50 Years of Video Games: Gotcha (Arcade)

In 1973 the video game world was still mostly wrapped up in Pong fever. Rather than trying to bring something new to the market, many developers and publishers were trying to release their own spin on the simple paddle-based gameplay of Pong, sometimes iterating on it or just trying to rebrand what was still essentially the same game. However, Atari already had Pong since they made that big hit themselves, and while they were still looking to make more profit on it in 1973, they were also pushing forward with new game ideas to try and spark a fever a second time. The two-player maze game Gotcha was one such effort and one that has been mostly forgotten by time since it didn’t leave too much of an impression, but it did manage to snag one claim to fame, Gotcha often cited as the first controversial video game.

There isn’t anything particularly scandalous about the black and white multiplayer maze game’s content, but when the product was being developed, an unusual choice was made regarding how players would control it. While the publicly released cabinet has each player manipulate a joystick to move the symbol they control about the screen, earlier designs had a large pink dome placed over the joysticks. The bright pink mounds seem to suggest the shape of a pair of featureless human breasts when viewed on the cabinet, and the idea the players would essentially knead them to move about the screen would certainly have lead to plenty of ribald jokes if the control method had remained in place. However, even after the swap to joysticks was made, advertising for the game had already been produced depicting the old controllers as well as a man grabbing a young woman in a nightgown by the waist from behind. The unusual lurid implications of a game called Gotcha being marketed such a way supposedly caused a bit of a stir, although the legend of the controversy could possibly have exaggerated the amount of push back that was truly received. Similarly, the controllers were supposedly designed deliberately like a pair of breasts as a humorous inversion of the gaming market’s reliance on the slightly phallic joystick, but considering the game had limited success I would not be surprised if the developers have played up the innuendos in later accounts to play into this barely known game’s most remembered aspect.

Actually looking at the game can be confusing at first, the screen almost looking like it is experiencing some sort of error. Gotcha takes place inside a large box with little barriers meant to obstruct the players’ in-game representations as they chase each other about. The maze-like structure isn’t static though, as two invisible lines drift slowly down across the play field, altering the obstructions as they move by. The effect almost feels like the occasional large sweeping scan line you can see on old television sets, but here it serves a gameplay purpose in that it ensures the maze is constantly shifting its layout. There are a few rules to how it places new barriers, the game never completely cutting off a portion of the maze and leaving multiple little spaces to pass through as it redraws the columns the barriers are aligned in. Some spots will never have any white walls occupying them, so no matter what there usually will be a lot of maze to move through but you need to spot how you want to go around to try and catch or evade the other player.

In Gotcha, one player is the Pursuer and the other Pursued, and while the cabinet identifies the small square as the Pursuer and the plus sign as the Pursued, they are identical in every way save appearances. The only true difference seems to be that the Pursued is the one who is teleported to a different position after the two players make contact, but this isn’t meaningful enough to really demand that either player has to stick to their assigned role. The game awards a single point when one player is caught by the other, making no distinction in its score-keeping to say who earned them. A timer ticks up to 100 before the game of chase ends, but no matter how things went, there really isn’t a victor crowned after. It seems to mostly be about the participating players deciding on if one person was caught enough to be considered the loser, and this free form approach to figuring out who won is probably one reason Gotcha didn’t catch on. It makes it easier to swap who is doing the chasing each round, but without a goal to shoot for it’s a constant chase without any evolving tension.

One reason it doesn’t matter who is truly the Pursuer or Pursued though is a big mark on the game’s ability to remain interesting. Both the plus sign and square move at the exact same speed, meaning no one inherently has an advantage. In a chase game this can lead to stalemates or long droughts of anything of interest happening, the Pursued always able to keep ahead of the other player unless the maze design prevents them from doing so. The two invisible lines redraw the maze so often you can’t really spend the time to plan a clever approach, and since both sides can use the walls to their advantage there’s nothing to really give the Pursuer the kind of edge needed to break up the monotony. One little issue can also arise where a player sitting in an area being redrawn can actually be completely boxed in by walls, giving a brief period of the game where players need to wait until the other person is free. The Pursued could at least potentially be trapped in a position where the Pursuer might be able to get a point when the box is opened up, but a Pursuer getting trapped gives the Pursued a large head start to head to wherever they like in the maze to make it even harder for points to be scored.

