1976 in video games

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1976 has several new titles such as Road Race, Night Driver, Heavyweight Champ, Sea Wolf and Breakout.

Highest-grossing arcade games

Japan

In Japan, Game Machine magazine published the first annual arcade game earnings chart for 1976 in their February 1977 issue, listing both arcade video games and electro-mechanical games (EM games) on the same arcade chart. Namco's EM racing game F-1 was the highest-grossing overall arcade game of the year, followed by Taito's video game Ball Park (originally released as Tornado Baseball by Midway Manufacturing in North America). The following titles were the highest-grossing arcade games of 1976, according to the first annual Game Machine chart.^[1]^[2]

Arcade video games				Arcade electro-mechanical games (EM games)
Rank	Title	Points	Genre	Rank	Title	Points
1	Ball Park (Tornado Baseball)	34	Sports	1	F-1	64
2	Speed Race DX	26	Racing	2	Mogura Taiji (Whac-A-Mole)	18
3	Heavyweight Champ	20	Boxing	3	Group Skill Diga	12
4	Breakout	14	Block kuzushi	4	Sky Hawk	11
5	Sea Wolf	10	Shooter	5	Mini Laser Clay	6
6	LeMans	5	Racing	5	Wild Gunman	6
7	Kamikaze (Zero Fighter Kamikaze)	4	Shooter	7	400 Miles	4
8	Sparkling Corner	3	Racing	7	Flipper (Pinball)^[a]	4
8	Speed Race Twin	3	Racing	9	Unknown	1
10	Indy 800	2	Racing\| style="background: var(--background-color-interactive, #EEE); color: var(--color-base, black); vertical-align: middle; white-space: nowrap; text-align: center; " class="table-Unknown" \| Unknown		1
	Night Driver	2			Unknown	1
	Rock n' Bark	2	Shooter\| rowspan="2" data-sort-value="" style="background: var(--background-color-interactive, #ececec); color: var(--color-base, inherit); vertical-align: middle; text-align: center; " class="table-na" \| —	—	—
	Western Gun (Gun Fight)	2		—	—

Note: Medal games are listed on a separate chart, with Nintendo's EVR Race being the highest-grossing medal game of the year.^[1]^[2]

United States

In the United States, RePlay magazine began publishing annual lists of top-grossing arcade games in 1976, covering both arcade video games and pinball machines. The following titles were the top ten arcade video games of the year, in terms of coin drop earnings.^[3] Lifetime arcade cabinet sales are also given in a separate column.

Rank^[3]	Title	Developer	Manufacturer	Genre	Lifetime cabinet sales
1	Sea Wolf	Dave Nutting Associates	Midway Manufacturing	Shooter	10,000^[4]
2	Gun Fight (Western Gun)	Taito	Midway Manufacturing	Shooter	8,600^[5]
3	Wheels (Speed Race)	Taito	Midway Manufacturing	Racing	7,000^[6]
4	Indy 800	Atari, Inc.	Atari, Inc.	Racing	6,495^[7]
5	Breakout	Atari, Inc.	Atari, Inc.	Block breaker	11,000^[7]
6	Indy 4	Atari, Inc.	Atari, Inc.	Racing	Unknown
7	Bi-Plane	Fun Games	Fun Games	Shooter
8	Death Race	Exidy	Exidy	Racing
	Demolition Derby	Exidy	Chicago Coin	Racing
	Trivia	Ramtek		Quiz

Events

October – Warner Communications acquires Atari from Nolan Bushnell for $28 million USD. Bushnell stays on as chairman.^[8]
3.5 million video games are sold, earning the retail video game industry $242 million in revenue.^[9]

