In the mid- 1970s, pinball was still the king of the American arcade and few companies had been in the pinball business as long as D. Gottlieb and Company.

Along with Williams, Bally, and Chicago Coin, they formed an immortal quartet of U.S. pinball manufacturers. Of the four, Gottlieb was perhaps the most respected. They were the oldest (founded in 1927) and produced the machine that launched the pinball industry (Baffle Ball, Nov. 193 1). They also manufactured more pingames than anyone else! As the 70s came to a close, pinball’s leadership faced an increasing challenge from a coin-gobbling army of beeping, buzzing, and thumping invaders-& games! Replay magazine’s November 1978 industry survey revealed that pinball was still the top money maker with video games trailing at third (behind pins and pool tables). In the next year, however, the hegemony would change. Pinball rival Bally, through their Midway subsidiary, would have tremendous success with the Japanese import Space Invaders. Then, in November of 1979, Atari would introduce the even more successful Asteroids. With that, an unstoppable behemoth was unleashed...

Gottlieb (which had been acquired by Columbia Pictures in 1976) had yet to jump on the video bandwagon but had developed solid state technology for their pinball machines. They started out the Eighties by announcing their "Decade of the Stars" and introduced the Star Series 80 pinball line. This revised solid state operating system (known as System 80) improved upon their earlier System 1 design, which was used in their first 16 solid state games. Along with System 80 they boasted a new wide-body standard in playfield size called Dimension 80. The line, which included pinball machines such as The Amazing Spiderman and Panthera, failed to stem the rising video tide. Unable to ignore the exploding video industry any longer, Gottlieb belatedly entered the arena before 1980 came to a close, they did so by licensing two Japanese creations-No Man’s Land, a tank combat game from Universal Co. Ltd. and New York, New York a talking, Galaxian-like game developed by Sigma Enterprises (a few years later, the company would also license the vertical shooter Juno First from Konami). Neither of these games could match the success of those introduced during the same year by their coin-op rivals: Williams’ Defender, Stem Electronics’ Berzerk (both developed by in-house designers), and Midway’s Pat-Man (licensed from Namco) were swallowing quarters faster than operators could roll them. In 198 1, the video juggernaut was impenetrable. While Gottlieb did have some mild success with pinball games like Mars, God of War (5,240 built) and Volcano (3,655 built), company revenue fell 46.5%. That summer they began development of their own in-house video game division. An auxiliary plant in nearby Bensenville, Illinois (their primary facility was in Northlake, Illinois) was quickly converted into a video production facility and Howie Rubin was chosen to head the division. Soon he and engineering vice-president Ron Waxman assembled a talented team of programmers, technicians, and artists who would produce almost a dozen video games over the next few years.

For its first in-house effort, Gottlieb chose to stay close to its pinball roots by designing a pinball-video hybrid called Caveman created by Joel Krieger, Jim Weisz and John Buras. The game looked like a pinball machine but embedded in the top-center of the playfield was a small video monitor. Caveman started out as a pinball game but at certain points the player’s ball would be captured and the action switched to the monitor which featured a simple maze game where a caveman fled from pursuing dinosaurs. Jeff Lee, who created the graphics for most of the company’s in-house video games, used an Apple II personal computer to create the graphics for Caveman and was limited to 4 colors and about 3 steps of animation per character. It was all in vain. Production was halted after 1800 machines had rolled off the line.

For its first all-video release, Gottlieb’s new division wanted to do what it could to ensure success. With this in mind, they obtained the services of one of the leading video designers available – Tim Skelly. Skelly had been one of the 70s most prolific and successful designers. While working at Cinematronics he’d produced a string of hits, including Rip off and Armor Attack.

Skelly was working at Sega/Gremlin in the summer of 1981 when Gottlieb signed him to a six-month contract to produce a single video game for them. With his significant experience, it was hoped that Skelly could create a hit for Gottlieb right off the bat. The game he would create was 1982’s Reactor. The idea for the game had come to him at Sega. As he describes it, "I kicked around an idea where, as the player, you wouldn’t shoot projectiles, you would BE the projectile. My working name for it was Ram-It." Casting about for some sort of metaphor that would fit the player-as-projectile theme, Skelly came up with the idea of nuclear particles.

