dcbailey

Hello! Do you mean what am I most proud of in my entire life so far? If that's your meaning, I believe I am most proud of reinventing my work in my late 40s. When I was in my late 40s, I wanted a different direction after 25 years of programming and systems analysis work. I earned two master's degrees beginning when I was 48, and I worked hard to earn a position as a faculty member at a university. It's hard to take up a new profession later in life, and I'm proud of that work.

Hi! I worked in the coin-op part of Atari from 1980 to 1982, so my experience was in arcade games. I needed a ton of help from programmers around me who had much more experience and training than I had, in order for me to be able to program Centipede and make it look different from other video games at the time. I had to be taught every hack and workaround that was used in Centipede. The problems were the ones you listed--limited memory, limited cycle time, and so on. It took determination on my part to learn to work with Atari's great custom hardware and with the 6502 microprocessor in order to realize the visual effects I wanted for Centipede.

Maybe I'm most proud of what I call "happy accidents." One of those happy accidents was needing a trackball for a control since I was terrible with buttons, which had been used in the past. A second thing that was an accident, but turned out well, was the discovery of a differently tweaked color palette, which I think gave the game an edge in the long run.

I don't know if creative solutions in video games these days are accidents! Have you heard anyone talk about accidental discoveries that make a current game better? Interesting question...

Did you mean video game? If that's your meaning, I think the video game I've played and enjoyed most over the many years is Tetris. I first played it on a PC in the 1980s, and then I've played it in many other forms over three decades now. It's simple but it never loses its appeal in my view. My current favorite games are word games on my phone. I always liked word games in the past--on paper and board games--and I love having a lot of choices of word games on my phone now. What a treat!

It takes hard work and a lot of concentration and focus to embark on and then complete any creative project, and it was the same back then at Atari. All creative projects demand specialized knowledge and skills, too, as well as daydreaming, inspiration, accidental discoveries, and luck.

All those things were true at Atari in the early days of making video games. Perhaps the one thing that was most different at Atari in those days, that I've never encountered anywhere else in my work, was the feeling of being on a frontier where there is no road map to look to as an example.

Because the video game industry was new, we weren't repeating past successes, we were forging new ground each day. That can be unnerving and lead to feeling lost sometimes, but it is also exciting and innervating at the same time. I remember wanting to have time and energy to dream more and dream bigger. I wanted to find new ways to use games to make people happy and to teach them ideas and concepts at the same time. I think I've continued through the years to want to use digital tools in those same ways.

I "discovered" Centipede's different color palette as I watched the screen while our technician was making adjustments to the prototype game. I think he was maybe setting a potentiometer for the monitor, and whatever he was doing caused the color palette to change from primary colors to hot pastel colors. I made a little yip of approval for our technician to keep those colors, and that's what I called a discovery. It was only something I noticed instead of a discovery, I suppose, but it ended up that I could use the regular primary colors plus the hot pastel colors, and I loved it.