While having both players be completely even in their abilities might sound fair, the difference in their goals is where the premise breaks down. The maze is unpredictable enough that it is still likely the Pursuer will get eventually get their chance to grab a few points, but if the Pursued realizes they aren’t at a disadvantage it’s easy to avoid troublesome areas like the corners where a Pursuer could try and psyche out the other player or force them into a bind. The thrill of the chase really drains once you realize how even abilities actually make it lopsided in the Pursued player’s favor, and while there is a steady heartbeat-like noise that gets faster when the players are closer to each other, it can’t really inject the tension back in after it’s been broken by such realizations.

THE VERDICT: Gotcha needs the unusual story around its controversy, since without it, the first publicly available maze game is also a poorly designed one. The Pursuer and Pursued are made completely equal in speed, meaning the Pursued has a huge advantage in the chase as they simply need to avoid cornering themselves while the Pursuer has to try and make use of a randomly shifting maze that benefits their opposition just as much as it benefits them. Grabbing points as the Pursuer can feel more like it comes about by the grace of the maze than by a strategic move, so while a game of Gotcha usually ends with someone putting some points on the board, the maze chase involved in earning those points is less exciting since luck or mistakes are overly important parts of any success.

And so, I give Gotcha for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. The shifting walls in the designated areas of the maze do mean that neither Pursuer or Pursued can get complacent, but the game can quite often boil down to the Pursued moving up and around a safe area in a way the Pursuer can’t do much about until the maze shifts again. Having two invisible lines shifting things around helps to combat this approach from working for too long, but at the same time the walls don’t block enough of the maze off so you can usually whip around an obstruction and keep moving unless your timing is particularly bad. It is so easy to see how to make this game at least a bit more exciting, giving the Pursuer even the smallest of speed advantages at least meaning players couldn’t keep running around the maze with no true progress being made. There are certainly more complex solutions to suggest such as the Pursued perhaps earning points if they’re close to the other player but not caught to give them a reason to potentially risk getting in close, but that might be beyond what simple programming could be done at the time. Maze walls could maybe be made a bit more dangerous to touch, right now both symbols lightly bounce off if they make contact, but if the Pursued bounced back further it could make weaving around the maze riskier for them.

Gotcha’s odd dynamically shifting maze might be a hard sell for a public who would probably think the game was malfunctioning, and considering it was literally designed when Allan Alcorn saw a defect in a Pong machine scatter the onscreen images into a maze-like shape they wouldn’t be too far off. The problem is with the play though as equal abilities actually leads to imperfect balance, Pong able to get away with having two equally capable paddles since it is a test of player reaction times but Gotcha needs some element tipped in a player’s favor to spur the action forward. Without it, Gotcha becomes about randomness interrupting a chase that wouldn’t progress otherwise, but that randomness also prevents any psychological element from entering the picture since you can’t really spook or bait the other player too well when the means of doing so shifts just often enough to sabotage those efforts.

Gotcha may also be technically the first color video game since a few cabinets were produced with color graphics, but that mostly just adds another unusual wrinkle to a time period where we still struggle to truly identify which game did which things first. Gotcha was the first maze game, but there was an electronic maze game in 1959 called Mouse in the Maze that may or may not be a video game depending on which definitions you use. So in a way, Gotcha’s title as the first controversial game could even be expanded into how we decide to classify its accomplishments, but this confusing journey of technicalities, personal definitions, and developers making provocatively shaped game controllers is all unfortunately tied to a rather dull multiplayer title that would probably grow old quickly even if it was better balanced.