A new hardware system was still in development when Skelly arrived so for three months, he did his design work on paper (Skelly also did all of the game’s art). The hardware system that emerged was called the Blue Box and featured an Intel 8088 processor and nine-inch floppy drives. When finally released, Reactor was a physics geek’s dream come true. Gameplay took place in a nuclear reactor whose core expanded slowly but surely as the game progressed, threatening to engulf the player, who was represented by a particle controlled via a trak-ball. A series of sub-atomic particles (among them pions, leptons, and nucleons) surrounded the player who would attempt to destroy them by knocking them into the reactor’s walls while avoiding the walls himself. Hitting the particles into a group of control rods caused the core to "cool down" and shrink to its original size, only to start growing again immediately. Players could also earn bonus points by trapping particles in either of two chambers located at opposite comers of the playfield. As levels advanced, enemies got faster and more numerous (some even split in two when hit) and the number of control rods required to cool the core increased.

While Reactor’s gameplay was original, the thing many people remember best are the game’s sounds. For that, credit goes to sound engineer Dave Thiel, who created the sounds for most of the company’s video games. "If there were a history of interactive sound, [Reactor] was probably the first place that somebody actually tried to make something that sounded like rock and roll." Thiel recalls. Realizing that his main audience consisted of 13-year-old boys, Thiel tailored the sound to the audience, creating a driving, hard-rock soundtrack. Like the hardware system, Gottlieb’s sound system was primitive, perhaps even more so. An adaptation of their pinball sound sys-tem, it consisted of an Apple II processor with a digital/analog converter and a Votrax chip to provide limited speech capability. Since the sound system provided only 2K of storage, digitized sounds were impossible so speech was synthesized using the 64 phonemes that the Votrax could produce. In addition to the music and speech, Reactor’s sounds included a submarine like ping and the steady throbbing of the reactor core.

While work on Reactor was proceeding, designer Tom Malinowski was at work on Videoman (aka: Protector, Guardian, Argus, Why Me?, and sometimes jokingly referred to as Pro VidGuardArgus), a side-scrolling superhero game where the player’s on-screen alter ego (which at one point was designed to look like Ron Waxman) could make use of super powers such as heat vision to thwart his video enemies while protecting resources from destruction. For control, Videoman used Reactor’s trak-ball system. Some time later, work started on a trivia game dubbed Quizimodo that consisted of an Apple II computer mounted in a cabinet. Neither Videoman nor Quizimodo ever made it past the play testing stage.

Tim Skelly was only one of the dozen-odd programmers working at Gottlieb. Another was Warren Davis, who’d come to the company after responding to an ad in the Sunday newspaper. His previous experience included work at Bell Labs where he’d designed hardware for a speech recognition system. While he helped out with some of the early games, it wasn’t until Reactor was in its final stages that he began working on his own game. It would go on to become one of the all-time classics of the golden age of video games - Q*Bert. Serendipity played a large role in the creation of Q*Bert. For Davis, the idea started when he came across a program by Kan Yabumoto who had filled a screen with a pattern of hexagons. At the same time, Jeff Lee had created a pattern of, M.C. Escher-inspired cubes which he drew up on graph paper then rendered on the Blue Box. Davis thought it might be interesting to combine Lee’s cubes with Yabumoto’s hexagons but to arrange them in a pyramid rather then having them fill the screen. He imagined a ball falling down the pyramid and thought it would be a good way to experiment with programming randomness. Davis soon showed his "programming exercise" to Jeff Lee who had created a number of characters for use in a video game. One that Davis especially liked was a round, orange character with a large tubular nose that he thought, "looked kind of helpless." Lee had originally intended his character to shoot out of his oversized schnoz in a game he called Snots and Boogers. Soon the little fellow acquired a coat of orange fur and was added to the pyramid where he would jump around avoiding obstacles. Lee had also created a number of other characters that would appear in the game.

To create Q*Bert, Davis made use of a new hardware system created by Jim Weisz. The system featured some of the first IBM PCs and had a whopping I megabyte hard drive, considered voluminous at the time (for those who may not fully grasp how little that is, today’s hard drives hold 16,500 times that amount... and climbing[!]). The game, however, still lacked something and the next piece of the puzzle fell into place thanks to another serendipitous event. One night, as Davis was sitting at his desk thinking about what he could add to the game, Ron Waxman sat down behind him and began to silently watch him as he worked (a tactic that he favored). As Davis wracked his brain for inspiration, the voice of Waxman piped up with "What if the squares change colors when he lands on them?" The idea provided the final piece that was needed to make Q*Bert a real game.