Business

New companies: Apple Computer, Data East

Notable releases

Games

January – Sega releases Heavyweight Champ,^[10] the first video game to feature hand-to-hand fighting.^[11]^[12]^[13] It uses controls that simulate throwing actual punches.^[11]
February – Sega releases Road Race.^[14]
April 1 – Exidy releases Death Race to video arcades. News of the game's existence breaks nationally in newspapers in the first week of July after a quiet nationwide rollout.^[15] The game sparks a public outcry over violence in video games, and is banned in many areas.^[16]
April – Taito releases Speed Race Twin,^[17] a sequel to Speed Race that allows simultaneous two-player competitive gameplay^[18]
May 13^[19] – Atari releases Breakout, whose prototype was designed by Apple Computer cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, to video arcades.^[8]
August – Sega releases Man T.T.,^[20] also known as Moto-Cross, an early motorbike racing game, using a pseudo-3D, forward-scrolling, third-person perspective,^[21] similar to Road Race.^[22] It also introduces haptic feedback, causing the handlebars to vibrate during collisions.^[23] Sega-Gremlin re-brands it as Fonz.^[24]
October – Atari releases Night Driver,^[25] a first-person perspective racing video game.
October – Gremlin releases Blockade, the first of what become known as snake games.
While working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, Don Woods discovers and expands Will Crowther's Adventure. Later in the year, James Gillogly ports Woods's version of the interactive fiction title from Fortran to the C programming language for Unix-based computers.^[26]

Hardware

November – Fairchild Camera and Instrument releases the Video Entertainment System (later known as the VES or Channel F), the first video game console to use a microprocessor and cartridges.^[27]
Coleco releases the Telstar, a console clone of Pong based on General Instrument's AY-3-8500 microchip.^[28]

Notes

^ フリッパー, Furippā

References

^ ^a ^b "本紙アンケー〜ト調査の結果" [Paper Questionnaire: Results of the Survey] (PDF). Game Machine (in Japanese). No. 65. Amusement Press, Inc. February 1, 1977. pp. 2–3.
^ ^a ^b "調査対象5年間のベスト1" [Best 1 of the 5 Years Surveyed] (PDF). Game Machine (in Japanese). No. 159. Amusement Press, Inc. February 15, 1981. p. 1.
^ ^a ^b "Profit Chart". RePlay. October 1976.
^ Steven L. Kent (2000), The first quarter: a 25-year history of video games, BWD Press, p. 83, ISBN 0-9704755-0-0, retrieved April 9, 2011, Sea Wolf, which was another creation of Dave Nutting, did solid business, selling more than 10,000 machines. (A later color version sold an additional 4000 units.)
^ Smith, Alexander (November 19, 2019). They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol. I: 1971-1982. CRC Press. p. 262. ISBN 978-0-429-75261-2.
^ Baer, Ralph H. (2005). Videogames: In the Beginning. Rolenta Press. pp. 10–3. ISBN 978-0-9643848-1-1.
^ ^a ^b Product: Total Build (PDF). Atari Games. 1999.
^ ^a ^b Thomas, Donald A. Jr (2005). "–1976–". ICWhen.com. Archived from the original (shtml) on March 17, 2006. Retrieved February 18, 2006.
^ TV Games Probed, Reading Eagle (December 21, 1976)
^ http://www.gamefaqs.com/arcade/567840-heavyweight-champ/data
^ ^a ^b Spencer, Spanner, The Tao of Beat-'em-ups, EuroGamer, February 6, 2008, Accessed February 23, 2009
^ Ashcraft, Brian, (2008) Arcade Mania! The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers, (Kodansha International), p. 94
^ Nadia Oxford, 20 Years of Street Fighter, 1UP.com, November 12, 2007
^ http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=road-race&page=detail&id=14493
^ AP (July 2, 1976). "It Offers That Run-Down Feeling". The Minneapolis Star. p. 3A. Retrieved August 30, 2017 – via Newspapers.com.
^ Gonzalez, Lauren. "When Two Tribes Go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy / The Major Offenders". GameSpot. Archived from the original on July 17, 2007. Retrieved February 18, 2006.
^ http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=speed-race-twin&page=detail&id=19477
^ Speed Race Twin at the Killer List of Videogames
^ "Atari - 1972 - 1984". www.atari.com. Archived from the original on June 11, 2016. Retrieved August 30, 2017.
^ http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=man-t.t.&page=detail&id=26084
^ Moto-Cross at the Killer List of Videogames
^ Road Race at the Killer List of Videogames
^ Mark J. P. Wolf (2008), The video game explosion: a history from PONG to PlayStation and beyond, p. 39, ABC-CLIO, ISBN 0-313-33868-X
^ Fonz at the Killer List of Videogames
^ http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=night-driver-upright-model&page=detail&id=26054
^ Adams, Rick. "A history of 'Adventure'". The Colossal Cave Adventure page. Retrieved February 17, 2006.
^ "Fairchild Video Entertainment System/Channel F". ClassicGaming.com. Archived from the original on June 10, 2007. Retrieved February 18, 2006.
^ Winter, David (2006). "Coleco Telstar". PONG-Story. Archived from the original on March 2, 2006. Retrieved February 18, 2006.

