TDE EP35 - Atari Inc Coin-Op Engineer Jeff Bell

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.