“We thought we were perfectly in the right and we had this wonderful product and everybody loved it,” Golson says. But to hit the market first and avoid a potential Pac-Man suit, GCC would need to establish that game modification was legal, starting with Super Missile Attack. The team, bolstered that summer by coder Philip Kaaret ’84, worked feverishly to get it done. The race to make an enhancement kit was on. That summer, a local arcade distributor told Curran that Atari planned to sue, but by then, the team was focused on a juicier prize: Pac-Man was dominating arcades worldwide. By mid-May, Macrae and Curran had founded a company called General Computer Corporation (GCC), sold roughly 1,000 Super Missile Attack kits, and grossed almost $300,000, inspiring the pair and Golson to put their educations on hold. On week two, the take was $400, and by week four, students who could play for only two minutes just weeks earlier were playing 10-minute games on a single coin. With help from their friend Steve Golson ’80, Macrae and Curran installed Missile Command on campus and collected $650 during the first week-roughly one quarter every four minutes, 24 hours a day. It started with Missile Command, a wildly popular space shooter game released by Atari in 1980. So they created a business-bolstering strategy that changed the landscape of video games forever. They noticed that students happily pumped quarters into brand-new games, but revenues dropped over time. The pair split revenue 50-50 with campus dorms and built a network of 25 pinball machines and arcade video games. That machine earned enough for Macrae to buy another, then another, and eventually partner with fellow MacGregor House resident Kevin Curran ’81. In 1978, when Doug Macrae ’81 set up his brother’s pinball machine in the H Entry Lobby of MacGregor House as an MIT sophomore, his goal was to collect a little cash from his dorm mates.
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