An Entertainment Sciences Warehouse Find
By Todd Bordelon
September, 2001

"I was at work and got a call from a friend that a person next door to his shop was sledge-hammering a boatload of arcade games. This got my interest and I was there in a flash (as we all would be).

Turns out, the company "Entertainment Sciences" was storing all of their remaining prototypes in a warehouse near me. Entertainment Sciences never released a game and they only had two prototypes: Bouncer and Turbo Sub.

There was too much in this warehouse for a single person to handle, so I invited Kirby Gowland to attend and share the wealth (a local collector vector-head). I let Kirby have the only Turbo Sub cockpit ever made.

A summary of the find: 40 nearly complete Turbo Sub prototype machines. Turbo Sub is a Star Wars cabinet with all-new components on it. The only missing part was the PCB’s. I did find several blank PCB’s (no components on them) that can be painstakingly assembled, and many revisions of beta eproms. These cabinets have never bumped into anything or been played by a human. They are all pristine and I have loads of NOS artwork. I also found a Bouncer control panel and marquee.

I was also given a lead to follow up on to obtain all remaining Bouncer stuff...(!) A nice hint I was given was to go rent the movie American Ninja III. Apparently Bouncer makes an appearance in it.

Here is what I have (thus far) been able to find out about Bouncer. Bouncer required an additional ROM board. I have one that (of course) is unpopulated. Holds a boatload of 27512's. During 'the dig', Kirby and I found plotter outputs for the board, now there is a PCB to match. I obtained several Bouncer wiring harnesses and misc parts (coin box,
buttons, etc). Also have what was stated to be 'one of the' power supplies for it.

So, I have *EVERYTHING* needed for a Bouncer machine except for the ROM images. Marquee, control panel, wiring harness, power supply, blank pcb's, etc. There wasn't any side-art (for any of their 3 games, just painted sides.) Wait, did I say 3?? Hmmm..."

Want to see some pictures?
Turbo Sub
Bouncer

Links:
Clay Cowgil's Bouncer page
Bouncer KLOV entry
Turbo Sub KLOV entry

Notes from Bob Wood:
Entertainment Sciences was a California firm which produced games in the early to mid 1980's. With [the Turbo Sub I purchased], I found an original game flyer and I have included a scan of the front of the flyer for you to see.

I am not aware of any other surviving examples of Turbo Sub and would be very interested to hear if someone else has found one.

These have become an elusive item but luckily this one managed to survive in like new condition. Turbo Sub is in a Star Wars like cabinet although it is a dedicated game and not a conversion of Star Wars. I think the company purchased some remaining cabinet shells which were originally intended to become Star Wars games (I don't know if these cabinets were obtained from Atari or instead came from an Atari cabinet supplier).

The game has speech and very engaging graphics and game play. Because if it's use of the Star Wars like controller there are some similarities in the game play to Star Wars. In fact, when I was communicating with one of the companies employees three years ago in my search for a Turbo Sub, he commented that he considered it to be another sequel to Star Wars (only without the Star Wars licensing).

The game play is best describe on it's KLOV page as... "The player pilots a futuristic submarine and battles invading alien creatures from outer space beneath the ocean".

The game hardware is very sophisticated and includes a keypad mounted behind the coin door. This keypad is used to control all diagnostics, settings bookkeeping, etc. The boardset consists of four boards mounted in a rack (CPU, video, ROM and sound).

We managed to get it working and have found it to be a lot of fun to play. So it is really a shame that more of these were not produced. I think that must have resulted from bad timing. It was designed and made at a time when the video game industry was suffering a sharp decline in sales.

I found about 20 cabinets back then. These were raw cabinets that were leftover when the company ceased operations. Unfortunately only two of them had been outfitted with the artwork and neither of those had the boardsets. From that discovery I have been pursuing a lead I got at the time about a complete one. Finally succeeded in locating and buying it and that is the one pictured.

Entertainment Sciences relocated all it's property to a location here in the southeast. I discovered this warehouse several years ago. I spoke with a relative of the founder of the company and based on what he told me I became convinced that none of the Turbo Subs had left the possession of ES. Obviously this was not the case.

As for the existence of a Bouncer, I did find a Bouncer control panel with overlay. It's been said that Bouncer was to have been a conversion for Turbo Sub (or vice versa).

But that would be puzzling to me since the Bouncer CP I found is entirely different from that found on Turbo Sub (which has a Star Wars like cabinet and CP). The explanation may be that Bouncer was to be both a dedicated cabinet and a conversion.
But that is just speculation. I found several Turbo Sub cabinets in the ES warehouse. All but the one on eBay were very incomplete and no other boardsets were to be found. And no cabinet was there that would have become a Bouncer.
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Notes from Andy Warren:
Now that struck a nerve. All of the Star Wars parts I had came from a massive conversion attempt of about 30 Star Wars machines with dead flyback transformers that had been corralled in a warehouse and had been gutted to be converted to "Turbo-Sub".

The deal fell through and there was a warehouse full of amplifone picture tubes, deflection boards, SW boardsets and "HV boards with REDisDead transformers" and a bunch of gutted Star Wars machines. I gathered a bunch of parts and managed to piece back together about 3 of the "empty cabs". They lived happily ever after in the late '80's.

The rest are a tribute to the scarcity and price of a nice SW upright or SW cockpit. Each "TURBO-SUB" sank 50 Star Wars machines for every one in existence. Yep, they're rare. So, I guess that means they're worth 20 to 50 Star Wars games.
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Notes from Matthew Brown:
Entertainment Sciences had locations in my hometown, Huntington Beach CA. As such, there were at least two locations that I know of that had the Bouncer protos for some time. If it means anything to you, they are Hora Space Video Games on Goldenwest and Gothard (now out of business), and Tilt! in Westminister Mall. I played Bouncer at Hora SVG for a few weeks...it went out of order....disappeared, then came back for a short time before disappearing altogether. It was truly a neat game.

So I had played it enough to ask the operator who I was friends with about it, and he said the game was in his warehouse of broken games, but NOT back at the manufacturer being fixed. He mentioned there being a 'problem' with the manufacturer. I now think this probably corresponds with Entertainment Sciences bombing....but who can say? I didn't care at the time!

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Notes from Gene Lewin:
I have been a game operator in Southern California for 27 years, and I actually operated both games. My Bouncer was in a converted Tempest cabinet and the Turbo Sub was of course in a Star Wars cabinet. I remember both games quit working and I could not find anyone to fix them, so (sadly) I got rid of them. I remember the Bouncer monitor was a converted G07 monitor that would not sync with anything else so I sold it to another dealer many years ago. The Turbo sub, I tried to have someone fix, and I even found another board set, but never got it working again. I don’t remember what I did with that one. I wish I had some appreciation for rare stuff back then, but luckily I did get some appreciation for rare games in the early 90’s.
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Bouncer Flyer		Turbo Sub Flyer