Play Meter

ROBBINS: Well, it's just something that happens
when you come out of a boom period and you start
to slide into a plateau area. Sales begin to level off
and the operator becomes selective in his buying.
When you're in a boom period, he buys almost
anything. When video games were booming in
1974-75, he'd buy almost any game you threw at
him. But now, it had better be a good game, a real
good one, or he passes. He just won't buy the
average or the mediocre game. Also, everything
the operator today buys is "on trial." He picks it up
and if it does well, he pays for it; if it doesn't do
well, he returns it. So the distributor has to be very
careful about what he buys. He can't sell or lease
equipment that is not good. So you just have to
judge the equipment, and you'd better be right
most of the time.
PLA Y METER: How do you judge the equipment?
ROBBINS: Well, when we get a piece of equipment
in, we'll view it-all of our people-and we'll take
an initial consensus of opinion. We usually take
several pieces and we'll put one on the floor and
we'll put some out for test. We combine our initial
reactions with the reactions of the people who see it
and play it on the floor and with, most important,
the results of the tests-two or three weeks
anyway-in the field. We put that information into
a hopper, and then we know pretty much what we
got, though we can still be wrong.
PLAY METER: You don't operate yourselves, do
you? How do you work these tests?
ROBBINS: We farm the equipment out to
operators. We watch then what it takes in, how
the service is, and we watch the income. If it starts
to slide rapidly, then you've got problems.
PLA Y METER: Do you show the data collected to
prospective customers?
ROBBINS: No, they don't ask to see it; they'll ask
just, "How's it doing?" And we've found that it
always pays to be honest. If we've had it out for a
period of time, and we can say that it's testing
beautifully, they'll buy it. But if it's not testing
beautifully, then there's no sense in being dishonest
with the factory or the customer; we'll tell both of
them the truth.
PLAY METER: Do you think two or three weeks is
long enough to get a good test on a piece of
equipment?
ROBBINS: Ordinarily but not necessarily. Nor-
mally you can get a pretty good feeling, but you can
get fooled. So you've got to be careful: it could be a
two or three week wonder. And on some pieces we
will insist on a longer test. But then with some
pieces you just know . You take a Sea Wolf or a
LeMans, for example. You put it out and it takes in
money, but you know more from the enthusiasm,
the feeling of the players-you watch them and you
know that you can go with that piece. So really
judging a piece takes a tremendous amount of
experience and knowledge. You're talking about
someth~ng intrinsic, intangible, that you can't really
Quantify. And you can be in this business a
hundred years, and let me tell you something, you
can still make mistakes. You can get carried away.
I've seen that, at conventions particularly,
distributors and operators getting carried away by
a game, "the best of show," and really it was just a
game.
PLAY METER: How did you feel about the
blocking games that came out of this past AMOA??
ROBBINS: They were fairly good games. I never
thought that they were as good as the reaction of
the show indicated, and that's the way it has
worked out. They turned out to be good but not
extraordinary.
PLAY METER: What about all the copying that
goes on? How do you feel about that?
ROBBINS: I think that's quieted down quite a bit.
You cannot exist as a real entity in this business and
go by primarily copying the other guys. Sooner or
later it catches up with you. You must have your
own innovations, and if you do not, you will not stay
around very long. The guys that are left today,
Midway, Atari, Gremlin and the few others-I
don't think you're going to see them copying each
other.
PLAY METER: Why not?
ROBBINS: Because, I think, these people that are
left, the big ones especially, the successful ones,
they want to keep the respect they have gained.
They have pdde in the business, in their company,
and they have found that they do not have to copy
to be successful, that it is not in their interests to
copy from the next guy, because he'll copy from
you. If you'll just behave like a gentleman, you'll be
treated like one, normally. And that's the best way
to run the business. It would have to be a
gentleman's agreement really, unwritten, because
patents are something very difficult to prove up in
court. And nobody likes to go to court anyway.
PLAY METER: How do you think the operators
have fared in this plateau period that you
mentioned earlier?
ROBBINS: Not very well. I think that the operator
is not making the margin of profit he's entitled to;
he is having difficulties.
PLAY METER: What are some of the most serious
of these difficulties?
ROBBINS: Well, in the urban areas, his biggest
difficulty is the loan demands from the locations.
They are sapping his cash, draining it, making it
more difficult for him to buy equipment and sustain
the income from the route that he needs by fusing in
new equipment all the time. The operator in the
city is not so concerned with the 50-50 as with the
horrible drain on his money from the loans. He has a
location, a good location-he's been in there for ten
years and everything's fine. He walks in one day
and the guy says, "Hey, I need five grand." He
says, "Five grand? I can't ... " The guy says, "Well,
so and so .. .1 can get it." What the hell do you
do- it's a good spot; you can't lose it. Sure the other
guy's an imbecile, but he'll give it to them. It's
horrible.
The operator's expenses are going sky high all
over the place. The equipment is gong sky high all
over the place. One of the things he needs is the
new small dollar coin. He may not know it, but this
is where organizations like AMOA and NAMA
come into play; and they're working on it. He's at a
quarter play on arcades and novelties now. If they
get that small dollar, in certain instances, he'll be
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