Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 64

Tempo 2 Section 5 Chicago Tribune, Friday, September 23, 1988 Chicago Scene Just the ticket for campaign to prevent child abuse In. 1 Xt Text by Barbara Mahany Photos by John Bartley ill .1 m. iv 11 the President's men, the ones with the funny little coils running behind their ears, were staked out behind the potted palms. Stone- W. Clement and Jessie V.

Stone at the Gold Silver Ball. i.M.,, 1 i i id Betty Block (from left), local child-abuse-prevention official; presidential son Michael Reagan; honoree Russell Hogg; and Lou Anne Kellman, benefit chairwoman. faced, they kept an eye on the man in the corner, the man who looked like any other middle-American gent, what with his ready-to-wear tux, his glass of chablis and his most animated way of spinning a yarn. It is not every party guest who comes complete with his own set of Secret Service agents, but then it is not every party that gets a son of the President as its very special guest. The Gold Silver Ball, which raised $150,000 for the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse last week, got Michael Reagan as their special guest.

And, as ball chairwoman Lou Anne Kellman will tell you, President Reagan's adopted son, who says he never got much attention from his father, gets a lot of attention from the guys paid to get him in and out of a party in one piece. "Three times a day for the last three weeks the Secret Service called me with a thousand and one different questions," said Kellman, who got so chummy with the protectors that she set a special table for them at the back of the International Ballroom of the Chicago Hilton and Towers. "Once they called to see if we were selling any weapons in the silent auction," she recalled, arching an eyebrow. She assured them that the Rebo-War pinball machine was as dangerous as the auction items got. Reagan was being honored because he revealed in his autobiography, "On the Outside Looking In," which chronicles his disclosure that he had been sexually molested by a summer camp counselor when he was 12.

'ff 1 timfm mwi. h'mijiii mm i glad I did it even though it cost me some relationships. It cost me my relationship with my mother Jane Wyman. "I had to tell her about it the incident and his account in die book on the phone because she wouldn't meet with me. And after I told her, she canceled Mother's Day.

She hasn't spoken to me since. But it's not her fault; society wants to blame someone for these things. Most of the time it's us, the children who are molested, who aren't believed. We're the ones put on trial. "It's important that the message get out that it's not our fault." Reagan said the Chicago dinner was the first time he'd been hon ored for his book, published seven months ago.

"It's one of those honors, though, you wish you didn't earn." Not one to stand still, Reagan then took off for a quick spin through the crowd of 500, eager to check out the silent auction. He took a special liking to the Robo-War pinball machine. By the time he wandered into dinner, the Secret Service team must have decided this crowd was safe. All but one had abandoned the watch and had been seated long enough to have polished off a basket of rolls and a round of salads. But then maybe that was their way of ensuring no gustatory harm befell their charge.

To the organization fighting to prevent child abuse, Reagan's admission sends a critical message to anyone who might be such a victim: "It helps people come forth and breaks the cycle of abuse," Kellman said. "People think, 'If it could happen to Michael Reagan, it's okay that it happened to It's not their fault, in other words. Holding court by a large plant, the author could not have been more eager to talk nor more easygoing. (He's so eager to talk, he said, he's negotiating for a radio talk show.) "I must have rewritten that chapter on the molestation 50 times," Reagan said. "It was the hardest thing I ever did, but I'm Above, Arlene and Richard Hardt, with daughter April at auction table.

Right, Carol Bluhm glows, along with the decor. Ann Harris Cohn, national official for the cause. (ill XXTl a 4J To Howard Phillips, life is a game a pursuit that put him on the ground floor of the ruling video-game giant. Games Continued from page 1 turned out, "Super Mario Bros." was supersucccssful, selling 5 million copies in 2 Vi years. Even 'The Legend of Zelda" has a way to go before it catches up.

With absolute confidence, Nintendo has begun to ship two more sequels, "Super Mario Bros. II" and "Zclda II The Adventure of Link," to toy stores all over the nation. Unfortunately, the supply is limited, and deliveries are running weeks late, the result of a worldwide shortage of computer chips. 'When is what I'm hearing," a toy store clerk in Anaheim, said late last month. "We've got waiting lists!" Phillips likes the sound of that, though he sympathizes with the kids, having been one for a long time himself.