[3] フリッパー, Furippā

[GM65-1] "本紙アンケー〜ト調査の結果" [Paper Questionnaire: Results of the Survey] (PDF). Game Machine (in Japanese). No. 65. Amusement Press, Inc. February 1, 1977. pp. 2–3.

[GM159-2] "調査対象5年間のベスト1" [Best 1 of the 5 Years Surveyed] (PDF). Game Machine (in Japanese). No. 159. Amusement Press, Inc. February 15, 1981. p. 1.

[RePlay-4] "Profit Chart". RePlay. October 1976.

[Kent-5] Steven L. Kent (2000), The first quarter: a 25-year history of video games, BWD Press, p. 83, ISBN 0-9704755-0-0, retrieved April 9, 2011, Sea Wolf, which was another creation of Dave Nutting, did solid business, selling more than 10,000 machines. (A later color version sold an additional 4000 units.)

[6] Smith, Alexander (November 19, 2019). They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol. I: 1971-1982. CRC Press. p. 262. ISBN 978-0-429-75261-2.

[Baer-7] Baer, Ralph H. (2005). Videogames: In the Beginning. Rolenta Press. pp. 10–3. ISBN 978-0-9643848-1-1.

[Atari-8] Product: Total Build (PDF). Atari Games. 1999.

[icwhen-9] Thomas, Donald A. Jr (2005). "–1976–". ICWhen.com. Archived from the original (shtml) on March 17, 2006. Retrieved February 18, 2006.

[10] TV Games Probed, Reading Eagle (December 21, 1976)

[11] ttp://www.gamefaqs.com/arcade/567840-heavyweight-champ/data

[tao-12] Spencer, Spanner, The Tao of Beat-'em-ups, EuroGamer, February 6, 2008, Accessed February 23, 2009

[ashcraft-13] Ashcraft, Brian, (2008) Arcade Mania! The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers, (Kodansha International), p. 94

[14] Nadia Oxford, 20 Years of Street Fighter, 1UP.com, November 12, 2007

[15] ttp://www.arcade-history.com/?n=road-race&page=detail&id=14493

[16] AP (July 2, 1976). "It Offers That Run-Down Feeling". The Minneapolis Star. p. 3A. Retrieved August 30, 2017 – via Newspapers.com.

[deathrace-17] Gonzalez, Lauren. "When Two Tribes Go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy / The Major Offenders". GameSpot. Archived from the original on July 17, 2007. Retrieved February 18, 2006.

[18] ttp://www.arcade-history.com/?n=speed-race-twin&page=detail&id=19477

[19] Speed Race Twin at the Killer List of Videogames

[20] "Atari - 1972 - 1984". www.atari.com. Archived from the original on June 11, 2016. Retrieved August 30, 2017.

[21] ttp://www.arcade-history.com/?n=man-t.t.&page=detail&id=26084

[Moto-Cross-22] Moto-Cross at the Killer List of Videogames

[road_race-23] Road Race at the Killer List of Videogames

[24] Mark J. P. Wolf (2008), The video game explosion: a history from PONG to PlayStation and beyond, p. 39, ABC-CLIO, ISBN 0-313-33868-X

[Fonz-25] Fonz at the Killer List of Videogames

[26] ttp://www.arcade-history.com/?n=night-driver-upright-model&page=detail&id=26054

[adventure-27] Adams, Rick. "A history of 'Adventure'". The Colossal Cave Adventure page. Retrieved February 17, 2006.

[channelf-28] "Fairchild Video Entertainment System/Channel F". ClassicGaming.com. Archived from the original on June 10, 2007. Retrieved February 18, 2006.

[telstar-29] Winter, David (2006). "Coleco Telstar". PONG-Story. Archived from the original on March 2, 2006. Retrieved February 18, 2006.

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