My officemate at Atari was a woman, one of the very few female programmers there. We worked on game cartridges for the Atari 400/800 for a couple of years; mostly we had separate projects, but we helped each other with code from time to time.
She was hired into our group with a /little/ programming experience, and had no knowledge at all about how the 400/800 computer worked. Fortunately she was a fast learner; she read a lot, asked lots of questions, and we were able to get her up to speed. Took about ten months for her to write her first cartridge (most projects were on the order of six months -- more, and you'd start getting the stink-eye from management).
Atari really did just throw people into projects, with little support or training. You just had to figure stuff out. I don't think this was even a conscious strategy, it was more like they got lucky enough that things tended to work out. (NB: Not a great long term strategy; Atari fell apart pretty quickly when things started to /not/ work out, and they didn't know what to fix, much less how).
A clone of Centipede is what got me a job at Atari. I was bummed that I never met Dona.
People are starting to complain more about the second fact more and more nowadays, even compared to 2 years ago. Will there start to be widespread men's only scholarships soon and other affirmative action style things for men? Who knows.
My son likes programming-ish things (like modding games). My daughter likes shopping and texting. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with one being a boy and the other being a girl. (Yet more female software developers would be great!)
Are you saying that caseorganic's desire not to read rants about gender mean that he is sexist? That seems like a baseless (and insulting) assumption...
I've never heard of Centipede before, are there any other "popular" games of the time that are not talked about much any more? I know of Pac-Man, Space Invaders, games that are that much a part of pop culture, but I'd never heard of Centipede.
...I still remember the rather lengthy comic book that came with the cartridge explaining the plight of the yars in their struggle against the armored cannon, or whatever.
Try to find an actual historic arcade. The games make more sense in context. In particular, Tempest has been redone in a dozen forms, but without the original spinner controller it's just not the same.
(QBert, on the other hand, is just fine in emulation.)
In Chicago (or, at least, down the street from me in the near-west suburbs) we have Galloping Ghost, which is $15 for unlimited all-day play; they have both Tempest (every time we've talked about going, Erin asks "but do they have Tempest?") and Q*Bert.
Woah, for some reason I always thought Xevious was from 1986 or so. I'm kind of shocked how many great games came out from 1980-1982...
To that list I'd add Spy Hunter (don't want to think how many quarters I sank into this without ever getting very far) and Gaplus (my favorite of the Galaxion spin-offs).
Defender (1980?) was great, but Stargate improved and built upon pretty much every aspect of it the same way that Galaga was an all-around improvement over Galaxian.
She was hired into our group with a /little/ programming experience, and had no knowledge at all about how the 400/800 computer worked. Fortunately she was a fast learner; she read a lot, asked lots of questions, and we were able to get her up to speed. Took about ten months for her to write her first cartridge (most projects were on the order of six months -- more, and you'd start getting the stink-eye from management).
Atari really did just throw people into projects, with little support or training. You just had to figure stuff out. I don't think this was even a conscious strategy, it was more like they got lucky enough that things tended to work out. (NB: Not a great long term strategy; Atari fell apart pretty quickly when things started to /not/ work out, and they didn't know what to fix, much less how).
A clone of Centipede is what got me a job at Atari. I was bummed that I never met Dona.