Phillips' published resume, called "Milestones in the Life of Howard Phillips," begins, "July, 1958 Howard plays his first games to amuse himself in the back of his family's station wagon on the crosscountry trip from Pittsburgh to Seattle, their new home." Phillips does not recall precisely which games he played. "I was only 6 months old at the time," he explains. "In preschool," the resume goes on to allege, "Phillips is recognized as fastest truck pusher," in elementary school as "fastest tree climber," in high school as "having best ball control" on the soccer team. The last claim may actually be true. Not until July, 1979, did Phillips play his first video game.

That one he remembers: "Pong," the video arcade game invented by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell in 1972 that gave birth to the industry. Phillips was hooked. After "Pong," he went on to master "Space Invaders," "Asteroids," "Pac-Man" and "Donkey Kong." Missing from Phillips' "Milestones" are details of his academic background 'or experience with computers. "I tried computers," he says. "But you put numbers in, you get numbers out, so there wasn't much excitement in that.

I didn't get a degree, but I did go to the University of Washington for several years, looking for a particular field to focus on so I could end up with a nice, fun career. I didn't find anything. So there were a couple of limbo years until I found Nintendo." That was in 1981, the year Nintendo Co. Ltd. of Kyoto, Japan, established its beachhead in Redmond, Wash.

A maker of miniature playing cards for a Japanese game called "Hanafuda" since 1889, Nintendo had entered the electronic toy industry in 1970, introducing a hand-held computer game with a liquid-crystal screen, then moving into video games in a big way. Phillips was in the right place at the right time. "When I started at Nintendo, it wasn't because it was a video game company; it was just because it was work," he recalls. "But just like at a car dealer's, when the new models come in, everybody drives them. So I got a lot of exposure to new games and a lot of play time.

I was only working part time in the warehouse. But very shortly thereafter I was moved to shipping manager and then to warehouse manager. We were very small then, which I think had a lot to do with my growth in the company. I think I was the fifth person on the payroll. "One of my first jobs was converting our first American arcade game, which wasn't successful, to 'Donkey which was an extremely big hit.

We had like 200 or 300 'Radarscope' games in the warehouse, all out of the boxes so we could take out the 'Ra-' darscope' boards and take off the Plexiglas panels that said 'Radar-scope' and turn them all into 'Donkey "We spent an awful lot of energy just trying to meet the demand for 'Donkey and for a company that was very small it was very profitable. We finally shipped 60,000 'Donkey A top-run arcade game now will do like 10,000, although 'Super Mario our last big, big arcade hit, did about 20- to 25,000. 'Pac-Man' did about 120,000 when the arcade industry really boomed." Although the industry didn't know it, the video game boom was just about over in 1981. That year, according to the Wall Street Journal, the arcades took in $8 billion worth of quarters; the upstart home video-game industry, which the ar- For several reasons, it was a risk worth taking. An advanced game system called Famicom (for Family Computer System) already had made it in Japan to the tune of 6.5 million hardware units sold, the same number of NES units Nintendo has since sold here.

Both new systems represented a substantial technological improvement. In Japan, Famicom is even used to play the stock market via telephone modem to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Famicom also supports a computerized knitting machine, a disk-driven facsimile system and an external disk drive. A 48-pin expansion slot concealed in the base of the American NES will allow it, too, to be expanded. But the immediate problem in 1985 was to keep the new system from going the way of its predecessors, so Nintendo had a plan to keep its product under tight controls.

Each of its software licensees (30 of them now) may make no more than five new games for Nintendo each year and none for its competitors. Like the games Nintendo itself produces, all the licensed games must pass the Phillips fun test. "To stop unauthorized products," Phillips says, "we've put a security system in both the hardware and the chip. A special chip in the hardware shakes hands with a special chip in the software. So only Nintendo-approved software will play in Nintendo hardware." The handshake is patented and easy to detect; it's also expensive, another deterrent to counterfeiting.

