George Carter III (born July 28, 1945) is an inventor who created Photon, the first commercialized version of laser tag, as well as other inventions such as the personal watercraft and certain versions of all-terrain vehicles. George Carter invented the Photon after being inspired by Star Wars.
Baja Raceway
In 1969 Carter's first business, prior to Photon, was a dirt-track grand prix concession car course in Phoenix called the Baja Raceway. The racetrack was across the street from an amusement park called Legend City, which included the music venue Compton Terrace. Jess Nicks, Stevie Nicks's dad, owned the amphitheater, and Fleetwood Mac played the venue several times, beginning on August 29, 1980. As Carter recalls, the band and associates arrived in limousines at the Baja Raceway after the show. It was around midnight, and the track was closing.
"We stayed open just for them," Carter told Vice. "We stayed open 'til like two in the morning. They spent a bunch of money and had a great time. One of the people with them was their accountant [or] manager—he gave me a card and said 'get in touch with me, we're interested in this business.' I'd heard that a hundred times before, that people were interested. But he actually called me a couple months later."
Baja Raceway was the first concession track anywhere that had two-seat vehicles. This led to bigger, faster vehicles that Carter went on to design and build himself instead of going to third parties to purchase the vehicles. Creating them himself created the ability to better control the go-kart experience and ensure maximum revenue by reducing the likelihood of vehicles being out of service due to maintenance. The tracks that came after the first Baja Raceway were made better, and the team created bigger, faster vehicles, using full-sized automotive tires and wheels. The Grand Prix tracks were very successful, and led Carter to Dallas, and with celebrity investors, included Lindsay Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, the actress Beverly Sassoon and others ultimately helped fund a new "chaparral grand prix" race track in Dallas, chosen for its growing economy and cheap land. At the grand opening, Lindsay Buckingham gave away signed helmets to those present.
Photon / Laser Tag
Photon is Carter's most well-known, and most successful, invention. Born from Carter's love of Star Wars, it was while he was watching movies that Carter got the idea to create a laser tag system that could bring to real life the fun of cops and robbers little boys played as children. Carter's previous venture, the Grand Prix tracks, had done well and after the location in Dallas was closed and the land sold for more than three times its worth, he went back to the laser tag idea that he had shelved several years earlier because technology was not yet where it needed to be for the game to be possible. The first Photon location was opened on March 28, 1984, at 12630 E Northwest Highway, Suite 300 in Dallas, Texas.
Carter revealed in an exhaustive interview aired by Newsweek on 15 July 1984 that he was investing considerably in quickly expanding the game centres across United States. In 1985 Photon was featured in a segment on ABC's 20/20 news program. The success of Photon was undeniable with the lure of playing in a videogame-like experience fun for young adults. Players would enter into the arena where they would be issued passports that were used by the Photon computers and would purchase the tickets used for play. Players would enter into the Photon staging area where they would put on the equipment, and then enter into. Chicago Tribune reported in July 1986 how George Carter himself imported the Photon game centre in Palatine. The report described the game centre as a "futuresque war zone". At that time, as per the report, Carter had opened Photon game centres in nine locations across America. In an October 1986 report on Carter done by The Washington Post, he revealed that by that time, 16 Photon centres had been started, with 15 undergoing completion and above of 60 other centres had been awarded to contractors across the globe.