
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 18, 1993                   TAG: 9307160057
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: F-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BY JOHN MINTZ THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE WAR ROOM FIGHTS INTO THE GAME ROOM

Two companies that made combat simulators for the Pentagon during the Cold War are striking deals with Japanese arcade game makers to create mock tank cockpits where children - or their parents - could stage realistic battles.

Bethesda, Md.-based Martin Marietta Corp.'s announcement last week that it will license its tank simulation gear to Tokyo-based Sega Enterprises Ltd. may be the ultimate example of "defense conversion," the process by which Pentagon contractors hawk their military hardware for commercial use.

Players who sit in the simulator would observe taped footage of a battle scene - a desert shot that resembles the terrain in Iraq, for example. Using Martin Marietta computers, the players would observe the opposing tanks' feints and thrusts, and blast away.

"We're not aware of anything this sophisticated out there," said Charles Manor, Martin Marietta's spokesman. "The scenes will appear much more realistic than anything seen before this." Not so, said Marietta's main competitor in the Pentagon's combat simulator market, Salt Lake City-based Evans & Sutherland Computer. In March it announced a similar deal with NAMCO Ltd., another top Japanese maker of electronic amusement games, for a "next-generation" arcade game.

Its announcement followed by several months a decision by General Electric Co.'s aerospace division to sell simulator hardware to Sega. Since then, Martin Marietta bought GE's aerospace division, and is forging ahead with both Sega deals.

The movie-quality games need not involve only play-acting at combat, although past experience in the arcade industry suggests that's a top money-maker. The computer hardware and software that the two defense firms are licensing to the Japanese could be used to create fantasies of speeding in the Indy 500, visiting Venus, going over Niagara Falls in a barrel or anything else imaginable.

The new twist on the simulator scene merges two industry sectors becoming more fantastically sophisticated by the month.

Pentagon planners increasingly are relying on nationwide networks of computers that simulate battles involving tanks, jets, missiles and divisions of troops across imagined desert and mountain theaters. Military officials are testing and rewriting battlefield doctrine by organizing these games over fiber-optic links.

Bomber pilots can train for a mission, for example, by using computer-generated images, drawn from highly detailed photographs, showing actual enemy airfields, oil depots and electric utilities, all in scale, in three dimensions and even in color.

Meanwhile, the electronic games industry is trying to use computer chips to create "virtual reality." Firms are outfitting participants with special video helmets and sensory gloves that immerse them in a three-dimensional fantasy world.

Sega also is a partner of a British firm called W Industries, which created "Legend Quest," involving a race for treasure in a castle. The players, wearing helmets with eyepieces, discern one another as the fictional characters in the fantasy.

John Lenyo, marketing manager for the Martin Marietta simulator division in Florida, said Sega should have some of the nontank prototypes in arcades by early 1994, and the tank game out by the end of next year.

Lenyo said the companies are restricted in the degree of verisimilitude they can bring to their military ventures.

"It won't be exactly like a tank," he said. "That's classified."

by CNB