Explains Phillips: "We can afford to put a chip in a game that's tough to make and costs money, because when we sell I don't know how many millions of games, that cost for us is very cheap. But for somebody in the gray market to say, 'Hey I'm going manufacture an illegal game, and In going to manufacture 100,000 of the cost is going to be much, much more." Many of the Nintendo games replicate the appeal of the arcade favorites; some are clones. In many of the games, as the action moves to the edge of the TV screen, the picture scrolls as if panned by a movie camera. In all of them, the graphics are crisp and colorful; the sound tracks are full of bells, whistles, beeps, honks, explosions and noises unknown in the world of reality. The animated characters are lively, and many of the games are damnably difficult to master; most are full of amusing surprises.

The $100 NES Action Set, "Super Mario shares a car- tridge with a light-gun game called "Duck Hunt." When you shoot down a duck, a hunting dog pops up from the weeds, grinning and 1 holding the duck like a trophy. When you miss, the dog pops up, paws over mouth, giggling maniacally. Everyone giggles back the first time; nearly everyone who.i repeatedly misses wonders why you don't get to shoot the dog at the end of the game. Although "R.O.B.," a miniature programmable robot packed in the introductory Nintendo Deluxe out fit, which listed at $199, turned out' to be a dud, the New York market 1 test was a success, and the home video-game market suddenly was revived. Atari, which had a vast li- brary of games already on hand, moved quickly to develop a high- end game system, the XE, and the American company Tonka joined the Japanese company Sega, to produce software for Sega's arcade- quality Master System.

But Nintendo's shrewd planning'1' had ensured its dominance. By the end of 1986, the company claimed 72 percent' of the market. In 1987; a post-Christmas season survey of i retailers by the magazine Toy Hobby World ranked the Nintendo Entertainment System not only as the best-selling game but the best-selling Christmas toy of any kind, -in both dollar volume and units sold. No one will be astonished if the company posts similar results in 1988. As for Phillips, the inveterate games player with the nerdy tie, says he's become a yuppie.

He offers in evidence his enrollment in an MBA program, his Seattle townhouse, complete with wife and two children and, above all, their newly remodeled kitchen. "If we weren't yuppies before, we are now," he says. "Anybody who remodels the kitchen when they're 30 years old is definitely a yuppie." There must be a marketable video game in that idea, perhaps "Zelda III Link Marries the Princess and Moves into a Townhouse to Do Battle with Interior Designers, Contractors, Plumbers, Carpenters and Building Inspectbrs." cade games had spawned, reported sales of $1 billion. In 1982, the arcade business slumped, but home video-game sales shot up to $3 billion. It was the prelude to a nightmare.

In 1983, home video-game sales plummeted to $2 billion, in 1984 to $800 million, in 1985 to $100 million. In three years, 99.9 percent of the business had disappeared like so many dots gobbled up in a "Pac-Man" maze. The home games had always been an inferior product, lacking the arcade games' superior animation, highly detailed graphics and "depth," the industry term for complexity, which translates to lasting play value and, in the arcades, tons of quarters collected. Nonetheless, the home versions were popular, and dozens of ad hoc companies tried to grab a piece of the action, introducing cheap imitations that glutted the market. Dumping and discounting reduced the prices of game cartridges that once had sold for $35 to as little as $5.

Dozens of incompatible game systems, inconsistent prices and hundreds of new software titles appeared simultaneously, infuriating parents, boring their children and disillusioning "The kids would master the games in a matter of days and then throw them in the closet and not want to play anymore," Phillips says. By the end of 1985, many of the first-generation video gamemak-ers had vanished or gone into home computers. Warner Communications, which had bought Atari from Bushnell for $28 million, sold the cr npany at a fire-sale price. Coleco quit making games and tried, unsuccessfully, to market a low-end personal computer. Mattel closed its electronics division, leaving the TV spokesman for its Intelevision system, George Plimpton, with nothing to do but edit the Paris Review, write books about sports and pursue his passion for pyrotechnics as fireworks commissioner of New York City.

In November of that year, the home video industry having been pronounced dead, Nintendo astonished everyone by introducing the NES. Says Phillips, who was part of the Nintendo team that set up shop in Hackensack, N.J., to test-market the system: "It was very risky. That's why we limited the introduction to the New York area. We figured if we made it in there, we could make it anywhere." Radio highlights 'Yankee Dawg You Die' bridges 2 worlds of Asian actors By Richard Christiansen Entertainment editor it 7 "Yankee Dawg You Die," enjoying its Midwest premiere at Wisdom Bridge Theatre, the playwright Philip Kan Gotanda bittersweetly tells of a relationship that begins, develops and comes full circle between two Asian-American movie actors. I.

