ZAP by Story of atari

Author:Story of atari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-11-30T00:42:04+00:00

After graduating from the University of Berkeley where he majored in electrical engineering, specializing in large-scale computer system analysis, Miller took a straight job with a company that built control systems for lumber mills. This was back when Nolan Bushnell was putting the finishing touches on Pong. Miller, in fact, played Pong at Andy Capp's, his favorite hangout, when it was first tested there. He spent the next two years at NASA and a semiconductor company before answering an Atari ad in the help-wanted section of a local newspaper in 1977.

Atari was about to come out with its VCS and needed engineers who could design game cartridges. Miller's first project was to convert Surround, a fairly popular arcade game, into the home video version. He went out to the arcades, which he had never done before, and played the game until he saw which improvements to make. He also designed Hangman and Basketball and contributed to Atari's two home computers, the 800 and 400, before leaving the company two and a half years later.

David Crane, twenty-eight, had been into consumer electronics since he started playing pinball before he was ten years old. He still plays every arcade game that comes out. After graduating from the DeVry School of Technology in Phoenix, he worked at National Semiconductor for two years. He met Alan Miller at an apartment complex in Sunnyvale where they both lived, and Al recruited him to work with him at the programming department of Atari. He also worked on the 800 and 400 home computers before going to Activision.

Impressed with Activision's rapid success, William F. X. Grubb, a former vice president of marketing at Atari, started Imagic, the second Atari spin-off, in September 1981 with a staff of Atari and Activision defectors. A software-only company like Activision, Imagic added a new wrinkle by designing games for Atari's VCS and Mattel's Intellivision when it entered the market. Imagic shipped its first game in March 1982 and by June was doing $15 million in business. Rob Fulop, twenty-four, an ex-Atari engineer seeking fame and fortune, joined Imagic in the middle of that year and became the company's first superstar designer. His first project, Demon Attack, shipped $30 million in sales by the end of the year.

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Before he left the company, Howie Delman epitomized the Atari video-game designer. He looked more like a rock star, like Billy Joel in fact, than an electrical engineer. (Of course, there are those who would argue that Billy Joel looks more like an electrical engineer than a rock star.) Delman is one of those ten in a million programmers Atari considered very special. Most hardware designers--engineers who physically build the game--know something about programming but don't qualify as programmers. Likewise, most programmers know something about hardware design but don't qualify as hardware designers.

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