Dave Nutting Associates
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Dave Nutting Associates was a video game consulting firm and a major contractor to Bally/Midway during the Golden Age of Arcade Games. They are particularly notable for creating the various video driver chips used in the Astrocade and various Midway arcade games such as Gorf. Dave's brother, Bill, also holds an important place in video game history, introducing the first commercial video game ever through his company Nutting Associates.
David Judd Nutting is a graduate of the Pratt Institute with a degree in industrial design. After leaving the Army Corps of Engineers, he joined the design firm of Brooks Stevens Associates. During his time there he was involved in a wide variety of projects, working on everything from Evinrude Outboard Motors, Mirro cookware, Bolens tractors, Studebaker, and 3M. For Willys, Nutting designed Jeep Grand Wagoneer, and went on to design the Enstrom Helicopter.
Dave Nutting Associates started as a general design and engineering firm in 1970. In 1974 Dave saw a LED-display clock in the window of a store, bought it, and turned it over to Jeff Frederiksen to reverse engineer how it worked. Using the ideas they learned from its operation they built a pinball machine that was run by a small microcontroller that used similar LED's for the score display. Compared to the mechanical versions the microcontroller replaced, the new design had almost no moving parts and was therefore considerably more reliable. Bally did not use the design immediately, so Nutting sold it to a small company in Phoenix, AZ, who introduced Spirit of '76 in 1975, before giving up on the pinball market. Bally introduced their own versions in 1976, forcing Williams, Gottlieb, and Stern Electronics to rush to catch up. When they did, Bally sued them for patent infringement but lost the lawsuit.
Around this time, Nutting was being acquired by Bally. During the later 1970s and early 1980s, Nutting increasingly turned to pure video-game design. Their games include Berzerk, Wizard of Wor, Tron, Spy Hunter and many others. Many of these games were based on a common video driver chip that was later used as the basis of the Astrocade game console. Bally shut down Dave Nutting Associates in 1984, possibly for reasons related to the video game crash of 1983.
Dave Nutting has since become an author, writing on science and quantum mechanics in The Language of Nature.