'Yankee Dawg You Die' A play by Philip Kan Gotanda, dlractad by Richard E.T. White, with a aat and lighting by Mlchaal 8. Phlllppi, eoatumea by Jeaalca Hahn, protacttona by John Boeacha and mualc and aound by Rob Mllbum. Opened Sept 22, with a preae preview Sept. 20, at Wladom Bridge Theatre, 16S9 W.

Howard and playa at 7 p.m. Tueeday, p.m. Wedneeday through Friday, 6 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, through Oct 30.

Length of performance: 2:00. Tlcketa are ttS to $24, wrm dlacounta available for atu-denta, aenlor cltlzena and groupa. Can 743-6000. THE CAST Vincent Chang Sab Shlmono Bradley YamaahKa Mare HayaaM .3 "Featured Artiste," 6 a.m. on WXRT, FM 93.1.

Happy birthday, Bruce Springsteen. "Morning Song," a.m. on WNIB, FM Music by Pierne, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Wolt. "Morning Program," 9 a.m. on WFMT, FM 98.7.

Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 15. "Roy Leonard Show," 9:30 a.m. on WON, AM 720. Jacques Lowe, author of "The Kennedy Legacy." "Studs Terkel," 11 a.m.

on WFMT, FM Singersongwriter Tom Paxton. "Adventures in Good Music," 7 p.m. on WNIB, FM 97.1. "Label-Conscious." "Chicago Law," 7 p.m. on WWX, FM 1031 Legal talk show.

a "Beyrouth Festival 1988," 7 p.m. on WFMT, FM 98.7. Wagner's "Siegfried." "Radio Classics," p.m. on WBBM, AM 780, "Mystery Theater." I "Open Line," 8 p.m. on WMBI, FM 90.1.

Fal Classic." 4j Corrections Vincent Chang is a suave old pro, once nominated for an Oscar, who has spent much of his career playing slant-eyed stereotypes. Bradley Yamashita, newly arrived in Los Angeles, is a proud young buck, trained in theater, who despises such tripe. Both men feel the same ego problems of their profession, and they share a resentment against the racial injustice inflicted on them; but as members of different generations, their methods of dealing with themselves, as men and actors, are very different. How they come to terms with their work and their personal lives, each man learning from and teaching the other, is the substance of the play. Their friendship is unfolded in a procession of meetings, each captioned with a key line from the scene.

In between, on designer Michael S. Philippi's sleek Japanese modern setting of sliding panels, there are solo scenes for both men from comic fancies to reverieshandsomely expressed with the aid of Philip-pi's evocative lighting and exquisite slide projections created by John Boeschc. With its sprinkling of flat lines and stale movie industry jokes, Gotanda's play does not always have a firm grasj on the several themes it is attempting. Its and clarifications one big boffo scene, a parody of "Godzilla" movies, actually seems an intrusion on the gentle progress of the drama. But the play is graced with a beautiful structural device that amusingly opens the evening with a comic twist and delicately closes it on a poignant note; and the produc- tion, under Richard E.T.

White's elegant direction, is fortunate in having two actors who invest their characters with sympathy and strength. Sab Shimono, though his Chang never convinces one that the old actor has the potential of a great thespian, is perfectly natty and slightly effete on the surface, letting glints of his dark sadness gradually show through. Marc Hayashi a native Chicagoan who played the leading role in the movie "Chan Is Missing makes a terrific hometown stage debut as the young firebrand Bradley, part sensitive poet and part posturing jerk. He's a fine actor, and, what's more, he's a commanding presence, 4 -fa i. A story on pork in the Tempo f.

section of the Sept. 21 Tribune incorrectly located the Iowa Machine Shed restaurant in Dubuque, la. The restaurant is in- Davenport, la. "situated at Exit" 295 of Int. Hwy.

80, about 14 mikz west of the Mississippi," as the story correctly reported. The Tribune regrets the error. Marr Uawochi llaM anrt Cah Chlmnnl nlav tun Acian.Amoriran ai? tors, an upstart and a veteran, in "Yankee Dawg You Die.".