Tom Meeks Interview (Summary) By Kevin Bunch March 24, 2020 This was originally posted to the Bally Alley discussion group, here: https://groups.io/g/ballyalley/message/17013 ---------------------------------------- From: Kevin B via Groups.Io Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2020 7:43 PM To: ballyalley@groups.io Subject: Highlights from a conversation with Astrocade's Tom Meeks Last Friday I had a lengthy phone conversation with Tom Meeks, who worked at Astrocade in the early 80s. Years back he had a nice back-and-forth in this group, and in some regards our conversation was a follow up to that. I'm still going through my notes/refining them with the transcription, but Tom said he had no problem with me sharing his recollections with other interested parties, so I thought I'd share some highlights. On coming to Astrocade: Tom was a video production guy and a part time teacher when he got the Astrocade job. He had bought the system around 1979 when he realized it put out a broadcast-quality signal, and messed around with the original BASIC cart. Tom also owned a Datamax UV1 due to his video production work, and eventually got in touch with a local Astrocade distributor to talk shop - this led to him getting a job interview with the company and a job, working under the sales manager, Ray George. With the company, Meeks described himself as "chief Galaxian killer." He was based out of Maryland - working out of his home until Astrocade paid up for a temp office in the area - but would fly across the country to assist with demonstrations. He'd be the one showing off their games and the hardware and what one could do with it, explaining why it was better than Atari and Mattel's consoles, and helping local reps learn how to sell it. The other part of his job involved meeting up with Dave Nutting and Bob Ogden's crew in Chicago about every Friday to talk about software: testing games, getting feedback from enthusiasts and public testers and using that to tweak the games. Dave Nutting Associates was still in charge of software, but they were open to outside ideas and suggestions. Meeks was also involved with the ZGRASS add-on, helping design the keyboard interface and even drawing up a design for a graphics tablet that would connect to it - at the time a high end input device. His design involved it being integrated into the keyboard, though since it would have dramatically driven up the price he understands why this was not pursued. On the add-on: I asked Tom how the ZGRASS expansion compared to the UV1. He said the biggest difference was speed. Because the UV1 used a higher clocked Z80 processor, didn't have to share memory and screen time with the Astrocade, and could be upgraded with even more memory, the UV1 was fast. The add-on, on the other hand, could see the animation bogged down. ZGRASS itself worked incredibly well for getting what you wanted done, but compared to machine language it was a slower effort. This actually matches up with something another historian, Alex Smith, heard from Jamie Fenton last year in an interview - Fenton said she originally liked ZGRASS in the add-on, but eventually turned on it because it was too slow and she's all about speed. One revision of the add on used Forth, she told Smith, which was much quicker (but clearly not what DNA was showing to Astrocade). Jim McConnell, Astrocade's hardware engineer, worked closely with the DNA folks - Tom said Jim also designed the 2000-baud cassette interface for AstroBASIC. On the work environment at Astrocade: Meeks painted a picture of a fairly political company that was divided into two camps and several strata. Ray George and Jim Guerin, who had worked together to scoop up the Bally system after struggling to get their own home game product off the ground. Jim ran the business side of things, and Ray the sales side. Tom had very little experience with Jim's team but noted that Ray was an "intimidating" salesman who was also charismatic enough that even a room full of pissed off reps and distributors would be happy to buy more product after meeting with him. He didn't feel Ray had a whole lot of interest in the product other than being something to sell, but the folks on his own stratum - Jim McConnell, himself, and the Dave Nutting folks - were all big believers in the product and felt it was better than the competitors' machines. he also suspects Ray and/or his sales team had some messed up payment arrangement that they were gaming the system with: to explain, Ray would get a commission for new sales and a different commission for selling product generally to existing reps. So he would recruit representatives and distributors, having Tom wow them with their games and quality, and then provide them with mostly mediocre games and a smattering of good ones to get into stores. As Tom said, you can't sell consoles without the good games, and when those reps failed to live up to their contracts to move product, Ray could break it, find another potential local rep in the same area, and get them on board with the same scam. He's not sure if this was Ray George specifically or someone on the sales team doing it or everybody, but he said it seemed counterproductive towards success. Furthermore, Guerin and George did not like each other, and as the animosity built up Guerin founded Nitron