Developed/Published by: Sega/Gremlin
Released: 04/1979
Completed: 18/03/20206
Completion: Finished one screen. High score of 2685. I’ll take it.

It’s been a while since I’ve dug this far back into gaming history, but, for reasons, I decided it was time. I’ve already played–and written about–the most important dot eater of all, Pac-Man (see exp. 2600) but Head On has incredible importance as the first maze chase dot eater. That sounds like a very specific genre, and when you look at Head On, not exactly a perfect description, considering it has really no maze to speak of. But Head On is still really important, so I went to some unnecessary effort to play it. [“You may wish to skip this following waffle. I’ll let you know when you can come back.”–Ed.]

You see, I can’t remember if I own Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 23: Sega Memorial Selection, the only home release of this game, or not. I know I don’t own a physical copy–lord knows I missed my window on that–but I’m pretty sure I own it on PS3 via the Japanese PlayStation Network.

However.

I’ve forgotten my login for Japanese PSN; and the PS3 I know I was logged into I don’t (currently) have access to. So that’s annoying. I could burn a copy, maybe, but why not just use it as an opportunity to finally dip my toe into the exciting world of PS2 emulation?

I know the first think you’re going to say. “Why emulate a 1979 arcade game via a 2005 PS2 compilation on a different machine? Why have a double layer of emulation?”

To be honest, I don’t really have a good excuse. But this Memorial Selection¹ included a “updated” version of Head On, and that seemed interesting and worth the effort.

And there my troubles began. I installed Retrodeck on my Steam Deck; easy, so far so good. But then I had to find a PS2 bios. And then I put what I thought was a working copy of the Sega Memorial Selection into the right folder but the (emulated) PS2 kept giving me the red screen of sadness instead of loading it, leading to a (far too lengthy) amount of time where I kept trying different regions in the hope that would change something (it doesn’t) until I finally hit upon the idea that even if the PS2 emulator in question claimed it read the kind of file I was trying to use (CUE and BIN, which does sound like a show about a snooker player teaming up with a binman to solve mysteries)  it… doesn’t? Or at least not this one?

So then it was having to download an ISO tool on Linux–because most people were like “oh just use the command line” and sack that on the Steam Deck–converting it… and then it worked!

Now, I know that wasn’t very interesting [“Do you? You still wrote it down”–Ed.] but it stood out to me a bit because it reminded me that the internet is completely fucking useless now. There are some oases; archive.org you beautiful bastard. But for the most part, you search for anything and you’re either getting scam websites, or AI garbage, and the more esoteric your problem the more useless even Reddit becomes. Just one of those evenings where you think “hmm, isn’t this hobby supposed to be fun?”

And all to play, uh… Head On. 

[“You can come back now.”–Ed.]

Head On is interesting in Sega’s history because it comes from the (fairly short) window of time when they were Sega/Gremlin. Now any student of video game history knows that Sega began as Service Games and was founded by Americans (gasp… or not, I mean Taito was founded by a Ukrainian, it’s fine. People from all sorts of countries can found companies. You’ll survive). Probably fewer keep at the front of their mind that between 1969-1984 they were owned by Gulf and Western (a quirk which allowed them to put out a licensed Fonz game.) And in the late 70s, they were struggling. There’s some great context from The Golden Age Arcade Historian, a now seemingly defunct blog:

“Sega’s plan for U.S. domination had not gone very well. In fiscal year 1977, Sega actually lost almost $800,000 overall and its American arm was responsible for almost all of it … many operators were reluctant to take a chance on a new game in the midst of an industry downturn. As a result, Sega released just two new games in the American market in fiscal year 1978. If Sega was going to compete in the U.S. market they needed to do something – and fast.”

Gremlin was also struggling. The Golden Age Arcade Historian has even more excellent research on the inexperienced company’s disastrous entry into the arcade industry with Blockade, with companies such as Atari ripping them off with games such as Dominoes while they struggled to to get Blockade to market.

I’m sure the decision to purchase a different American arcade manufacturer came with a lot of boring business reasons that I don’t quite understand, but one wonders if they truly understood what they were buying was Lane Hauck, the company’s star game designer who, for some reason, is poorly remembered now (the best piece of writing about him is from a 1982 article in the San Diego Reader by a Jeannette DeWyze, thankfully online.)

