Interview (conducted
by email Nov-Dec 2017, all photos courtesy of Martin Shoebridge)
TiviaChick:
Could you tell me a bit about your background and what led you to work in the
development of laser tag?
Martin Shoebridge:
I’ve been involved in electronics for over 50 years...It started when I was 11
and my Uncle bought me a transistor radio kit to put together with his help. I
think that gave me the bug... At 15, I started to work for a small local
company in my home town of Aldershot making valve amplifiers for record
players. I used to go to his shop on a Saturday, collect all the bits and take
back the completed amplifiers the following Saturday. At 16 I left school with
a few O Levels and gained an electronics apprenticeship at the world famous
Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough Hampshire. This gave me core
training in electronics. Skip a few years and a few jobs and I set up a company
in Fleet Hampshire to sell home computer bits and pieces. This was 1980. We had
a retail shop and offices above that we used to make things. I gave myself just
3 months to get profitable and make enough money to support the family. A big
gamble that paid off handsomely. We made a lot of money in a very short time
thanks to the boom in home computing explosion- Commodore, IBM/clones Apple
Macs, Amstrad, BBC Home computer, etc. I designed and made several ‘add ons’
most notable memory packs for the Commodore VIC20. We went to a World of Commodore
exhibition in Toronto and sold out all of our stock in a few days. Our prices
were significantly cheaper than any other products. It wasn’t long before we
owned three factories in Fleet and employed 18 people designing and making all
sorts of computer related products.
One of the major
sellers was a plug in memory expansion card for IBM clones. In those days, the
standard RAM configuration was a mere 256K! We designed and sold shed loads of
256K and 512K add in cards.
In another factory
nearby, there was a guy who was making a very crude laser tag system, having
seen a product in New Zealand (or was it Australia?). I think that was an early
Laser Force system?..... Anyway he came to me for help assembling the kit and I
was fascinated.... It was very crude. Built with HeNe laser tubes that required
high voltage to make them laze (very dangerous and difficult to manufacture
without arcing). The functions were very crude with almost no flexibility as to
options. In fact none. Packs were hard wired with ID and the game time was
fixed using crude chip timers that had +/- 10-15% timing tolerance. They
managed to sell a few but got into deep trouble when they took a contract to
deliver a radio based version that was impossible to deliver and that was the
end of them.
So I thought I could
do a far better job (I didn’t realize just how hard it would be to make
something reliable). I went on holiday with the family and spent the week
writing the core code for a laser tag system on bits of paper. This basic core
code is still being used today in various laser tag companies including Veqtor.
When I got back from holiday, I set about getting the code into a computer for
editing. I also set about designing the hardware and it wasn’t long before I
had prototypes working. The basic hardware design was very flexible with all
the basic parameters being set up as variables so they could be changed by
using a hand held custom programmer. We could change the game time, shots,
lives, etc. We soon started selling systems and very soon the software bugs
started to show.....
I had been doing some
work with a guy called Pete on a project that would automatically record
medical programs overnight from TV transmissions. His software work impressed
me immensely. I asked him to look over my code to see if he could find the
software bugs which he duly did in next to no time. That was amazing as he had
not seen the code at all. (He had a small amount of prior knowledge as I had
commissioned him to write the scoring program).
Following that, I
offered him a full time job which he accepted. It was to be one of the best
decisions I had ever made. His comments were that what I had written was ok,
but he could do a far better job and had a vision of a new super system which
was later to become what is known in the industry as the AR system. His vision
and enthusiasm was staggering and I had doubts as to whether he would be able
to deliver such complexity. How wrong I was. To this day (radio excluded) I
think the AR system would stand up against the best. Not many people know the
true extent of the capabilities of the AR system and just how clever it was/is.
All or most of the software is modular across all the components of the system-
the gun processor, jacket processor, network controller, network targets,
scoreboards, etc. How Pete managed to conceive that structure across all the
devices is beyond me.
One little known
feature is the ability of the guns to be used in a ‘round robin’ laser tag game
as used in inflatable mobile arenas..... each gun knows what game it has been
playing and knows if another competitor’s gun is in the ‘current game’ or
is from a ‘previous game’. If it was from a previous game, it automatically
knows that.