The sound for Q*Bert was still another example of serendipity. Dave Thiel had been experimenting with the Votrax chip trying to get it to form sentences. At one point, he spent 20 hours trying to get it to say "ten thousand bonus points" only to have it say "bogus points" every time. Encouraged by Chris Brewer, he began having the chip play phonemes at random, producing what sounded like an alien language. When he saw Davis’s game, he knew he had the perfect voice for the character. By varying the pitch of the random phonemes, Thiel could also produce voices for the games other characters, Despite rumors to the contrary, Q*Bert's speech was entirely random. The only actual words spoken intentionally during the game occurred when it was turned on and when the game was finished. Other memorable sounds in the game included an echo-tilled ring when the player inserted a coin and a loud splat when Q*Bert fell to his death. The latter sound was courtesy of pinball technician Rick Tighe, who suggested that they use a pinball knocker, the same knocker used to pro-duce the famed "thwack" when a replay or extra ball was awarded. The idea was adopted and Q*Bert was fitted with an A-5 195 coil and plunger that was mounted in the lower regions of its cabinet. Fashioned to knock against the game’s wooden cabinet, the designers tried to muffle the sound by inserting a piece of cardboard between the cabinet and plunger, but the idea proved impractical.

The game was now almost finished but it still lacked one thing - a name! During development, Davis had referred to it simply as "The Cube Game." Management, with an eye towards marketing potential, wanted a cute name. Howie Rubin suggested that they name it "@!#?@!" after the word balloon of curses that Q*Bert made when he died, but few others liked the idea (although some games were produced with that name on the marquee). After soliciting employees for names (none of which worked), a meeting was called and at some point someone began playing with variations of the word "cube." Hubert was suggested, then Cubert The spelling was soon changed to Q-Bert and finally an asterisk was added and the game had a name. Introduced in late 1982 Q*Bert was a smash hit at the arcades. In the game, the title hero jumped around a pyramid of cubes trying to change them all to match the screen’s target color. Jumping off the edge of the pyramid was fatal, an idea that some disliked but Warren Davis had insisted remain in the game. The action was controlled by a single joystick (which during development, had been mounted on the bottom of an inverted bucket) which moved diagonally rather than horizontally and vertically (another feature Davis had insisted on).

It also featured a host of other enemies, including Coily, a snake who hatched from a purple ball that tumbled to the bottom of the pyramid, then made a bee-line for Q*Bert; Ugg and Wrong-way, two purple villains whose touch was fatal; Slick and Sam, a pair of green characters who changed the colors of the cubes they hopped on (like all other green things in the game, they were safe to touch), and two balls, a dangerous red one, and a green one that would momentarily freeze all action on the screen. At certain points, the player could jump onto a floating disk, luring Coily to a fatal plunge off the pyramid’s edge if timed correctly. On the second level (each level consisted of 4 rounds), the player had to hop on a cube twice to change its color and later levels introduced an even more nefarious twist: hopping on a cube would change its color even if had already reached the target color.

In addition to being a hit as a game, Q*Bert provided a marketing bonanza with a host of toys, games, and other products bearing the hero’s likeness. There was even a Q*Bert cartoon. Saturday Su-percade was a CBS cartoon series which featured a number of different segments starring various video game characters. In addition to the characters from the game, the Q*Bert segment featured Q*Tee (Q*bert's girlfriend), Q*Bit (his little brother), and others. The popularity was such that Gottlieb assigned pinball designer John Trudeau (Creature From the Black Lagoon, Congo) to devise a Q*Bert pinball. It was called Q*Bert's Quest and Trudeau created an innovative design pattern that should have sparked just about any arcade goers to try it. Remarkably, it was a miserable flop. Released in March 1983, a paltry 884 machines dribbled out of the plant and further convinced management that pinball was indeed experiencing desperate times.

Meanwhile, a few changes had taken place at Gottlieb. The video game division moved from Bensenville to Northlake and the company itself became part of a new corporate family. In 1982, Coca-Cola was looking to diversify and at the suggestion of a consultant, they purchased Columbia Pictures. The $750 million purchase price was greeted with derision, since it was almost twice the company’s market value. As a result, Coke’s stock dropped 10% in a week. Nonetheless, Coca-Cola now owned Columbia and with it, Gottlieb. The Coke acquisition may have been responsible for a new, Mello-Yello soft drink version of Q*Bert featuring video animation showing the title character rising to top of the screen extending his nose to slurp a giant container of the beverage.

