recognized for his extensive video game experience, Skelly was recruited by the Sega Technical Institute, where he advised on game design and served as Art Director for Sonic the Hedgehog 2. A short time after the co