And so the AR laser
tag system was born......
TC: What was
the progression of your involvement with the various tag companies you worked
with?
MS: Firstly, I felt
that most of the companies that I worked with were intent on taking advantage
of my naivety and their own financial greed. Veqtor was the only company that
to this day, have conducted themselves in an honourable and ethical way when
dealing with me/Fleet Micro Computer Systems Ltd.
My first involvement
was with Laser Force UK and for a while, things went well.
(Clarification: Laser
Force UK was unrelated to the Laserforce company out of Australia with a
similar name)
They decided to get a
copy made using the software in the guns and redesigned hardware. The company
they took it to, to get the job done may or may not have been aware what was
going down. Whatever... but the down side was that I had a big drop in sales
and we relied on sales to support a loan from Laser Force that would enable us
to continue with development and support on the Laser Guns. For my goodwill, I
had to repay the loan which caused substantial hardship and nearly took us to
the wall.
Then along popped
Pulsar. A new start, or should I say another bad move. They wanted me to design
something different to the current design. They had produced a vacuum formed
gun shell (that was a nightmare to put together) and had visions of a ‘V’
shaped vest electronics display and target arrangement. (This was later taken
on by Veqtor). So their system was duly designed and manufactured and they had
good success with the sales and we were back up and running. But then Pulsar
decided it would be more profitable to get the system manufactured
elsewhere.... I thought I had the system reasonably secure at that time by
introducing a dongle based scoring system but Pulsar managed to bypass that.
Eventually Laser
Force (UK) went bust, having had some substantial investment from a company in
Holland to develop a radio based system which they were unable to deliver. As
far as I know, the Dutch company forced the winding up of Laser Force, but the
directors started up a new company and a new venture involving/combining laser
tag and Go Karts (as far as I remember).
Pulsar, in the mean
time also went bust but the details escape me.
Around this time must
have been when someone from Laser Chaser came to get hold of my technology and
start to develop his own system. I only came across this by accident when
someone told me how much it sounded like my system. Sure enough, when I came
across his system at an exhibition, I discovered that my hand held controller
would operate his guns/jackets. Thus proving that his I/R communication control
had been copied from my system....
Having made good
progress in the reliability of the laser gun systems, I came across Tim Dallyn
at an exhibition (who at the time was working for Tim Shurruck if I remember
correctly). He had decided to go on his own and do his own Laser Tag thing and
chose our system to start out in Canada.
TC: How did
Actual Reality (AR) get started?
MS: So this is how
Actual Reality Inc came into being. The first system he bought went into a
mobile inflatable operation that was a big success and from there he employed
more people and premises to deal with sales and servicing. What had been in my
mind a really reliable gun cord turned out to be bad news. It was to be a long
time before I came up with the coiled, easily replaceable cable idea as used on
the AR system.
TC: Who
else was involved in the start up and in what capacity?
MS: I’m not sure, but
you can find the information on the Laser tag museum archives. I remember his
brother was involved in the early days in looking after repairs. While we were
developing the new AR system, we agreed to pay half of a software programmer’s
wages for a year to help with development costs. That guy was Al Levsen, who
was just amazingly enthusiastic and was tasked with writing the core software
known as PROSITE. Our programmer designed the comms system structure and spent
a lot of time in Canada working with Al getting everything together. One of the
major tasks was porting the software from Windows 98 to Windows XP. (Or was it
Windows 95 to 98?) Al also designed the Prosite Games Wizard which basically
allowed anyone to develop any game strategy that could be loaded into the guns
and targets just prior to starting the game, giving great flexibility.
TC: How did
you approach the development of this system? Can you describe the process for
creating both the hardware and the software and what made AR unique compared to
other laser tag systems?
MS: The approach to
developing the hardware and software was to end up with a modular system that
had great flexibility and reliability. We had our own injection mould tooling
produced that would allow easy reliable assembly of the gun housing.
One critical feature
that was essential for safety was the inclusion of a front safety touch
trigger. This meant that to operate the gun, one had to make contact with the
two front ‘touch buttons’ before the main trigger would operate.
