The Ted Dabney Experience

Jeremy Saucier is Assistant VP at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.Jeremy talks to us about the history and evolution of the Strong Museum and its pedagogical remit - from American history and Industrialisation to a focus on play - and gives us a fascinating insight into the day-to-day management of a museum. With a doctoral degree in history and a degree in American Studies, Jeremy was a natural fit for his role at The Strong, with its extensive archive of original material, from concept art and design documents to internal company memos from Video Arcade stalwarts such as Williams, Bally and most notably Atari.

Jeff Bell was a hardware engineer in Atari Inc’s coin-op division and officially the longest serving employee of the company; literally the last person to switch off the lights in 2004. Jeff walks us through his formative years learning the basics of electronics at his father’s desk, the brotherhood of Atari Inc, suspected mob involvement in the early videogames industry and Nolan Bushnell’s Bermuda shorts.

For this episode we speak with none other than Allan Alcorn, Atari employee number three after Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, and the engineer of Pong, one of the very first video arcade games.

Senior corporate executive, serial entrepreneur, automotive designer and fine artist. Roger Hector is not only a successful businessman but a bona fide creative polymath. A long time ago, Roger sharpened his pencils at Atari Inc, working alongside co-founder Nolan Bushnell and creative director George Opperman on a vast range of videogame projects. Hector became R&D manager at Atari, before leaving to co-found his own games company, Videa, with Howard Delman and Ed Rotberg, programmer of Atari’s Battlezone.

Part 2: Eugene Jarvis cut his teeth in the Atari pinball division before going on to produce the groundbreaking Defender for Williams Electronics. Also for Williams (contracted as Vid Kids, his new company with Defender co-creator Larry DeMar) was Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Jarvis left Vid Kids in 1984 to attend Stanford University where he gained an MBA in 1986. He then returned to Williams to design the OTT run and gun title Narc (programmed with George Petro) and, with Mark Turmell, Robotron’s spiritual successor, Smash TV. To this day Eugene produces popular arcade video game titles for his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc.

Eugene Jarvis cut his teeth in the Atari pinball division before going on to produce the groundbreaking Defender for Williams Electronics. Also for Williams (contracted as Vid Kids, his new company with Defender co-creator Larry DeMar) was Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Jarvis left Vid Kids in 1984 to attend Stanford University where he gained an MBA in 1986. He then returned to Williams to design the OTT run and gun title Narc (programmed by George Petro) and, with Mark Turmell, Robotron’s spiritual successor, Smash TV. To this day Eugene produces popular arcade video game titles for his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc.

Dr Alan Meades teaches the undergraduate and post-graduate game design courses at Canterbury Christ Church University and is the author of Arcade Britannia, published by MIT Press. After dedicating so many episodes of the show to the mythic American arcade of the late Seventies and early Eighties (in some ways perhaps more a figment of our collective imagination than we might care to admit) it was wonderful having Alan provide a much wider historical context of the amusement arcade, actually dating back hundreds of years and all via a uniquely British lens.

Dave Sherman joined Atari shortly prior to Nolan Bushnell’s departure and was at the company through its precipitous near-collapse and subsequent restructuring during the infamous market crash of ’83 and ’84. Sherman worked alongside Dave Theurer on iconic such as I, Robot and Missile Command, and shares many an anecdote about those early days, including soundly beating Bushnell at his own predilection, the strategy board game, Go. After Atari, Dave engineered a dual-purpose CAD system, generating fluid, texture-mapped polygon graphics for videogame application a good eight years before Sony ruled the roost with the Playstation.

The Ted Dabney Experience is a podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander). We host long-form conversations with the leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op video arcade gaming. Our guests have included Evelyn Seto (graphic designer at Atari, Inc., alongside George Opperman), Warren Davis (Q*Bert), Jeff Lee (Q*Bert, Mad Planets), Mike Hally (Star Wars, Akka Arrh), Ed Logg (Asteroids, Centipede), Owen Rubin (Space Duel, Major Havoc), Carol Kantor (the industry’s very first market researcher), Doug Wismer (Canadian monitor manufacturer Electrohome), Kevin Hayes (former MD of Atari Ireland), Walter Day (founder of the world-famous Twin Galaxies arcade), John Newcomer (Joust, Sinistar) and many more. The podcast is produced and edited by Richard May with a bespoke sound suite by Ghost of Wood.

Franz Lanzinger programmed the singular Crystal Castles for Atari, Inc. Released in the summer of 1983 and housed within a typically eye-catching Atari cabinet, the game found modest success as a coin-op title and was adapted for numerous home platforms. Franz talks to us about being the person to establish the long-overdue display of creator credits in video arcade games, meeting avid arcade gamer Steven Spielberg during the development of Atari’s ill-fated Gremlins arcade game, and then quitting the company in a fit of pique following a dispute with management over proposed creator royalties.

Jonathan Hurd coded Food Fight at General Computer Corp for Atari. A decidedly ‘non-violent’ game amid a galaxy of shooters, Food Fight was GCC’s first title for a smart-thinking Atari after the infamous Super Missile Attack lawsuit was settled (for more on Super Missile Attack, listen to our interview with GCC’s Steve Golson).

