Gee Bee

Outside Japan, it was published by Gremlin Industries. The first video game to be designed in-house by Namco. Prior to this, the company had manufactured arcade electro-mechanical games (such as Periscope and F-1) and published a number of video games by Atari, Inc. (notably Breakout) in Japan. Iwatani originally wanted to produce pinball machines for the company, but higher-ups at Namco disapproved of the idea. The eighth highest-grossing arcade video game of 1978 in Japan, and sold 10,000 units worldwide. It was not as successful as hoped, but it would nevertheless help establish Namco's presence in the video game industry. Two sequels were produced in 1979: Bomb Bee and Cutie Q.

• Title — Gee Bee • Developer — Namco • Designer — Toru Iwatani • Programmer — Shigeichi Ishimura • Series — Gee Bee • Platforms — Arcade • Genre — Pinball, block breaker • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer

• Illustration — Arcade screenshot Gee Bee is a block breaker arcade game intermixed with elements of a pinball table. The player uses a rotary dial to control a set of paddles on-screen, the goal being to score as many points as possible by deflecting a ball towards objects placed on the board. These include Breakout-like brick formations, pop bumpers that award ten points each when hit, and spinners that slow down the ball. Making the ball touch the "NAMCO" rollover symbols (replaced by the Gremlin logo in the North American version) causes them to light up and having all of them lit up increases the score multiplier.

Gee Bee was developed by Toru Iwatani and was Namco's first video game produced in-house. The company began their insertion into game development in July 1976, when Shigeichi Ishimura, a Namco electro-mechanical game designer, proposed the idea of creating a video arcade game utilizing a CPU, with information accumulated from his work on electro-mechanical games. Namco approved of the idea and purchased a surplus amount of PDA-08 microcomputers from NEC, employees being assigned to study the system's potential to create video games. In 1977, Toru Iwatani joined Namco, shortly after graduating college. Before the arrival of Iwatani, Namco was publishing Atari arcade games in Japan, following their acquisition of Atari Japan a few years prior. Iwatani wanted to create pinball machines as opposed to video games, but Namco higher-ups disapproved of his idea. As a compromise, Iwatani was allowed to instead create a video game based on the concept of pinball, akin to Atari's Video Pinball dedicated console, intermixed with the gameplay elements established in Breakout. Ishimura would assist with programming. Due to hardware limitations, strips of cellophane were applied to the monitor to compensate for the lack of color. The actual layout of the game board is made to resemble a human face. The game was named after the Japanese word for carpenter bee, "kumanbachi", and used the same font type from Atari's unreleased arcade title Cannonball from 1976. Gee Bee was first released in Japan in October 1978. Gremlin Industries licensed the game for distribution in North America, where it was released in January 1979.