Hired by Gremlin on the strength of a homebrew blackjack console(!) he was the one who eventually pushed the company from “wall games” (a kind of electromechanical game) into video games, notably designing first Blockade, the true original snake game, and Depthcharge, before creating Head On.

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Depthcharge: An Aside

In my article about Atari’s Destroyer, I said:

“the story here is that Destroyer definitely began as a rip-off: after ripping off Gremlin’s Blockade for Dominoes, Atari seemed like they really wanted to stick the boot in, ripping off Gremlin’s slow anti-submarine shooter Depthcharge with a far flashier game.”

Interestingly, I probably spoke too quickly. DeWyze:

“Frank Fogleman recalls that just a few days after Gremlin had applied for legal protection of the “Depthcharge” name. Atari showed up at the copyright office to file an application under the very same name for a game that was almost identical to Gremlin’s initial prototype. Because Atari then had to change its game’s name and refile, Fogleman says Atari suffered a slight delay in coming to the marketplace … Fogleman says the incident prompted hours of speculation within Gremlin over whether Atari had pirated the idea. ‘Finally, we decided it was just coincidence. But you always wonder.’

Hauck agrees it was probably chance. ‘When you spend a lot of hours, as I do, sitting around and trying to think up games, you soon realize that there really is a quite limited choice of what you can do.’”

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Head On was actually designed before the Sega acquisition–with a two-player mode tried and failed–and benefited greatly from it. With Space Invaders beginning the “lives” era of arcade games–most of the games before just used a timer–a designer at the Japanese arm (Hauck: “An industry veteran there who had invented every game Sega had ever done … He was a very venerated guy on the verge of retirement”²) advised that they change the game from a timer to a lives system–resulting in a game that was so popular in Japan they’d, well, give it pride of place in a Sega Ages collection.

Even with the change to a lives system, Head On is very much a game of its time. It’s the kind of thing that you could imagine could have got an “arcade perfect” port on the ZX Spectrum. In the game, there are five lanes full of dots, with gaps in which you can switch lanes. You drive a small car and can push a button to go faster, and there’s another car (more than one, later in the game) that’s going in the opposite direction of you that’s trying to cause a horrific accident by smashing into you as fast as possible before you collect all the dots. The trick is that you cannot turn around. Your only option for avoiding this other car is to change lanes, but they can (and will) change lanes as soon as you do to try and keep their target in their sights, meaning you have to play the game by savvily modifying your speed–you can change two lanes when you aren’t going full speed, which the opposing car cannot do, and as they can only change lanes at the same places you can, you can try and ensure they don’t have the opportunity to change before you pass them.

To a modern player, Head On is… well, it’s not great. It’s punishing, because the entire map resets after every death, meaning that you can only move onto a future level if you do it in one go (though like Pac-Man, there aren’t different maps). It’s also really frustrating to control. You aren’t controlling the car like you’re driving it (push left or right) you’re pushing the car in the direction on screen you want it to go (so if it’s travelling across the screen, you need to push up or down to change lanes.) I found this unbelievably confusing; I feel like audiences in the 70s might have found this more understandable, but it’s such a different way of understanding your relationship to what’s happening on screen it’s almost unbearable, though I did (eventually) get comfortable with it. A bit, anyway.

It also struggles with, surprisingly, complexity. Like Pac-Man, it seems to be a pattern game: you are trying to find the ideal path through the level because the enemy car is largely predictable. This means that you want to (for example) go full speed at first, and not change into the second outermost lane until the last second, and then change into the middle lane after two turns, and so on. The problem is unlike Pac-Man, where you are only focused on turning, in Head On you need to be extremely aware of when and how to change your speed to “juke” the enemy. I don’t hesitate to believe that with many more hours of practice I could walk my way through the first level, but it’s somehow much more taxing than performing Pac-Man’s patterns.

If you put in the time–like I did, somewhat–it’s frustrating but moreish; I was determined to see the next screen. It’s responsive and quick to restart; the lure of collecting all the dots is irresistible and the lives system must have been a huge draw at the time even if–I suspect–the game was less attractive than just playing Space Invaders again (though that it’s so much faster has something to it.)

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Head On (2005)

Obviously, I also played the “updated” 2005 version included in Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 23: Sega Memorial Selection; after all, I went to all that trouble. According to Sega Retro it seems to have been developed by Japan Art Media, and it makes the (strange, in my opinion) decision to change everything into lights rather than go with a car theme. There are some new collectibles that can do stupid stuff like make the map invisible based on when you pick it up, and they’ve tried to make the on ramp smoother by having more maps that start with many more ways to change lanes and enemy cars that, frankly, just don’t seem that bothered about attacking you.