In any video arcade, especially during the proverbial Golden Age of the Seventies and Eighties, it wasn’t always the games on screen that first caught the eye but the colourful, imposing, sometimes lurid cabinets that housed them. This was bona fide pop art for the coin-op kids of America and beyond. Paul Niemeyer started his career at developer Bally Midway during the early Eighties, working on such titles as Ms. Pac-Man, Tapper and Spy Hunter. He also had a hand in creating such impressive cabinets as Discs of Tron, Satan’s Hollow and the peculiar Wacko. Niemeyer tells us about the precision art of cutting and layering art screens, life at Midway during the Bally takeover, working with the so-called Bally Pinball art gods, the development of the notorious and enduring Mortal Kombat and having his homework marked by Sylvester Stallone.

We speak with Walter Day, the grandfather of e-sports and the inspiration for Wreck-it-Ralph’s avuncular arcade manager, Mr Litwack. Walter is the founder of the long-defunct but world-famous Twin Galaxies video arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the international scoreboard of the same name. Day waxes lyrical about the trials and tribulations of running an arcade during the Golden Age of electronic gaming, the films Chasing Ghosts and King of Kong, his brief stint as an oil futures trader and, of course, transcendental meditation. We also ask Walter for his official position on the ongoing furore surrounding Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong high-scores.

Lee Feuling is a retired United States Airforce and American Airlines pilot who, once upon a time, was a coder for Centuri Video Games in Hialeah, Florida. Centuri was best known for its hugely popular licensed releases of Japanese titles such as Track & Field and Phoenix, but of far more interest to TDE listeners is Tim Stryker’s vector shooter, Aztarac, and for an even deeper cut, the unreleased Grabber Goose (another Stryker vector title); not to mention Feuling’s very own, also unreleased, Freddy Flames. Lee reminisces at length about his close relationship with the visionary Tim Stryker, Centuri’s productive but underutilsed in-house R&D department and flying fast jets over Saudi Arabia.

Howell Ivy is the creator of Exidy’s infamous Death Race. Released in 1976, this was the first arcade game to stir a moral panic over videogame violence in America, leading the company to hire round-the-clock security in response to many green-ink letters and phoned-in death threats. Exidy followed Death Race with the relatively innocuous but very successful Circus; Venture, arguably the spiritual forerunner to Atari’s Gauntlet, and then back to controversy with the genuinely gruesome light gun game, Chiller (1986). Howell departed Exidy under somewhat difficult circumstances and joined Sega of America where he oversaw the development of the company’s early Virtua series of games, and his long tenure at the company saw him bear witness to one of the most revolutionary periods of videogame design.

Evelyn Seto worked at Atari under creative director George Opperman on some of the company’s most iconic graphic material, including arcade cabinets such as Fire Truck and Soccer, a wealth of arcade game sell sheets and console packaging for the consumer division; not to mention the famous Atari ‘Fuji’ logo. Evelyn’s long and storied career also saw her employed by industry giants HP and Apple, and Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell at his post-Atari toy/tech ventures AG Bear and Androbot. With guest co-host Tim Lapetino, author of Art of Atari and co-author of Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon.

In accordance with Theurer’s Law - named after Missile Command and Tempest programmer Dave Theurer, which states that every programmer’s first game will be a relative failure - Ed Rotberg’s first game for Atari, Baseball, didn’t exactly score a home run. However his sophomore title, 1981’s Battlezone, with its distinctive green XY monitor graphics and unique periscope-adorned cabinet is rightly regarded as one of Atari’s finest releases of the coin-op videogame Golden Age. You’ll also learn about Battlezone variants, such as the well-documented but still fascinating development of the Bradley Trainer (a version of the game adapted for military training purposes) and a unique Stereoscopic Battlezone that never left the lab.

Excerpts from our interviews with the gentlemen who created Gottlieb’s Golden Age Video Arcade titles Q*Bert, Mad Planets and Krull. Featuring Warren Davis, Jeff Lee, Matt Householder and David Thiel.

The Ted Dabney Experience is a podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander - A Journey to The Top of an Arcade Classic). We host intimate conversations with the leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op Video Arcade gaming. Our guests have included Warren Davis and Jeff Lee (Q*Bert), Mike Hally (Star Wars), Ed Logg (Asteroids, Centipede), Jamie Fenton (Gorf), Owen Rubin (Space Duel, Major Havoc), Carol Kantor (the industry’s very first market researcher), Doug Wismer (Canadian monitor manufacturer Electrohome), Kevin Hayes (former MD of Atari Ireland) and many more.

Rich Adam joined Atari in 1978, initially working on the company’s pinball games before being assigned the role of Junior Programmer on Dave Thuerer’s Missile Command. Rich went on to take the captain’s chair for the hard-as-nails Gravitar, arguably the pinnacle of Atari’s vector game output, and the game for which he is most well known. Talking to Rich was a real treat. He was by turns amusingly candid and quietly philosophical, and Paul was finally able to take further notes for The Official TDE Hot Tub Logbook.