to actually build the Astrocades. The setup was that Astrocade would get an order in, they'd get the money, and then it would go into a "lockbox" and move on to Nitron to pay for the production. If Astrocade failed to pay, Nitron would take over the company (and thus cut George out entirely). So there were some efforts around this time to get the product sold off to another company or find some other solution to keep Nitron from taking over. Meeks said they had a meeting with Fisher Price, which was very interested and tentatively offered $3 million to buy out Astrocade and the game system. Around this time they also got a lead that Hasbro was interested, and similarly Hasbro offered them $3 million as well, Meeks said. Ray George, trying to play them off each other, told Hasbro they appreciated it, but that they already had this tentative deal with Fisher Price. Hasbro's folks didn't appreciate going through this demo and song and dance when a tentative offer already existed and dropped out. Then an enthusiast caught wind of the potential sale, reached out to Fisher Price to congratulate them on going after the Astrocade, and inadvertently killed that deal as FP didn't want to deal with a company with that kind of leaking going on. The death of Astrocade: Meeks recounted the tale of what really ended up doing Astrocade in. He and Ray George were in Europe after that went down trying to drum up a distributor out there who could financially help them keep Nitron from taking over the company. And they found a West German guy who was interested, provided they could design a PAL Astrocade unit (which finally pushed Jeff Fredricksen to do so). The German fellow was willing to pay handsomely to become the European distributor for the product, ITT was going to produce the units, everything was looking good. Well Tom says that Ray George had this "disgusting friend" there with them, and after they got the commitment from the distributor, this fellow calls New York Post financial reporter Dan Dorfman and tells him that Nitron is going to have some trouble because Astrocade can't pay them, and that this may end up being illegal. He then hangs up and says that it should keep Nitron busy for a while and should keep them from taking over Astrocade until they get the money from the German fellow. Well, flash forward a little bit - Ray George has set up this meeting with a big investment bank in New York and the German guy is coming in to give him the check and sign the formal paperwork: George thinks doing this with the investment bankers will make everything seem more impressive all around. He finishes his presentation, Tom does his part, and one of the investment bankers says this all looks good and they don't care what Dan Dorfman said in the paper that day. Well, no one at Astrocade nor the German guy had seen this, so the German guy goes downstairs, buys the paper, comes back up and reads the piece blasting Ray George and company as being disreputable. Tom recalls the guy's face turned beet red, that he took the check and put it back in his coat pocket, asked for a cab to be called, and left. And once he left, the investment bankers were no longer interested in the product, either. To quote "They outsmarted themselves." Odds and ends: Tom wasn't around for the Bally sell off to Astrocade, but heard secondhand that Bally cut the home division loose in part because it was underperforming and in part because they were under investigation for mob ties and, because it was underperforming, the folks in charge were fingered and the division sold off. Bally itself had no experience selling on the consumer market and didn't seem to understand how to market the machine. After Astrocade laid folks off and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy (Tom remembers being at CES during that taking place when they were named a #1 company by Consumer Reports), Tom worked for a couple local publishers making computer software, which eventually led to his program Homework Helper getting sold off to Spinnaker. He was involved with the Mindset computer after realizing its potential for video production, and his production software was even packed in with the machine for a time (it ultimately went under in part because of problems getting the hard drive to work). I can get into more detail on Mindset if there's interest. He also worked with John Perkins on Project NEMO - the game system Hasbro financially backed that could play games off VHS tapes - and gives Perkins 100% credit for solving the multiple video stream problem they faced. [...] From: Kevin B via Groups.Io Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2020 2:26 PM To: ballyalley@groups.io Subject: Re: [ballyalley] Highlights from a conversation with Astrocade's Tom Meeks One interesting item that I forgot about last night. Tom's got an interest in educational software, and actually worked with a woman working on a phd on a project using video games to help kids learn. As such, he wrote a few games in Bally BASIC and they used an Astrocade for her experimental work. The woman, June Wright, is still around as far as I can tell - I plan on reaching out to see if she remembers more about the project. Tom himself doesn't still have those BASIC games, but said that one of them, My Town, was later turned by him into a Mindset game.