Soon after the game’s release, reports had started filtering back that some people were playing for hours on a single quarter. Davis began working on an advanced version which he called Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q*Bert that would challenge even the most expert player. FHMC Q*Bert (as it was also known) featured a number of gameplay enhancements as Davis himself describes the game: "The game looked basically the same except it was faster from the start... the disks would flash every few seconds and then move up one step of the pyramid so you’d have to time your jumps. The waves were all re-tweaked and structured differently. A new character was added called Q*Bertha (a female Q*Bert with affections for Q*Bert who replaced Coily after a few waves). Also, when Slick and Sam came down they changed the squares into a pattern that Q*Bert couldn’t change back. Instead, he had to lead Coily or Q*Bertha over those squares to get them to revert to a solid color. There was also a bonus round after every couple of levels."

Unfortunately, FHMC Q*Bert was never released, perhaps because it was tested too soon after the debut of the original. In 1983, however, a sequel was released, Q*Bert's Qubes designed by Neil Bumstein. The game theme was similar to the original but there were some major differences. The playfield was shaped like a diamond rather than a pyramid and instead of the cubes simply changing colors, they rotated when Q*Bert jumped off them. The direction they turned depended on the direction Q*Bert jumped. In Q*bert only one side of each cube changed colors but in Q*Bert's Qubes, all six sides of each cube were a different color and the player had to match colors on all 3 facing sides. Instead of trying to change the colors of the entire play-field, Q*Bert only had to create a certain number of tic-tat-toes or lines of cubes matching the target colors. The new game also allowed players to select their starting level and high-scoring players were dubbed the "Noser Elite." Another new feature in Q*Bert's Qubes was the name of the company that made it. During 1983, Gottlieb had changed its name to Mylstar (pronounced mile-star) Electronics to reflect expansion of its product line.

Between the introduction of the two Q*Bert games, the rest of the Gottlieb team was also hard at work. After having a hand in the creation of Q*Bert, Kan Yabumoto had begun work on the space shoot-‘em-up Mad Planets, released in 1983. One memorable feature of the game was its unusual control arrangement comprising a joystick and a rotary control which allowed the player’s ship to both move around the screen and rotate. In Mad Planets, the players spaceship would attempt to destroy a series of Earth-like planets which emerged from the center of the screen and began to grow. Destroying all of the planets in a round before they reached maturity netted the player a hefty bonus. Fully-grown planets were orbited by a number of small moons, which, if destroyed, caused the planet to go "mad" - turning red and making a beeline for the player’s ship. The game also featured bonus rounds where stranded astronauts could be retrieved for points. Once again, Mad Planets benefited from Dave Thiel’s excellent sound. Explosions produced a satisfying bass rumble that Thiel achieved in part by making use of the game’s cabinet.

"[Video game companies] were spending 50 or 60 bucks on the sound board and two bucks on the speakers," he recalled. "[The speakers] were mounted to the top, you could then use the entire back of the cabinet as a baffle. So while they had very non-linear frequency response they had some resonance’s where if you found the right frequencies, you could make something like bass." For this reason, Thiel always tried to have an actual cabinet at his station when he created sound so he could test its acoustic effects.

At the time of Mad Planets, most video games did not include the designers names since many companies feared that well-known designers would be lured away by competitors. This policy approached ridiculous heights in an April 1983 Videogames magazine interview with Davis, Thiel and Lee. While designers from Williams were identified by name in the same issue, the Gottlieb trio was identified as D. Ziner, J. Walkman, and R. Teeste due to the company’s policy of keeping designers’ names secret. While management continued to prevent employees from including their full names in a game, they did eventually agree to throw them a bone by allowing the use of their initials (or nicknames) for the game’s default high scores. In Mad Planets, the default high score screen contains the identities of almost the entire Gottlieb video crew.

After Mad Planets, Gottlieb’s parent company Columbia Pictures took advantage of their video game division by releasing a movie tie-in game based on their 1983 theatrical release Krull, a sword-and-sorcery epic chronicling the attempts of the hero, Prince Colwyn, to rescue the Princess Lyssa from the evil Slayers. Krull, the video game, was designed by Matt Householder and Chris Krubl with art and sound by Lee and Thiel. The game was developed concurrently with the movie and game designers were granted access to the movie’s script, score, and production stills. You played the role of Prince Colwyn as you traveled through five separate stages of game-play to rescue Princess Lyssa. In the first stage, you traversed a barren landscape dodging rolling boulders as you tried to recover pieces of the glaive, a five-bladed sword. Stages 2 and 3 were Robotron-like where Colwyn rescued members of his army while destroying a band of enemy Slayers. The 4^th stage was a brief, Breakout-like mode where the hero broke down the walls of a hexagonal fortress. In Krull's final stage, Colwyn had to rescue Alyssa while avoiding the Beast and his deadly fireballs.

