General Computer Corporation
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The General Computer Corporation (GCC) is a printer company today, but was started in 1981 by Doug Macrae, John Tylko [1] and Kevin Curran as a video game company.
They started out making mod-kits for existing arcade games - for example Super Missile Attack, which was sold as an enhancement board to Atari's Missile Command. At first Atari sued, but ultimately dropped the suit and hired GCC to develop games for Atari (and stop making enhancement boards for Atari's games without permission).[2] They also created an enhancement kit for Pac-Man called Crazy Otto which they sold to Midway, who in turn sold it as the sequel Ms. Pac-Man.[3] GCC made arcade games for Atari, such as Food Fight, Quantum and the unreleased Nightmare. They also produced many Atari 2600 cartridges, including the 2600 versions of Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede. They also produced over half of the Atari 5200 cartridges. They did the chip design for the Atari 7800 and the first round of cartridges for that base unit.
In 1984, the company changed direction to make peripherals for Macintosh computers: the HyperDrive (the Mac's first internal hard drive), the WideWriter 360 large format inkjet printer, and the Personal Laser Printer (the first QuickDraw laser printer). Presently the company focuses exclusively on laser printers.[4]
References
- ^ http://www.aurora.aero/company/Management.aspx
- ^ Fulton, Steve (2008), Atari: The Golden Years -- A History, 1978-1981
- ^ Kent, Steven L. (2001), The Ultimate History of Video Games. ISBN 0-7615-3643-4
- ^ http://www.gccprinters.com/corporate/history.html
External links
- GCC corporate homepage
- Video: "College Dreams- the story of General Computer" Play Value - ON Networks