Adventures in Toy Design: Part 2 — In 1979, when this story began, I had not yet completed college and I had never written a computer program. The closest I had come to writing a real program was fooling around with my TI-58 programmable calculator. Here’s a sample of what a program on that device looked like.¹…

The Making of Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 — Life is strange. In the summer of 1982, I spent about three months creating a list of 4,096 numbers, meticulously ensuring that every single number was the right value, and in the correct place in the list. When I finished, the only tangible evidence of my work was that long…

Geoffrey the Giraffe and the Tale of Two Cheeks I’ve been in the video game industry for 40+ years, starting in 1979. The first video game system I developed games for was the Atari 2600. My first two 2600 games were Space Jockey, for U.S. Games, and Donkey Kong, for…

I don’t like when my computer hides things from me. As a software/video game developer, I see tech tips everyday. Most of the time I will read the ones that sound interesting, but I find that I rarely, if ever, have the occasion to use the tip in the future…

My first job (1969) — NYC, teletypes and espionage — I read an article today in the Guardian about a new book coming out, “American Kompromat” by Craig Unger, about Russia’s (alleged) 40-year effort to cultivate Donald Trump as a Russian asset. Yuri Shvets, a former KGB spy, was a key source for Unger in writing the book. What caught…

The amazing story of its development. — Is there anyone left who hasn’t played the game where you remove tiles, one at a time, to clear the board? Have you ever wondered where it came from? I’ll bet we’ve all seen and/or played a game like this, as it’s probably been put on every computer, game system…

Adventures in Toy Design: Part 3 — In the 1970’s, Bill Dorhmann had arguably one of the most fun corporate jobs in the world. Bill was the Vice President of Research and Development for Parker Brothers, of Monopoly fame, and one of the most successful toy companies in the work. In the late 1970’s, in my days…

Adventures in Toy Design: Part 1 We had this toy idea for a voice scrambling helmet. It was 1979 (or thereabouts). The helmet would cover your face completely (think Darth Vader™), have an internal microphone and headset, and an external microphone and speaker. The child would put it on their…

And Got Over My Fear of Out-of-Tune Game Toons — When I first saw the Atari 2600 and played a few of the early games, one of the things that stood out to me was just how bad it sounded when a game attempted to play music. Before I started developing for the machine, as…