Arcadia was first and foremost Arcadia Electronic Software. A hopeful startup organization, nobody knows exactly when Arcadia was founded, but everyone knew that Nolan Bushnell was at the forefront of it. Arcadia - or Arcadia Prime, as nicknamed by Bushnell - was created during his tenure at Utah State. In 1964, he took himself and his venture to the University of Utah's College of Engineering, where he would meet more like-minded fellows.
1964 would be the year that Arcadia became Arcadia.
Bushnell was the hotshot of his class in 1964, boasting and bragging about his business ideas. It wasn't long before Bushnell's university friends learned of the Arcadia venture and asked to join; one of those friends being Ted Dabney. They met while studying in the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab and bonded over a shared love of the Go board game and occult rituals. Nolan and Ted saw opportunity in the lab's engrossing electronic games, and they took it.
The most popular game on campus was Spacewar!, a simple space combat game. The pair ripped that off with ease. But that wasn't the only thing they planned on ripping. They'd come up with an idea while they sat together mumbling incantations at midnight. Ted Dabney had conceived of a technological innovation that could unlock the secrets of harnessing the cursed magicks of the underworld. It was a small step to transfer their knowledge and interests over to Arcadia.
That year, President Lyndon B. Johnson woke up in a cold sweat and began frantically sketching out a horrible visage which had come in his dreams. White squares endlessly batting back and forth in deep space forever. This triggered a chain of events which eventually led a mild-mannered engineer named Ralph Baer to take the President's sketch and create an interstellar communication and control device. He dubbed it the Brown Box. Thus began an odyssey of triumph and terror which would last for decades to come.
The SCP Foundation had ears everywhere and they knew of what Dabney and Bushnell were up to. In turn, Bushnell knew of Baer's discovery from public demonstrations of the Brown Box's more mundane aspects. This cross-pollination led to the group's first big break. The Foundation would provide funding for a collective experience-gathering experiment to create a human capable of reliably engaging with the Brown Box. In exchange, Arcadia would supply their technology and occult expertise. The Foundation only needed the former, but Bushnell - ever the shrewd businessman - insisted on providing both.
The money flowed in like water.
Kicking into gear in 1967, Arcadia quickly appropriated connections in order to make their first original product; the Dabney-Syzygy Inhibitor. Partnering with Nutting Associates under the guise of developing a commercial computer game, the Inhibitor inside what would become "Computer Space" allowed them to refine their technique on half-drunk pinball players who didn't understand the ramifications of trading their souls for quarters.
Unlocking the secrets of Hell gave them a new conundrum: Portals to hell are a two-way street. Once you've opened that door you'd better be ready to parlay on the demon's terms. What if there was a way to moderate the energy coming through that aperture? Hold it open just a crack, let the corrupting power flow out without unleashing doom. Harness the energy given off when sending souls back through, double-dipping on a devil's bargain.
It wouldn't be too long before the Foundation scooped up the project assets and cut ties with the darkening hearts of Bushnell and his goons. Looking for more funding now that he didn't have the limitless funds of the men in black, Bushnell grew tired under the self-imposed limitations of Arcadia, and left in 1969 to pursue his own projects. His little cabal left with him. Arcadia was thrust into the hands of Dan "Wolf" Dunn, a recently-hired visual designer and story-writer.
It was under Dunn's management that Arcadia became a household name. Despite having left, Bushnell and co. would frequently collaborate with Arcadia. Dunn used these projects as reputation fodder, to his advantage. Arcadia started to produce games for companies desperately outsourcing projects during the video game boom. Their popularity spiked. Arcadia independently developed hundreds, if not thousands of games in their heyday years.
Working at Arcadia at this time was a tricky proposition. You never knew whether the gal or guy sitting next to you was a regular employee or a devil worshiper in business attire. The drugs had abated but never truly went away. There was never enough money coming in to make everyone feel comfortable. The culture was balancing on a knife's edge.
