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Old 03-26-2010, 02:15 PM
michelej1 michelej1 is offline
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Default Photon Game Center?

[I don't know what it means that the game center's music was produced by FM. Anyone ever hear anything about this before?]

Houston Chronicle Sci Guy Blog by Eric Berger, March 25, 2010

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archiv...laser_tag.html


Who knew? Laser tag was born in Houston and Dallas

In case you missed it, I had a really cool story today about a local physicist at the University of Houston, Roy Weinstein, who persevered after 20 years of waiting to get a patent on superconducting magnets. He did so after his son, an inventor, began arguing his case with the U.S. patent office.

During the course of the story I interviewed his son, Lee Weinstein, who casually mentioned that he had invented laser tag in the 1980s, while working at Schlumberger in Houston.

What? Laser tag? What male geek of my age or a bit older doesn't remember loving the heck out of laser tag as a kid?

The back story's a bit more complicated, as Weinstein explained, and there's some question over who actually invented laser tag. What we can say for certain is that laser tag originated in Texas.

Sometime early in 1984 Lee Weinstein built a game called "Star Laser Force" and opened a game center near Chimney Rock and the Southwest Freeway. If you played a lot there you could get an ID like this:

A few years later Weinstein sold the game to Worlds of Wonder, of Teddy Ruxpin fame, which marketed the toys under the name Lazer Tag. There Weinstein's association with the game ceased.

At around the same time, in Dallas, inventor George Carter was finishing two years of work developing another brand of laser tag. Carter opened his first Photon game center in March, 1984. Carter had considerably more commercial success, eventually opening 70 Photon franchises around the country, including in Houston.

Carter said he recalls the Dallas Photon game center opening prior to Star Force Laser in Houston, but I could not independently verify which facility opened first. It does seem clear that Carter's system was more sophisticated because it included a central scoring system.

Compact discs hadn't been invented yet, so Photon's music, which was produced by Fleetwood Mac, was first played off of glass discs, Carter said. They also weren't allowed to use lasers, and the phasers weren't actually firing the beam. The phaser was actually the receiver.

Photon received a lot of publicity, Carter said, including magazines, TV, newspapers and a segment by John Stossel on 20-20. And what was the inspiration?

"The movie Star Wars inspired us," Carter said. "I saw the movie, the characters running up and down the halls shooting the lasers at one another and I saw the potential. It's a game everyone's played at home, with disputes about who shot who. I thought if you could actually score it, it would be a big hit."

And it was. Deep in the heart of Texas.
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