Cinematronics

United States · Founded 1975 · Arcade Manufacturer

The San Diego arcade company that released the first commercial vector-graphics game, Space Wars, made Star Castle, and published the laserdisc sensation Dragon's Lair.

Dennis Partee, Gary Garrison and Jim Pierce founded Cinematronics in San Diego on 1 April 1975. Its breakthrough came from an outside designer: Larry Rosenthal's Space Wars (1977) was the first commercially available video game to use vector graphics. Cinematronics built a line of vector games around the technique, several of them designed by Tim Skelly, including Starhawk (1979), Rip Off (1980), Star Castle (1980) — its most successful game, at more than 10,000 units — and Armor Attack (1981). In 1983 it published Dragon's Lair, developed by Advanced Microcomputer Systems with Don Bluth, the first major laserdisc video game. By then the company was in financial trouble: its bank foreclosed in August 1982, and its Chapter 11 bankruptcy was reportedly the longest in California's history. Jim Pierce sold it to Tradewest in March 1987, and its titles passed eventually to Midway and then Warner Bros. Games.