Gaming registry adds Franklin Park site

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Franklin Park was the center of the arcade game universe from the late 1970s to the late 1980s because of Bally Midway Manufacturing, the builder of such superstar games as Space Invaders, Pac-man and Ms Pac-man.

Bally Midway has since been lost to bankruptcy. But Patrick Scott Patterson, a gamers’ gamer who lives about a half hour north of Dallas-Fort Worth, believes the history shouldn’t be lost.

Patterson has started a registry of historic gaming locations. Added to the list last week was 10750 W. Grand Ave., former site of Bally Midway.

“Even modern generations of gamers who never saw the big arcade boom of the 1980s know Space Invaders and Galaga,” Patterson said during a phone interview from his home in Denton, Texas. “The entire video game world was turned on its ear by games that came out of there.”

Midway Manufacturing was started in 1958 and bought by Bally in 1969. In 1978, the company began producing an arcade game it had licensed from Japan named Space Invaders.

“That was the first big killer hit arcade game,” Patterson said.

In the 1980s, the company licensed and built Pac-man and Ms Pac-man, still the most popular arcade games in the U.S.

“Every Pac-man and Ms Pac-man has a plaque on the back saying it was built in Franklin Park, Ill.,” Patterson said.

Patterson knows. Before his age hit double digits, he crawled behind a Pac-man machine in an arcade and saw the plaque. An enthusiast even then, he wrote the company for information. Over the years since, he’s collected trade magazines, promotional material and books on the games.

The late 1970s to late 1980s was a boom time for arcade games and Bally Midway and Atari battled for the top manufacturing spot. Bally Midway also produced Mortal Kombat and NBA Blitz, among others.

The company did well into the 1990s, until arcades began to fade due to competition from home video games. Bally Midway started to go downhill around 2000 and declared bankruptcy in 2009.

Patterson, who holds several world records in gaming, according to “Guinness Worlds Records: Gamers Edition,” came up with the registry idea during a visit to Stanford University in May.

“They were doing a video game study related to using live microbes,” Patterson said. “I realized my motel was down the street from the old Atari headquarters.”

His visit was bittersweet. While he enjoyed visiting, there was no indication of the significance of the site in the gaming world.

Patterson would like to develop support for the registry of historic gaming places and eventually place historical markers on the locations, perhaps even gain honorary street names.

“Television has things like that, music has things like that and movies have things like that,” Patterson said.