Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth(nytimes.com) |
Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth(nytimes.com) |
She was hired into our group with a /little/ programming experience, and had no knowledge at all about how the 400/800 computer worked. Fortunately she was a fast learner; she read a lot, asked lots of questions, and we were able to get her up to speed. Took about ten months for her to write her first cartridge (most projects were on the order of six months -- more, and you'd start getting the stink-eye from management).
Atari really did just throw people into projects, with little support or training. You just had to figure stuff out. I don't think this was even a conscious strategy, it was more like they got lucky enough that things tended to work out. (NB: Not a great long term strategy; Atari fell apart pretty quickly when things started to /not/ work out, and they didn't know what to fix, much less how).
A clone of Centipede is what got me a job at Atari. I was bummed that I never met Dona.
Women receive fewer than a fifth of the bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science...
than this:
...even though they get nearly 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees...
"In 1980, 30 percent of the computer science degrees went to women."
If true, why is the percentage going down?
In contract, this interview with PacMan inventor Toru Iwatani in Programmers at Work is absolutely fantastic. http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pac...
http://atari.com/arcade/arcade/centipede
It's really difficult, and I think that it might have been partially designed to suck down quarters. The best Atari game is this:
...yeah it looks like crap, but he crammed it into 4K, and at the time there was literally nothing like it in the world.
Most people say this is the best Atari game:
http://www.atari.com/arcade/arcade/yars-revenge
...I still remember the rather lengthy comic book that came with the cartridge explaining the plight of the yars in their struggle against the armored cannon, or whatever.
ED: found the comic. I guess it's not that long:
http://www.atariage.com/comics/comic_thumbs.html?MagazineID=...
what
Well check out tempest and Super Locomotive (which hardly anyone else remembers). And Q*Bert. And Gorf.
Try to find an actual historic arcade. The games make more sense in context. In particular, Tempest has been redone in a dozen forms, but without the original spinner controller it's just not the same.
(QBert, on the other hand, is just fine in emulation.)
In the Northeast you can go to Funspot:
http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/
It's got the flavor of the real thing. Takes me back to the old days.
To that list I'd add Spy Hunter (don't want to think how many quarters I sank into this without ever getting very far) and Gaplus (my favorite of the Galaxion spin-offs).
Robotron:2084.
Gravitar.
Bosconian.
Red Baron and Battlezone.
Many, many quarters spent.
What amazes me is that you can still find Galaga in arcades today. If, of course, you can find arcades at all.