This prevented anyone
from using the gun as a ‘physical’ weapon and smash someone in the face. This
had happened in the past with ‘pistols’. Touch sensitive buttons were used as
it would improve the reliability over mechanical switches which would always be
liable to fail....
The other design
upgrade was the manufacture of the front/rear covers. In the past, we used off
the shelf boxes and we had to up the image so we came up with the ‘octagon’
design with recessed windows for protection.
An injection mould
tool was then designed along with an aluminum back plate to which everything
was bolted. There was also a separate aluminum back plate to cover the battery
pack in case of any malfunction of the pack or associated electronics.
We also looked long
and hard at the connecting cable between the gun and jacket as this had been
our ‘Achilles heel’ for a long time. We eventually decided on both a hardware
and software solution. The hardware solution was to utilize a standard RJ45
network cable, but implemented using a custom made coiled version. The customer
would also be able to use a regular off the shelf cable as a backup.
The software was
something special.... It was implemented in such a way that the jacket
processor software would know if it lost communication with the gun ( i.e. the
gun/jacket cable was defective). This allowed a cable to be replaced in the
middle of a game with no loss of historic information for that game. When a
cable was replaced, the jacket processor would update the gun display with all
the current information and carry on as if nothing had happened.
As part of the jacket
system software, it was able to discriminate three separate incoming I/R
sources using software polling. It had been said it couldn’t be done, but it was.
At the time, it was perceived to be impossible with the available technology,
but our programmer Pete achieved the impossible..... With today’s technology,
it would be simple to have, say, eight or more separate I/R channels.... I
think we were also one of the first (if not the first) to introduce the feature
‘Good Shot’! Another superb achievement
by Pete!
With careful design,
we didn’t suffer from ‘cancelling’ either and never had done. Our I/R
transmission and reception algorithms were infallible in this respect.
Downloading was
another area that we put a lot of effort into making it simple. Our early
designs (including current Veqtor systems) relied on utilizing a custom
download ‘box’ into which you had to point the gun and pull the trigger at the
end of the game. Pete came up with a scheme (in conjunction with Prosite and
targets) whereby one only had to point the gun at a target and the download
process would be automatic, ending with a voice confirmation ‘download
successful)’. This meant no more queues waiting to download as the arena
targets were automatically switched over to ‘download stations’ at the end of
the game and a player could point his gun at any target to download. It
wouldn’t matter how many concurrent targets were designated as download
stations as they all buffered the incoming I/R data before passing it back to
Prosite for processing.
The ‘download box’
was a black box that took score data from the guns and fed it back to the
scoring PC. It was a feature of all our equipment ( up to AR kit) including
laser force, Pulsar, Veqtor and probably many others.... Planet Trog was the
full blown AR kit with targets that could be designated as download stations at
the end of the game - essentially a SMART download box.
Another interesting
feature was that of partial downloads.... Whenever a player went to a target to
reload, or get a feature, the data accumulated in the gun was sent to the
target as well and then forwarded to Prosite for intermediate processing,
giving a sort of real time update on the scoreboard. As close as you can get to
radio based scoring without radio..... That was my biggest regret- not bringing
a radio based system to market. We did some development work that was very
promising but it never came to fruition....
Other notable
features? I’m not sure, but certainly at the time the Games Wizard allowed
infinite variations to be put into a game scenario at game start time. I don’t
know of any other manufacturer at the time that could do that. Nowadays it’s
old hat with the advent of radio based systems.
TC: What
would someone need to know about this system (and the games) to be successful
playing AR?
MS: Depends on how
much you want to ‘cheat’. It was possible to cover up the front gun I/R sensors
and front jacket sensors and thus could only be hit from behind.... I never
used to do that but saw plenty who did. That detracts from the fun. Hiding and
sniping the unsuspecting is always good and making sure you get off a few good
shots to wipe out their shields. Having good rock solid designed software meant
we could achieve a fast rapid fire or machine gun fire. Limiting the shots
prevented players from going round just using the machine gun feature to wipe
out players.
TC: What
was the biggest challenge your company faced?
MS: Making the whole
system as reliable as possible and future proof with the advent of the Games
Wizard.
TC: When
was the height of success for AR?