It’s just… very ugly and inessential. The text in the middle of the screen makes it look like the game is being obscured by the pause menu (it’s not–there’s not supposed to be anything there) and if the original is fast to get going, and fast to restart, this takes too long to really feel like anything. The Sega Ages 2500 remake era is not fondly remembered, and largely with good reason; it would have made far more sense to not bother to include this rubbish and instead include Head On’s sequels and derivatives. 

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Head On has a pretty huge legacy, even before Pac-Man. There’d be a sequel (Head On 2) and clones a-go-go in the arcades (such as Taito’s Space Chaser) and at home (Atari 2600’s Dodge ‘Em, which I guess you’ll be able to read about in exp. 2603). It makes it all the stranger that having basically created two of the most memorable game designs ever that Lane Hauck isn’t not just better remembered but openly celebrated. But surprisingly, after 1980 he isn’t (according to Mobygames) credited on any more video games, only following Head On with Carnival. I reached the limits of my investigative skills here, but thankfully Ethan Johnson of The History Of How We Play is working on a book about the San Diego arcade scene with a focus on Gremlin, and he was able to let me know that the last game Lane finished that was released was Tac/Scan in 1982, and that (sadly) Lane was let go from Gremlin in 1983, “after Gremlin had been sold for pieces.”

Before that happened, though, there’s a maudlin conclusion to DeWyze’s article on him:

“I’m really torn. Sometimes I feel like I’m a Christian Scientist pharmacist. I mean, there are super-good things to do with microcomputers, but I don’t consider this one of them. Talk to any honest speaking game designer and you find him trying to legitimize what he’s doing. I feel that way. I want to grow up and do something legitimate some day.’’

In 2026 I hope he understands: everything he did was legitimate, and we owe him a lot.

Will I ever play it again? I will, in the form of Dottori-kun, which was included on the Astro City Mini.

Final Thought:  In an absolutely bizarre “it’s a small world” detail, we owe him for more than just Blockade and Head On, because he was friends with Trip Hawkins’ dad. 

From Stanford’s Alumni magazine in 2012:

“My father in the 1970s had worked in San Diego with a brilliant engineer named Lane Hauck who later made arcade games … Around 1971 Lane bought a PDP-8 kit and built it at home. It was a box about the size of a bureau drawer, with red lights and switches and was connected to a KSR-33 printer, the kind then used in newsrooms (like a ticker, only bigger) with the rolls of yellow paper, and it could pound out 10 characters per second. (I can hear the chugging sound even now.)

Lane built a game called MOO, similar to what later emerged as a board game called Mastermind, where you try to guess a four-digit number. You would enter a four-digit guess on the KSR-33 keyboard and it would then tell you how many moos and cows you had. A cow was the right digit in the wrong place; a moo was the right digit in the right place. On one round of the game I got the answer in three turns and Lane was upset, he didn’t think that was possible and thought I’d only made a lucky guess. Of course I already knew I loved games and was already interested in computers and was already making board games … Playing on Lane’s PDP-8 kit was a key event on my road to determining by 1975 that I was going to make computer games and found my own company.

Yes, I decided in the summer of 1975 that I would found EA in 1982. And as they say, the rest is history.³”

Updated 01/04/26: Ethan Johnson caught a few errors/omissions in the original article. The date of Gulf and Western’s ownership of Sega was corrected, as was the reason for Lane’s hiring, the sourcing of Shikanosuke Ochi, and Lane’s last game with Sega/Gremlin.

1. Annoyingly, Sega have a weird (bad) habit of re-using the name “Sega Memorial Selection” using it for two Saturn compilations and a PC compilation. And the first volume of the Saturn one includes Head On as well. So I could have emulated a Saturn to emulate it. But that would have been crazy!!! ↩︎
2. Wikipedia has this down as Shikanosuke Ochi, seemingly unsourced source: Ethan Johnson! ↩︎
3. I suspect some people might think we should blame Hauck for this, considering what EA has turned into. But I personally have a fondness for what Hawkins was trying to do with EA, at least at first. What the company is now really doesn’t seem like his fault. ↩︎