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The Full Story · Told by the Makers

The Full Story of Starcade · TV's First Arcade Game Show

Nobody could work out how to stop an arcade game at exactly thirty seconds, which meant there was no fair contest and therefore no show. The answer was a Radio Shack home computer wired to a clock wired to a brand new freeze-frame box. The producers pitched the result to NBC and were turned down by its station managers, one of whom said video games were destructive to children's minds. One producer responded by having a t-shirt made that read DUMB AS A PEACOCK. Ted Turner bought the show instead.

Starcade was the 1982 arcade-game game show, created by James Caruso and Mavis Arthur of JM Production Company, in which contestants answered video game trivia and then played real arcade cabinets against the clock for prizes. It began on Ted Turner's WTBS in December 1982, moved into syndication, and ended in 1984 after roughly 123 episodes. Mark Richards hosted first; veteran game show host Geoff Edwards finished the run.

The show that had to invent its own scoreboard

Before Starcade could exist, its makers had to solve a problem that the arcade industry itself could not.

A game show needs every contestant to get exactly the same amount of time. Arcade cabinets of 1982 had no way to stop on command, and the machines kept adding to the score for a beat after play ended. In the account Jim and Mavis Caruso published under their own names, the problem was flatly existential: "None of the game techs, game designers or manufactures could solve that one. This was the critical element because without an exact precise playing time for each contestant there would be NO CONTEST."

The fix was assembled out of parts. "A brand new digital device was introduced that would freeze a frame of video on command," they wrote. "So all we had to do was design and build a clock that would trigger the freeze frame. We locked a second camera on the games score box. Then we connected a Radio Shack TRS-80 to our clock connected to the freeze frame box. At the precise end of the playing period the exact video frame would freeze and it would set off the buzzer too. Simple huh?"

Getting the game picture onto television at all was its own fight, because a cabinet monitor and a broadcast camera do not agree. The makers describe pointing a camera at the screen and accepting scan lines on some games. The neon sign they had installed because it looked good then poisoned the signal. "It caused static in the audio and the video and I swear the doorknobs," Caruso said in a 2006 interview. "It was everywhere. We finally grounded everything to get rid of it."

The host, notably, never knew how any of it worked. Asked in 2011 how the gameplay and the timer were put on screen, Geoff Edwards said he did not know, and that he had only ever been "looking from the other end."

The pilot that nearly killed it

The first attempt was not the show anyone remembers. It was built as a sports contest, on the theory that competition would make video games respectable, and it starred an Olympian.

Twenty-four contestants played in three teams of eight on Defender, Centipede and Pac-Man, with the winners meeting on Berzerk. The host was Mike Eruzione, captain of the gold-medal United States Olympic hockey team, and the guest star was Larry Wilcox of CHiPs, who played the champion on a Donkey Kong cabinet. Nolan Bushnell's Pizza Time Theatre arcades supplied both a route to the machines and, per Mavis Arthur in 2017, the first contestants.

The makers' own account of the taping is a catalogue of things going wrong. At least ten hours passed before tape could roll. Larry Wilcox's agent wanted him to leave. Eruzione was nervous and blowing his lines. Forty-three crew members each had to hit a precise cue. Five more hours of shooting and twelve hours of editing produced one episode.

By the makers' account it aired on KRON in San Francisco on Sunday, September 13, 1981, and beat its time period. Then nothing happened. "We thought that we had a hit and that the networks or syndication would be beating down our doors to get Starcade. WRONG," they wrote. The sports-team format was wrong for the subject, and the era's opinion of video games was against them.

"How did you two get in here anyway?"

The rebuilt show went to NBC, and the pitch meeting is the best-told scene in the whole record.

The executive was Phil Ross, in charge of programming for NBC's owned-and-operated stations. The makers knew they had the right man because of a small piece of theatre: "We knew we were pitching to the decision maker because as we sat down he, with a flourish, pushed a button on his desk and the office door closed."