MS: For me
personally, being invited to quote for the Disney Toy Story Laser Tag themed arena....
TC: Could
you please share more about the Disney Toy Story laser tag arena?
MS: AR, somehow, were
spotted by Disney scouts and were asked if they would be interested in putting
in a bid to build the Toy Story Laser Ride in Disney Orlando. I had just
arrived back in the UK from a visit and had to fly back to Edmonton the next
day to help get a bid back together. The outcome was that we would have won the
bid, but Disney were not happy with the equipment being designed/built in the
UK so the bid went to a company in Orlando....
TC: What
were some other successes?
MS: Installations in
Sweden ( Cybertown and two others). Cybertown is still going almost 20 years
later, all be it with an upgraded radio based system from Holland. And the
Robot installations in Holland.
The Robot was a
special feature ‘target’ that was bought by the company that put our
systems into Holland. They had one Green and one Red that acted as reload
stations once they were ‘destroyed’.
The installation in
West Edmonton Mall. AR overcame numerous obstacles before getting approval.
And I guess all the
other installations in the USA and Canada that I know little about. Especially
Planet Trog that somehow is still managing to function with equipment ‘out of
the Ark’.
TC: How
many laser tag sites used AR and how many were located in the United States?
MS: Sorry, I don’t
know
TC: Can you
talk about expanding into Xtreme Themes and Design (arena building)?
MS: This was a Tim
Dallyn dream that as far as I can tell never came to fruition, although I did
do some work on the electronics design.
TC: What
was the laser tag industry like when your company started and how did that
compare to the state of the industry in 2002?
MS: We started around
1989 and there was only Laser Quest and Laser Force in the UK. (as far as I
know). By 2002 there were countless offerings.
TC: What
was AR's relationship to Darklight?
MS: Tim Dallyn tried
to team up with Darklight with a view to being able to offer a radio based
system to potential customers in the USA and Canada but it never came to
anything.
TC: What
was AR's relationship to Veqtor?
MS: They didn’t have
one, but Fleet Micro did. During the AR development years, Fleet Micro
continued to assemble and build the Veqtor systems who were very successful.
TC: What
are your thoughts about the state of the laser tag industry today?
MS: It seems to be
healthy and well alive, although I have not had any direct involvement for
years. It’s nice to see it is still a thriving industry for many.
TC: What
did you go on to do after your time working on AR?
MS: In 2007 ish, I
decided to retire and sold out to Veqtor. In 2009 I came out of retirement to
work as a test engineer for a large electronics manufacturer. Originally it was
for a three month contract, but I stayed there for seven years and ended my
time as Principle Test Engineer. Very rewarding and interesting time. I finally
retired in December 2016.
TC: In 2012
you became the second recipient of the Industry Innovator Award for your
contributions to the laser tag industry (the only other recipient was George
Carter III in 2005). Tell me about your reaction to being honored at the ILTA
dinner where you were recognized.
MS: I was absolutely
dumbfounded to the point where when I was asked to speak to the assembly, I
just couldn’t. I regret that sincerely. I should have at least said something
to all those that were there. But I will be forever grateful for the award.
TC: Do you
have any additional thoughts to share?
MS: I wish Tim Dallyn
had not taken me for a ride in the final throws of ARs existence. My wife has
always said I should have stuck with Veqtor and by and large I agree with her.
The problem with that is Veqtor would not move away from their custom network
system and I advocated that they should switch to the AR network system. Had I
and Veqtor gone down that route, who knows what magic could have been developed.
That’s not to say that Veqtor hasn’t succeeded. They have. And both Fleet Micro
and AR have disappeared into the ether. They now have some truly unique and
innovative products that not many people know about. They keep their heads down
and get on with bringing new products and ideas to the market.
#####
This concludes my
interview with Martin Shoebridge and I wish to extend my thanks and
appreciation to him for taking the time to answer my questions and share his
insight from some of the early days of the laser tag industry. For more
information about the history of Actual Reality please visit the Laser Tag
Museum website, specifically the page linked below.
Comments or Questions?
Contact:
tivia@tiviachickloveslasertag.com
Websites:
www.tiviachickloveslasertag.com and www.photonforever.com