Nevertheless, Dunn and Arcadia were full of themselves, ego oozing from everything they developed. The quality of their games started to drop as more and more saturated the market. The demonic influences started to peek through.
Arcadia as a whole was totally unprepared for the video game market crash of 1983. This Arcadian shock zapped the market to a fraction of its former value, resulting in the rough and dirty death throes of the company. They weren't quite ready to give up yet.
The 1985 Arcadia rebranding came as a direct result of "Wolf" Dunn and the rest of the company still not believing in the start of Arcadia's downfall. Most employees left during the start of this year, moving to companies who actually cared about their workers or starting independent projects. The rest of the general staff were fired. The parties and the drugs got a significant increase, and were funded from fingers dipped in the reserves for their paychecks.
Dunn finally realized in mid-1985 the severity of the losses that Arcadia had taken during their drug-filled stupors. He had also been tiring of the near twenty years of demonic influences upon Arcadia. Seeing a premiere of Don Giovanni scared Dunn enough to completely remedy it. Through a significant amount of computing products created to harvest souls, Arcadia paid its long past due debt and the demons released their stranglehold upon Dunn.
To save the rest of Arcadia, Dunn spent the rest of the money allocated for "corporate parties" into cleaning up their older games and scrubbing the rest of the negative influences from the company. They went back to Arcadia's roots to fill quotas for the upkeep of the former Arcadia empire by dabbling in software production. It wasn't enough. By the end of 1985, Arcadia was reduced to 7% of the influence that it had only five years ago. The rest of the executives weren't convinced and effectively cast "Wolf" Dunn off from Arcadia. He left in 1986.
His idea for a new Arcadia wouldn't leave with him.
In 1986, Arcadia returned to the look it had when it was a powerhouse. It was anything but. Arcadia had no real objective past survival, grasping at straws and odd job offers from companies looking to make a cheap buck. Deprived of their empire, their equipment, their funding, and their place of prominence, Arcadia would never again be able to dictate the terms. They would be lucky to survive at all.
The company underwent talks of being bought out. The remaining Arcadia employees, still dreaming big despite their much shallower pockets, tried to hang tight as every one of their original projects failed to make it out of the prototype stage. Meanwhile, ex-Arcadian employees would put out unlicensed, unofficial and still dangerously demonic games with the Arcadia name still applied on. They feared nothing from a company that spent most of its time keeping themselves afloat, much less quelling active legal breaches. There weren't many mourners when the company finally went quiet in the late eighties.
Arcadia re-emerged in 1991 with a new face. A merger with the powerhouse technologies company Prism Products Corporation not only allowed Arcadia to enter new markets but also come back from the brink of death. Arcadia's redesign shocked those who had been working for the company for decades. Their original projects started to gain traction in the world of video games again, and other developers wanted to outsource to the company that had once been the pinnacle of independent game design.
Despite their success, nobody within Arcadia knew what or who to attribute it to. Their new management was ruthlessly efficient but paid extremely well. Arcadia itself never quite seemed to have the influence in the public sphere that came from the projects that they completed. Additionally, the lower-level contracts they had been adjusted to were thrown out in favor of bigger projects that never seemed to be released outside of Arcadia. Rumors were told that Dunn had come back to instill his '85 vision into the new Arcadia. Nothing was ever proven or disproven.
Even though it sat in the shadows of more popular companies, the 1990s were a good time for Arcadia. Arcadia was content with its place - existing, but not fully present. Influential, but not powerful. Some of Arcadia had been lost, but not any of its meaning. The company shot for the stars, but it never forgot where it came from.
Arcadia closed their public division in 2006 along with a logo redesign. No one knows what the company does for sure anymore, but the Arcadia name shows up in the shelves in the videogame section occasionally. The word is they'll do anything for anyone who pays them.
Arcadia may not be what it once was. It may not even be Arcadia anymore. The only way to determine that for sure? Find Arcadia to play. After all…
Why not Arcadia?