Their expectations were low, and they say so with numbers: "Pitch meetings usually last about thirty-eight seconds, then eyes glaze over and you know it's time to leave." This one ran for hours. "After about 3 hours of this Phil looks up at us and says, 'How did you two get in here anyway'?" They told him they had called and made an appointment. In their telling he replied that it took a lot of chutzpah, then sent them to see a man usually sitting in his waiting room who needed a job.

That man was Alex Trebek, years before Jeopardy, between houses and out of work. The makers say they offered him five thousand dollars to host three pilots and that "he almost kissed us both in the middle of the street he was so happy at getting some work."

It did not save the show. Ross liked it; his five station managers did not. The makers recorded their verdicts: "no home audience participation" and "who wants to watch kids play games," and the one that stung, "video games are destructive to kid's minds so we don't want to show them on OUR TV station." Caruso's response was to have a shirt made. In his 2006 telling it read "NBC, DUMB AS A PEACOCK," and he wore it to most productions.

There is one more fight worth recording, because the makers lost nothing in it. The network wanted the game manufacturers' names hidden. They refused, saying they had given their word to Bally-Midway, Nintendo and Nolan Bushnell, and the compliance people gave way.

Turner, and the three versions of the deal

Everyone agrees Ted Turner bought Starcade. Nobody agrees how.

In the account the makers published under their own names, Turner sent Turner Program Services chairman Sid Pike to San Francisco, and the deal was for 13 shows, one a week on Saturday morning. In Caruso's 2006 interview a distributor who knew Pike made the introduction, Turner met them at the NATPE convention in Las Vegas, and the contract was for 24 weekly shows. In the 2017 Bleeding Cool interview with both creators it is a cold call to Turner Program Services followed by a trip to Atlanta, and they leave "with an order for 23 shows," followed by an order for 100.

The one beat that recurs is Turner asking them to strip the show, meaning produce enough for a daily run. Caruso's version: "Ted asked us if we would strip the show for him and WTBS, that is make enough so they could show it daily. We shook hands all around and had a deal, their only demand was that we had to get a new host and that's when Geoff started hosting."

That is also the makers' explanation for replacing Mark Richards, whom they had cast from unknowns because his lifetime ambition was to host a game show. Their published history puts it as a demand for star power: "we replaced Mark Richards because Turner felt that we should have a 'name'." The widely circulated alternative, that Richards seemed uncomfortable on camera and uninterested in the games, appears in a reference article that carries a citations-needed notice and no source for the claim. The makers' version and the popular version are not the same story, and this page does not merge them.

The host who was never asked

Geoff Edwards took the job the ordinary way. It came through his agent, he had no history with video games, and he was candid about the motive: "I needed work. So I took the show and had a good time at it."

He then did something the record rewards him for. Nobody explained the show's technical tricks to him, so he taught himself the room. "They didn't brief me, but I knew what was going to go on," he said. He would get there early, and by his account the routine was fixed: "I'd always go back and look at the games we were going to have. And I knew what we were going to see."

What makes his 2011 account remarkable is that it exists at all. When the retro gaming podcast Retro Gaming RoundUp approached him, the hosts noted on air that he had never been interviewed about Starcade. He also warned them in advance that his memory of the period would need refreshing, and it shows: in the same conversation he is unsure which network carried the show, guessing USA rather than WTBS.

Then he said something nobody had heard. "I don't think anybody's ever been told this," he began, "but I don't have really good feelings about Jim," because, he said, "they never paid me the residuals they owed me." He described being owed "quite a hunk of money from reruns," and said "The union got on them and they just closed their ears and their doors."

His summary was the hardest line anyone has said about the show: "And it just makes you feel bad that people who come off so pure are not really."

That account is Edwards' and it is uncorroborated. The makers have never answered it in anything reachable, Caruso died in 2021, and the specific network Edwards names for those reruns is one he was unsure of minutes earlier. It is recorded here as what the show's own host said on the record, not as a finding. Edwards died in 2014, so it is also the last thing he ever said about it.

