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…

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 ea…

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.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience

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.…

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…

Part 1: 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…

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 collecti…

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, inc…

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., alongsi…

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 credi…

Jonathan Hurd coded Food Fight at General Computer Corp for Atari. A decidedly ‘non-violent’ game amid a galaxy of shooters, Food Fight was GCC’s first title for a smart-thinking Atari after the infamous Super Missile Attack lawsuit was settled (for more on Super Missile Attack, listen to our interview with GCC’s Steve Golson).…

In any video arcade, especially during the proverbial Golden Age of the Seventies and Eighties, it wasn’t always the games on screen that first caught the eye but the colourful, imposing, sometimes lurid cabinets that housed them. This was bona fide pop art for the coin-op kids of America and beyond. Paul Niemeyer started his career at developer Ba…

We speak with Walter Day, the grandfather of e-sports and the inspiration for Wreck-it-Ralph’s avuncular arcade manager, Mr Litwack. Walter is the founder of the long-defunct but world-famous Twin Galaxies video arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the international scoreboard of the same name. Day waxes lyrical about the trials and tribulations of running…

Lee Feuling is a retired United States Airforce and American Airlines pilot who, once upon a time, was a coder for Centuri Video Games in Hialeah, Florida. Centuri was best known for its hugely popular licensed releases of Japanese titles such as Track & Field and Phoenix, but of far more interest to TDE listeners is Tim Stryker’s vector shooter, A…

Howell Ivy is the creator of Exidy’s infamous Death Race. Released in 1976, this was the first arcade game to stir a moral panic over videogame violence in America, leading the company to hire round-the-clock security in response to many green-ink letters and phoned-in death threats. Exidy followed Death Race with the relatively innocuous but very …

Evelyn Seto worked at Atari under creative director George Opperman on some of the company’s most iconic graphic material, including arcade cabinets such as Fire Truck and Soccer, a wealth of arcade game sell sheets, and console packaging for the consumer division. Not to mention the famous Atari ‘Fuji’ logo. Evelyn’s long and storied career also s…

In accordance with Theurer’s Law - named after Missile Command and Tempest programmer Dave Theurer, which states that every programmer’s first game will be a relative failure - Ed Rotberg’s first game for Atari, Baseball, didn’t exactly score a home run. However his sophomore title, 1981’s Battlezone, with its distinctive green XY monitor graphics …

Excerpts from our interviews with the gentlemen who created Gottlieb’s Golden Age Video Arcade titles Q*Bert, Mad Planets and Krull. Featuring Warren Davis, Jeff Lee, Matt Householder and David Thiel.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience

Rich Adam joined Atari in 1978, initially working on the company’s pinball games before being assigned the role of Junior Programmer on Dave Thuerer’s Missile Command. Rich went on to take the captain’s chair for the hard-as-nails Gravitar, arguably the pinnacle of Atari’s vector game output, and the game for which he is most well known. Talking to…

Matt Householder co-designed Gottlieb’s underrated arcade adaptation of Peter Yates’s ill-fated Krull, before going on to join Atari’s consumer division to work on home adaptations of video arcade hits. With his partner Candi Strecker he went on to create and produce the critically acclaimed California Games (and much more) for Epyx. We chat with M…

Ed Logg, AKA Super Duper Game Guy, is the programmer’s programmer. Cited by his contemporaries as one of the all-time greats, Ed designed and co-developed arcade smash hits such as Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Super Breakout and Gauntlet. In 2011, Logg was awarded a Pioneer Award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in recognition of…

Steve Calfee has rarely gone on record about his time at Atari. His managerial role at the company’s Coin-Op division saw him channel the work of well-known programmers such as Rich Adam, Dennis Koble, Dave Theurer and Howard Delman into Video Arcade smash hits such as Canyon Bomber, Space Duel and Missile Command.…

David Thiel is perhaps best known for his pinball audio work on titles such as Tron: Legacy, Alien, Dialed In, Avatar and Family Guy, but he was also responsible for everything aural on all the Golden Age Gottlieb video classics (Reactor, Q*Bert, Mad Planets, Krull, The Three Stooges). From synth salesman to local rock star to Gottlieb and beyond (…

Tim Lapetino on the underrated yet enduring legacy of Atari creative director George Opperman, and behind the scenes on both The Art of Atari and the forthcoming Pac-Man: The Birth of an Icon.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience

Honing his coding skills producing games for the Apple II, Bob Flanagan joined Atari in 1984. It was a difficult time for the company and the industry as a whole, yet Bob still managed to work on some of their best loved releases, including Paperboy, Marble Madness and Gauntlet. Bob tells us about collaborating with the brilliant but demanding Mark…

Jeff Lee was the original video artist at D. Gottlieb and Company, designing the character Q*Bert and working on titles such as Krull, The Three Stooges and the late Kan Yabumoto’s seminal Mad Planets. Jeff talks to The Ted Dabney Experience about his days at Gottlieb (later Mylstar) and, most importantly, the origin of Q*Bert’s vestigial limb.…

Recruited by the company in 1976, Dennis Koble was one of Atari’s earliest coin-op game designers. Koble stayed with Atari for five years and was responsible for such notable titles as Avalanche, Sprint 2 and Dominos, before leaving to co-found Imagic. In 1984 Dennis would return to coin-op as Director of Software for Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnel…

Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast

The inimitable Steve Golson reminisces about his days evading Atari’s radar with GCC, subsequently being co-opted by the former for arcade classics such as the frantic Food Fight and the singular Quantum, and of course Crazy Otto (aka Midway’s Ms. Pac-Man).Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience

A brief introduction to The Ted Dabney Experience podcast. Originally released as a segment for the Retro Asylum Christmas Special episode, 2020. The Ted Dabney Experience is brought to you in association with ACAM, The American Classic Arcade Museum.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience & The Retro Asylum

We talk with Rampage co-creator Brian Colin about the early days at Bally Midway, applying his traditional animation know-how to the seminal Discs of Tron and meeting The Rock.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience

The Ted Dabney Experience podcast talks with Kevin Hayes, former Managing Director of Atari Ireland. If you played an Atari arcade game in Europe during the proverbial Golden Age of video games, including popular third-party licences such as Cinematronics’ Dragon’s Lair, it bore Kevin’s fingerprints. We also discuss goat slaughter, littering and sm…

TDE Podcast takes you from the North East Yorkshire coastal town of Bridlington to Miami Beach with one of the very few Brits to have developed coin-op videogames for the American market during the Golden Age, Mr Andy Walker.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience

An in-depth discussion with John Newcomer, designer and lead developer of one of the most unique and enduring arcade games of the Golden Age, Joust. John talks to The Ted Dabney Experience about his influences and inspirations, hits and misses, his design philosophy, videogame violence and working with Eugene Jarvis, Warren Davis and the late, grea…

Electrohome supplied CRT monitors to all the big-name video arcade game manufacturers of the Golden Age, including Atari, Gremlin and Midway. Doug talks to us about how the company was saved from potential oblivion by arcade gaming; the pen, paper and handshake conception of Atari’s first vector monitor (over a pinball machine in Chuck E. Cheese) a…

Mike Hally devoted a quarter of a century to Atari, from the Sunnyvale years through Time Warner, literally turning off the lights when the company closed its doors for good in 2002. The Ted Dabney Experience talks with Mike about the gentleman’s arcade game, Gravitar, lost classic Akka Arrh, shooting aliens on toilets and Atari’s seminal coin-op t…

The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast talks to Space Duel designer Owen Rubin about the frontier days of videogame creation at Atari, the volatility of vector hardware, the original Boss Key, disco dancing and Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell’s infamous pool parties.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast

The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast catches up with a long-time friend, ACAM’s Gary Vincent. We discuss Gary’s early days at Funspot, NH, his participation in Randy Fromm’s Arcade School, Funspot’s transition from electromechanical to video arcade and the establishment of ACAM. Gary shares his views on keeping old games alive, ACAM’s educational miss…

TDE sits down with Jamie Fenton, the developer of the original multi-game shooter, Gorf. Digging deep into Jamie’s early life and career with Dave Nutting Associates and Midway, we talk transgender issues, Datsun sports cars, Larry Cuba of Star Wars SFX fame, the original US military application of the Gorf flight stick, the ill-fated Robby Roto an…

TDE talks to Q*Bert co-creator Warren Davis about the early days of videogame design at Gottlieb, lost Laserdisc classic Us Vs Them, his time at Williams Electronics working alongside Eugene Jarvis, and hanging out with Aerosmith.Bởi The Ted Dabney Experience