Word: videos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Byrne and Talking Heads. Billy Joel. David Bowie. All of them, and dozens more, reeling and rocking across those eleven screens in a serenade of sensory overload. The place is packed. "We haven't played a record since last June," says the Snuggery's John Clausen, whose video disc jockeys play tapes the way radio deejays spin platters. So rock on, Schaumburg Snuggery. You may be just a secondary target in the great video blitzkrieg-the vidblitz-that has shaken up Hollywood, salvaged the record business and set up a whole new way of responding to music...
Increasingly, and perhaps irreversibly, audiences for American mainstream music will depend, even insist, on each song's being a full audiovisual confrontation. Why should sound alone be enough when sight is only as far away as the TV set or the video machine? Whole generations have had their brains fried with a cathode ray tube, a condition that creates a certain impatience and shortness of attention when limited to aural input. Posterity can rest easy-as Billy Joel points out, "Beethoven didn't have no videos, and he's been hanging in there"-but for rockers, popsters...
...will do nothing to improve TV's already dim view of the typical executive. Like J.R. Ewing of Dallas, most businessmen come off on the tube as antiheroes at best. A 1981 study by the Media Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based group, found two of every three video businessmen were portrayed as crooks, conartists or clowns...
...years ago, a young programmer named Bill Budge developed the smash hit Raster Blaster, the first computer game that simulated a pinball machine on a video monitor. Now, with Pinball Construction Set, Budge has done himself one better. This program puts the pictures of components on the screen and lets players make their own pinball machines. Flippers, bumpers, launchers and kickers fall easily into place and then perform like the real thing. Players can paint the pinball pieces bright colors, set up complex scoring patterns, or adjust the time, gravity and elasticity of the playing area. An added advantage...
...1960s. They shifted from leather into plastics and soon became the world's largest manufacturer of above-ground swimming pools. That was a seasonal business, so they bought a snowmobile manufacturer and suffered heavy losses during the mild winter that followed. They admired Atari's pioneering home video game, Pong, and they made a fortune on an imitation named Telstar. But they overinvested in that, lost $22 million in 1978 and nearly went bankrupt. Then they gambled heavily on ColecoVision, which could play both Atari and Mattel games. It is still selling well (1.9 million units...