Loco-Motion
Platform: Intellivision
Region: USA
Media: Cartridge
Controller: INTV
Genre: Action > Strategy 
Gametype: Licensed
Release Year: 1982
Developer: Konami Industry Co. Ltd.
Publisher: Mattel Electronics
Players: 1 or 2 Alternating
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Based on a 1982 coin-op, Loco-Motion is a puzzle-style arcade game in which a train is riding on a grid of movable track pieces. The goal is to guide the train through the train stations located around the edge of the playfield. An empty section in the grid allows the player to shift adjacent track pieces into that section to alter the train's path, and a tracing light shows the path the train is taking as it moves. An accelerator button moves the train more quickly on its path, and a panic button will switch the piece of track the train is on with a random track piece on the grid.

A bonus timer ticks down during gameplay, showing how many points will be received if the train arrives at a station in a timely fashion. If the timer reaches zero, "Crazy Trains" and "Loop Sweepers" will appear and race down the track in an attempt to crash into your train. Other obstacles include "Crazy Tracks" which can send your train in another direction, and exploding stations (occurring occasionally if the bonus timer reaches zero.)

Loco-Motion has 4 play speeds, and offers play for 1 player or 2 players alternating turns.


DEVELOPMENT HISTORY:

With Atari having most of the good arcade games sewn up, Mattel had to compete with other video game manufacturers for whatever was left over. Upon seeing the Konami arcade game Loco-Motion (one was moved into the Applications Software department in Summer 1982), the programmers and Marketing felt this was a great game for an Intellivision conversion -- it was fun, unique, and "doable" with our technology.

Marketing shelled out big cash to beat out some other bidders for the rights and Ray Kaestner was chosen to do the conversion. Ray was set to take two weeks of vacation in August, so he was scheduled to begin work on Loco-Motion upon his return.

But Dan Bass, who was working on the ECS game Wall Street at the time, became addicted to the Loco-Motion arcade machine and decided he had to do the Intellivision version. Not knowing that Ray had already been picked for the job, Dan set out to get it. In about a week, he secretly put together a demo of the game mechanism, then presented it to management.

Based on the quality of the demo, Dan was pulled off of Wall Street and given the higher-priority Loco-Motion. Ray Kaestner returned from vacation to find that he was off the game. VP Gabriel Baum and Director Don Daglow (Utopia) apologized to Ray and gave him a consolation prize: the job of converting the arcade game BurgerTime.

Everyone was excited about Loco-Motion and Marketing was prepared for a big advertising campaign. Then, just as Loco-Motion was going to ROM manufacturing (a three-month process), Activision released an Intellivision game called Happy Trails.

As far as most people at Konami and Mattel were concerned, Happy Trails was a blatant rip-off of Loco-Motion, actionably so. The programmers and Marketing personnel happily anticipated a lawsuit that would shut Activision down. But no lawsuit was ever filed. Why not?

A Mattel lawyer claimed the problem was that Konami and Mattel couldn't agree on who should file (and pay) for the suit. Mattel felt that since Konami owned the game, Konami should sue. Konami's position, according to the lawyer, was that essentially Mattel was the damaged party (Konami got a huge guaranteed royalty whether the game sold or not); it was Mattel's responsibility to sue.

So no one sued, and Activision got credit for their "originality" in the overwhelmingly good reviews Happy Trails received. Marketing dropped plans for the big push on Loco-Motion, and got rid of the large number of ROMs that had been ordered by discount pricing the cartridge.

An M Network Atari 2600 version was in development but never released.

 
http://www.mobygames.com/game/intellivision/loco-motion
http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/1983b.html#locomotion