Exidy was a developer and manufacturer of coin-operated amusements. The company was founded by H.R. "Pete" Kauffman and Samuel Hawes in 1973. The name "Exidy" was a portmanteau of the words "Excellence in Dynamics". Notable games released by Exidy include ''

Circus A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyc ...

'', '' Death Race'', '' Star Fire'', '' Venture'', '' Pepper II'', ''

Mouse Trap A mousetrap is a specialized type of animal trap designed primarily to catch and, usually, kill mice. Mousetraps are usually set in an indoor location where there is a suspected infestation of rodents. Larger traps are designed to catch other ...

'', '' Targ'' and '' Spectar''.

Game history

Pete Kauffman (1923 – 2015) was a marketing executive at Ramtek (company) in 1972 and was one of several employees of the company who played the original Atari ''

Pong ''Pong'' is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972. It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alc ...

'' prototype at Andy Capps Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. Believing coin-operated video games would become a major business, he left Ramtek in late 1973 to establish Exidy with Ampex engineer Samuel Hawes. Exidy found competing with larger video game companies such as

Atari, Inc. Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari was a key player in the formation of the video arcade and video game industry. Based primarily around the Sunn ...

difficult. The company's Lila Zinter claimed in 1983 that "Exidy is an innovator, but ... we have a hard time breaking through the politics of getting a game a fair chance." One of Exidy's efforts aimed at trivia lovers during the 1980s was the quiz game ''Fax'', a multi-level game housed in a large wooden cabinet that stood about 4 feet high and looked nothing like other video games of the time period. The players were shown a series of questions with four possible answers. A point value "clock" ran down to zero after answers were shown, meaning players answering quicker earned more points for their correct answers (Incorrect answers incurred no penalty). Beginning in 1983, Exidy released a series of

light gun A light gun is a pointing device for computers and a control device for arcade and video games, typically shaped to resemble a pistol. Early history The first light guns were produced in the 1930s, following the development of light-sens ...

games, the first and most well known of which was ''

Crossbow A crossbow is a ranged weapon using an elastic launching device consisting of a bow-like assembly called a ''prod'', mounted horizontally on a main frame called a ''tiller'', which is hand-held in a similar fashion to the stock of a long fir ...

''. These presented an unusual twist to the light gun genre: the goal is to protect

character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

s walking through the screen by shooting things which are trying to kill the characters. These games were also the first to feature fully digitized sound for all

sound effect A sound effect (or audio effect) is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. Traditi ...

s and

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

. Other "C" series games include ''

Cheyenne The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enro ...

'', ''Combat'', ''Crackshot'', ''Clay Pigeon'' and ''

Chiller A chiller is a machine that removes heat from a liquid coolant via a vapor-compression, adsorption refrigeration, or absorption refrigeration cycles. This liquid can then be circulated through a heat exchanger to cool equipment, or another pr ...

''. Chief designer for these games was Larry Hutcherson. Exidy also made two rarely seen motion cabinet games with vector graphics called ''Vertigo'' and ''Top Gunner''. Chief game designer for this game was Vic Tolomei. Another somewhat successful game from Exidy was a driving game named ''Top Secret''. This game featured a spy car with advanced weaponry on a mission inside the Soviet Union to destroy a heavily guarded Top Secret super weapon. Game designers for this game were Vic Tolomei, Larry Hutcherson and Ken Nicholson. In 2006, it was announced that Mean Hamster Software acquired rights to develop new Exidy arcade games. In 2015, CollectorVision Games registered the unused trademark rights to the Exidy name and logo.

The Exidy Sorcerer

Under the leadership of visionary

Paul Terrell Paul Terrell is an American businessman. In December 1975, he founded the first personal computer retailer shop. He helped popularize personal computing to the hobbyist and home computing markets, and was the first retailer to sell an Apple Compute ...

Byte Shop The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

fame, Exidy made a brief foray into the

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

market, with the Exidy Sorcerer in 1978. The Sorcerer was a modified

S-100 bus The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 ''(withdrawn)'', is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. computers, consisting of p ...

based machine, but lacked the internal expansion system common to other S-100 systems. It made do with an S-100 expansion card-edge that could connect to an external S-100 expansion cage. The Sorcerer also featured an advanced (for the era) text display that was capable of 64 characters per line, when most systems supported only 40 characters. The Sorcerer did not support sound, color, or in some respects, graphics, which seems at odds with the company's video game background; however, the characters it displayed were programmable by the user. The system was never very popular in North America, but found a following in Australia and Europe, notably Belgium. Exidy licensed the Sorcerer computer and its software to a Texas-based startup called Dynasty Computer Corporation in 1979. It was relabeled and sold by Dynasty as the Dynasty Smart-Alec.

Arcade titles

First Star Software games

These were licensed from First Star Software in 1984 for use with the Max-A-Flex arcade system. *'' Astro Chase'' *'' Flip and Flop'' *'' Bristles'' *''

Boulder Dash ''Boulder Dash'' is a 2D maze-puzzle video game released in 1984 by First Star Software for Atari 8-bit computers. It was created by Canadian developers Peter Liepa and Chris Gray. The player controls Rockford, who collects treasures while ...

Unreleased prototypes

*''Kreepy Krawlers'' (1979) *''UFO's'' (1980) *''Teeter Torture'' (1982) *''Snapper'' (1982) *''Critter'' (1995, mechanical gun game) *''Hot Shot'' (1995, mechanical gun game) *''Troll'' (1995, mechanical gun game)

Free titles via MAME

In 2007, the

MAME MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preser ...

website announced that H.R. Kauffman had released the first of what would become a sizable group of Exidy games downloadable for free, non-commercial use, adding ''

'' to the already-released '' Teeter Torture''. By 2011, with the help of Reinhard Stompe, the list of

ROM image A ROM image, or ROM file, is a computer file which contains a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip, often from a video game cartridge, or used to contain a computer's firmware, or from an arcade game's main board. The term is frequen ...

s included ''Circus'', ''Robot Bowl'', ''Car Polo'', ''Side Trak'', ''Ripcord'', ''Fire One'', ''Crash'', '' Star Fire'' and its unreleased upgrade ''Star Fire II'', '' Targ'', '' Spectar'', ''Hard Hat'', ''Victory'', ''Teeter Torture'', ''Fax'' and ''Top Gunner''. The ROM images may be freely downloaded from the MAME website after the user acknowledges the terms of usage.MAME , Multiple Arcade machine Emulator
"New Free ROMs Posted", January 25, 2011, accessed June 15, 2011.

References

{{reflist

External links

Free Exidy arcade ROM downloads
at

The Dot Eaters Article
featuring a history of Death Race and Exidy Exidy games American companies established in 1973 Video game companies established in 1973 Defunct video game companies of the United States Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area