The pinball division was enlisted to render Krull into silverball form. Designer John Trudeau developed a magnificent two-level game that was further enhanced by Larry Day’s catching artwork. Perhaps it was cost or the simple fact that Krull was a boxoffice dud, but Krull, the pinball, never progressed beyond prototype stage. Ten games were built and it remains one of the rarest pinball machines.

While Gottlieb achieved record revenues in 1983, the video game industry continued to decline with companies beginning to fall by the wayside. This erosion had started in 1982 and continued unabated in 1983. There was one development, however, that many believed (prayed?) would be the savior of the industry - laserdisc technology.

Cinematronics’s laserdisc creation, Dragon’s Lair, was the hit of 1983 and produced profits that hadn’t been since the heyday of Asteroids and Pat-Man. Ironically, Cinematronics was limping along at the time, struggling with its reorganization under Chapter 11. Gottlieb’s entry into the laserdisc market began when Ron Waxman challenged programmer Dave Pfeiffer to create a game using an old Pioneer laserdisc player that was laying dormant. Pfeiffer located a disc containing airplane footage and designed a game prototype. A demo won Howie Rubin's approval and the design of M.A.C.H. 3 was underway. Clay Lacy, whose work included the Clint Eastwood movie Firefox was hired to shoot footage for use in the game. Lacy had a specially designed plane with cameras in the belly and nose and produced suitable footage for a shoot’em up game.

Unlike Dragon’s Lair, which simply allowed the player to control which segment of the laserdisc was played, M.A.C.H.3 would combine video footage with computer graphics to allow a greater degree of interaction. It was no easy task to lay computer graphics over existing video. In order to make sure that the computer and video portions stayed in sync, target data had to be painstakingly entered by hand, a single frame at a time, on the disc’s right audio track. The game also experienced technical problems. The discs themselves, for instance, tended to warp slightly, especially in hot climates, which threw the computer graphics and video out of whack. The problem was eventually solved when Pioneer added an aluminum backing to the discs to prevent distortion.

Dave Thiel had long wanted to design a custom sound sys-tem specifically for video games and with M.A.C.H. 3 he was finally allowed to do so. His original plan was to use two Commodore 64 sound chips and 2 microprocessors to create a system that would allow six voices and multiple simultaneous sounds. Previously, Thiel had been limited to playing one sound event at a time, though each sound could have 4 voices (while it may seem hard to believe, in games like Krull and Reactor only one sound event was playing at a given time). At the last moment, however, Commodore decided that they’d need all the sound chips they could make for their own per-sonal computer. Since sound chips at the time were limited, Thiel had to turn to a more utilitarian General Instruments chip, which produced simple square waves. Nonetheless, Thiel designed a system that made its way into M.A.C.H 3. It also included an improved speech synthesis chip, which was used to create some of the rocket and missile sounds. In spite of the production challenges and expense, M.A.C.H. 3 proved to be worth the effort. The seamlessly blended video and computer footage made for excellent game-play. The player could choose to fly either a fighter or a bomber as he piloted his way through a myriad of ground and air targets such as enemy airplanes and oil refineries. The game eventually reached the number one position on all the charts - Replay magazine’s Player’s Choice, Play Meter’s Equipment Poll, Games People’s Top Ten, and National Video Newsletter’s National Earnings Average. It was a well-deserved financial hit for the company.

Mylstar’s second laserdisc effort, Us Vs. Them, did not fare as well but gameplay was not the culprit. By the time the game was released, the laserdisc market had collapsed as rapidly as it had risen and with it, the entire video industry. Us Vs. Them was created by Warren Davis with film footage by Dennis Nordman who had also come up with the concept (Nordman would latter join Williams/Bally pinball and create such pinball hits as Elvira and the Party Monsters and White Water) and audio by Dave Zabriskie. As usual, Jeff Lee provided graphics.

