> Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks
They were notoriously unreliable, so much so it killed the laserdisc arcde fad that lasted about a year.
Part of the problem was the way the games used the laserdisc. The games spend most of their time randomly playing different video tracks as gameplay changed (a-la Dragons Lair). The players were designed for "linear" playback -- like a CD, you move the head to a track, then slowly move the head forward play the track. Seeking a new track is a (relatively) infrequent operation -- but the laserdisc games hammered the players with constant track seeks, moving the head back and forth so many times it quickly wore the mechanism out. Player failure rate was so high operators started bailing on the tech.
Funny story is that Atari looked into laserdisc games in the late 70's... Decided the tech was unreliable, but went ahead anyways. As Owen Rubin recanted:
I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) educating myself on laserdisc games and technology in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any games with laserdisc. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. And I was right, but we started several games anyway.
That's actually surprising. While the early game industry was young and there wasn't much management skill or experience, it still strikes me as an unusually odd error. It wasn't just a subjective difference of opinion over what style of game would be more popular or something similarly unknowable. There was objective data available, they had a smart, trusted insider study it extensively and the actual issue was easy for even a non-technical person to understand.
Rubin's analysis was likely a big reason Atari was late to the laserdisc game craze... They were so late that their first (and only) laserdisc game Firefox shipped at the very moment the laserdisc craze was imploding.
The phenomenal success of Dragon's Lair forced Atari to rethink their position about the technology -- Everyone in the industry was jumping onto the laserdisc bandwagon at that point, not wanting to be left behind on the Next Big Thing. So the execs at Atari figured maybe Rubin was wrong in his analysis, and therefore Atari needed to quickly catch up.
Obviously, in hindsight, Rubin's analysis was spot on. But you can't blame the execs for jumping in - at the time it looked like laserdisc was the future of the industry.
They were notoriously unreliable, so much so it killed the laserdisc arcde fad that lasted about a year.
Part of the problem was the way the games used the laserdisc. The games spend most of their time randomly playing different video tracks as gameplay changed (a-la Dragons Lair). The players were designed for "linear" playback -- like a CD, you move the head to a track, then slowly move the head forward play the track. Seeking a new track is a (relatively) infrequent operation -- but the laserdisc games hammered the players with constant track seeks, moving the head back and forth so many times it quickly wore the mechanism out. Player failure rate was so high operators started bailing on the tech.
Funny story is that Atari looked into laserdisc games in the late 70's... Decided the tech was unreliable, but went ahead anyways. As Owen Rubin recanted:
I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) educating myself on laserdisc games and technology in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any games with laserdisc. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. And I was right, but we started several games anyway.