Before the Crash: Early Video Game History

Foreword by Ed Rotberg

vii Foreword When Mark asked me to write the foreword for Before the Crash, I was certainly flattered, but my first thought was: “Why me?” A little introspection quickly gave me the answer—I’m old! Certainly relative to this industry I’m old. Before I started to work for Atari, I had been working for a large pharmaceutical corporation, integrating microcomputers into lab equipment for real-time data acquisition and analysis—fun stuff, huh? In my spare time, however, I was programming the Xerox Sigma 7 computer and some of our SBC-80s to play games like Mastermind and refine games like the wonderful, text-based Star Trek game. A friend of mine at work knew of my passion and handed me a copy of an ad in InfoWorld (an industry rag) for programmers at Atari. I moved to California and my new career about a month later. The reason I mention all of this is because I want you to understand that I had stepped into a completely new world. By 1979, I had been programming professionally for six years already, at three different companies. The engineering team at Atari was a complete change from everything I knew. To this day, that group remains the single most talented and creative group of individuals I have ever had the privilege of working with. People like Ed Logg, Dave Theurer, Howard Delman, Lyle Rains, John Ray, Dave Sherman, Owen Rubin, Rich Adam, Mike Albaugh, Dave Sheppard, Jed Margolin . . . the list goes on and on. Everything was new back then. There weren’t many rules; there was no vast body of work before us pointing the way. Our fiveyear mission: to boldly create fun where no fun had gone before. We were pioneers given a speedy go-cart and a vast open roadway. Who needed a rearview mirror? In some ways, it did turn out to be about a five-year mission—before the Crash. Right about the time I arrived at Atari, the world had started to sit up and take note of video games. The VCS cartridge system was just mak00 FM.indd 7 3/20/12 12:53 PM viii Foreword ing its debut, and the media had started to actually report about what was happening in our fledgling industry. Oh, and Time-Warner had just bought Atari and was in the process of nudging Nolan Bushnell out of the company. But management in engineering kept the development process intact, and I was so jazzed about the new job that I couldn’t put it all in perspective at the time. All the same, it was a wonderful new job and though I didn’t know it at the time, it would become my career. To my mind, the best thing about the job was that it was not just technical—it was also creative. We were given a lot of leeway to create fun (which is not an easy task), with a new medium. It wasn’t a completely solitary job. We had small teams of three or four people, generally with one programmer, one hardware designer, one technician, and a project leader who may have been wearing one of the three previous “hats.” But everyone got along, there was no shortage of friendly suggestions, and it seemed like idea brainstorming was a daily spontaneous occurrence. We also had a lot of time for play, and I don’t mean strictly video game play, though there was plenty of that. Our team was close-knit, and we all actually liked one another. These were pretty heady times. Though we certainly did not think of it this way on a daily basis, we were aware that we were doing something special, breaking new ground, and being wildly successful at it. Almost every new game we produced would feature some new gameplay mechanic , or at least some novel technical approach that had never been done before. It kept us fresh, engaged, and working insanely long hours. Our idea sharing was not purely creative either. There were many times when someone would have a knotty problem to solve—maybe trying to reduce the cycle count on an inner loop of an algorithm—and we would all try to find the optimal solution (though it usually came from Mike Albaugh). A basic tenet of our job was to keep the cost down. Saving a single chip in the game-board design was a big deal profit-wise, so we often traded...