Released as a conversion kit for M.A.C.H. 3, the game featured a starship pilot defending his planet against alien invaders while flying through a number of environments including outer space and an alien forest. The action was occasionally interrupted by tongue-in-cheek video sequences featuring live actors which combined to provide a back-story for the game. In addition to creating the game’s sounds, Dave Zabriskie wrote a full musical score and an orchestra was hired to record it (with Zabriskie conducting). Us Vs. Them did well in initial tests but when it was ready for release, arcade owners were already leery of laserdisc games. In addition to their declining popularity, the games were often plagued by technical problems. Many of the games, for instance, tended to skip when jarred or kicked which led to customers demanding their money back. Many distributors, in fact, refused to accept Us Vs. Them that had been ordered months before leading to legal action. The upshot of all this was that very few units made it into arcades.

By now, Gottlieb/Mylstar's video game division was under scrutiny by Coca-Cola’s bean counters. Their days were numbered, especially after the release of Us Vs. Them. The final game released in any quantity was The Three Stooges (programmed by Sam Russo with audio by Zabriskie and graphics by Lee) which made use of another of Columbia’s properties. Artist Jeff Lee had long wanted Gottlieb to create a game based on the comedy trio and with The Three Stooges, he got his wish. The action started out in a restaurant. Players could assume the role of Larry, Moe, or Curly and up to three could play cooperatively. The object was to escape from a room by uncovering three keys hidden behind various pieces of furniture. Enemies included Flat Foot (a cop), Beauregard (a Maitre'D), Wags (a dog), Pierre (a waiter) and Muffy. The player could clobber the enemies with a hammer, attack them with a cream pie, or (lacking the former) just slap them silly. Later rounds allowed players to silence lounge singers by tossing pies at them and the gameplay was occasionally interrupted by a humorous intermission. The player achieving the highest score was dubbed the "Top Banana".

Another game that was created around this time was Curve Ball, a baseball game released as a conversion kit. Perhaps the most intriguing fact about Curve Ball can be found in its design credits, which identify the its designer and programer as Bill Adams. He created (or helped create) such video classics as Tron and Spy Hunter. How he came to work for Mylstar is a story that awaits telling.

In addition to the released games, there were others made during the previous years that made it to various stages of development but never saw public release. Among them was Chris Brewer’s Video Vince and Fred Darmstadt’s Arena, a raster-graphics game similar to Tempest where the player controlled a wizard that patrolled the edges of an arena blasting various enemies as they tried to climb up the walls. Tim Skelly also negotiated two other contracts to create a pair of games that were not released - Insector, which he describes as, "my own answer to Robotron" and Screw Loose, a 2D/3D shooter. During development of the games, Skelly worked under contract out of his house.

By mid- 1984, the collapse of the video game market was complete and Coke pulled the plug on Mylstar. For a while, it seemed that because of a failed video line the stalwart pinball division would fall victim as well. The pinball industry was in danger of losing its oldest champion. Disaster was averted, however, when the pinball assets were sold to a Gottlieb executive (Gil Pollack) and a group of investors (the founders of Mondial Distributing) who formed Premier Technology which continued to make pinball machines under the Gottlieb name. The video game division was dissolved outright in September 1984 and most of the programmers and artists went their separate ways. Warren Davis was held on by Premier for a time and created a 2-player video game called Exterminator in 1989.

El Dorado City of Gold was the first official Gottlieb/Premier Technology pinball release in February 1985 (the actual sale occurred during the production run of Mylstar’s Touchdown pinball) and utilized Ed Krynski’s decade-old El Dorado playfield design. Considered one of the ultimate drop target games, the layout featured 15 drop targets and a speedy ball entry trajectory unlike any other. Premier built only 905 of their first game but it quickly established them as a dominant pinball force that was strengthened by the stalwart Gottlieb name. Having moved the pinball division out of Northlake and into a Bensenville industrial park, the company would produce over 50 titles. Eleven years later and eyebrow-deep in red ink, Gottlieb/Premier shut its doors forever in July 1996 and auctioned its assets in November that same year.

Gottlieb’s video game division was in existence for a relatively short period of 3 years and produced an outstanding series of games, some of which are among the classics of the genre. And even though the factory no longer exists, the Gottlieb name is still a coveted commodity. Gottlieb Development L.L.C. is its current name, residing with its owners in Pelham Manor, New York. No factory building, no new games, no production line. Simply a lone corporate entity protecting its rights and patents. A quiet, flameless ember of a one-time coin-op blast furnace.

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