How the telling has grown over the decades

Two honesty notes about this record. First, the 2005 Good Deal Games interview and the 2006 RetroBlast interview share near-verbatim answer text wherever their questions overlap. The most likely explanation is that Caruso supplied the same written answers twice. They are two publications and they are not two independent tellings, and this page counts them as one.

Second, the drift is unusually wide for a show with so few tellers. The Turner deal has three incompatible versions from the same two people. The episode count runs 133 in Caruso's 2005 and 2006 answers, a planned 130 in the makers' history, and 123 by the 2017 and 2021 accounts. And the makers and their host do not describe the same enterprise at all: one side remembers Starcaders writing in for decades, the other remembers a union getting nowhere.

The dates this page will not pretend to know

Reference sources give the WTBS premiere as December 27, 1982 and the last first-run episode as February 24, 1984. Neither could be confirmed against a primary listing for this page.

The archive of TV Guide issues holds exactly one issue covering the premiere week. It is a New Hampshire edition, and it does not list WTBS programming at all; the superstation appears in it only inside a news story about cable carriage fees, which reports that WTBS then reached 25 million cable homes. No issue in that archive covers February 1984, and none covers San Francisco in September 1981.

So the record here is honest rather than tidy. December 1982 as the WTBS launch and 1984 as the end are carried by every account. The exact days come from a reference article that carries a citations-needed notice. The pilot date of September 13, 1981 comes from the makers themselves, and the only check available is that the day of the week matches: it was a Sunday, as they said.

The honest bottom line

Starcade was a cheap show about a fad, hosted for its first stretch by an unknown and then by a man who had never played a video game, and its whole premise was pointing a camera at other people's products. Its makers put more than sixty thousand dollars of their own money in before anyone would buy it, and were told by a network that their subject was destructive to children's minds. What they built anyway was the first television program to stand contestants at real arcade cabinets and treat their play as something worth watching, solved on a Radio Shack computer and a freeze-frame box because nobody else had bothered. Four decades later that is the format of an entire industry. Its host went to his grave saying he was never paid the residuals he was owed for it.

Sources

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of TV POWWW, the other show that put video games on television, and the Press Your Luck story.

Frequently asked

What was the Starcade TV show?

A game show built around arcade video games, created by James Caruso and Mavis Arthur. Contestants answered video game trivia, then played real arcade cabinets against a timer for high scores, with a bonus round where the winner tried to beat an average score for a grand prize, often an arcade machine of their own.

When did the Starcade game show air?

It launched on Ted Turner's WTBS in December 1982, moved into syndication, and its first-run episodes ended in 1984. Reference sources date the premiere to December 27, 1982 and the last first-run episode to February 24, 1984, though neither could be confirmed against a primary listing.

Who hosted Starcade?

Mark Richards hosted first, cast from unknowns because he had always wanted to be a game show host. Veteran game show host Geoff Edwards replaced him and finished the run. The makers say the change was a condition of the Turner deal, which required a recognizable name.

Was Alex Trebek almost the host of Starcade in 1982?

He hosted pilots, not the series. Before Jeopardy, out of work, Trebek was recommended to the producers by an NBC executive and, by their account, was paid five thousand dollars to host three pilots. NBC's station managers passed on the show anyway.

How did Starcade stop the arcade games at exactly the right time?

With a rig the makers built themselves. A second camera watched the score box, a purpose-built clock triggered a then-new digital freeze-frame device, and a Radio Shack TRS-80 tied them together so the exact frame froze and the buzzer sounded at the same instant.

Can you still watch Starcade?

Episodes were rerun on G4 in the early 2000s and the show has resurfaced online since, including a 2017 Twitch marathon organized with the creators' blessing. The makers' own site at starcade.tv currently shows only an under construction placeholder.