Dona Bailey | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1955 (age 68–69) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Arkansas at Little Rock |
| Occupation(s) | Video game programmer Educator |
| Notable work | Centipede |
Dona Bailey (born 1955) is an American video game programmer and educator. Bailey, along with Ed Logg in 1981, developed Atari, Inc.'s arcade video game Centipede. [1] [2] [3]
Dona Bailey was born in 1955 in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated high school early and started attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the age of 16. She accelerated her education by taking classes year-round, and by the age of 19, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Psychology with three minors in English, Math and Biology. She continued her education by earning a master's degree in Math. [4]
As a young programmer, Bailey was hired by General Motors in 1978 and trained in 6502 assembly language programming. She worked there for two years on displays, [5] and microprocessor-based cruise control systems. [6] Bailey's first exposure to video games came from when she first heard the song "Space Invader" by The Pretenders. A friend told her the song was inspired by the arcade video game Space Invaders . After becoming interested in what a video game was, her friend took her to a nearby bar which had a Space Invaders arcade cabinet. Bailey noticed that the display on Space Invaders resembled the display she worked with on the Cadillac at GM. [7] She later found out that Atari was using the same microprocessor in its games. [2] This inspired her to leave GM and move to Sunnyvale, California with the intention of working for Atari. [4]
In 1980, Bailey joined Atari, Inc.'s coin-op division, where she was the only woman. [6] [3] In an interview, Bailey recalled that Atari had a notebook of possible game ideas at the time. Of the 30 or so entries, the only one without "lasering or frying things" was a short description of a bug winding down the screen. She said, "It didn't seem bad to shoot a bug." [8] Within a four-person team, she became the software developer and software engineer on Centipede . [2] [7] Ed Logg, a supervisor at Atari at the time, assigned Bailey to do the programming on Centipede. Logg said he worked on the game's design, while Bailey did "about half the programming". [9] Centipede went on to become Atari's second best-selling coin-op game. [10] Due to the game's popularity, Atari's production line was forced to run two shifts to keep up with demand. [11]
Centipede was also one of the first coin-op based arcade machines to have a significant female player base. This was intentional, as Logg and Bailey designed the game to appeal to a broad audience, not just male players. The game's vibrant pastel colors and the trackball-based gameplay appealed to both male and female players. Centipede’s unique color palette is credited to Bailey. [6] While most games used bright colors, Bailey chose a pastel color palette for Centipede, which was caused by a happy accident when the game’s technician was making adjustments to the game. Bailey said, "I was in front of the cabinet, watching the changes that were cycling through on the screen as he worked. Suddenly the regular primary colors on the screen changed to hot and vivid pastel colors I had never seen before, and I made a yip of approval and asked our technician to keep those colors." [12] After Centipede, Bailey was working on a game titled "Weather War", but since processors at the time were so limited, she was unable to make the game include everything she wanted. [2] [13] Bailey left Atari before the game was finished. [13]
Bailey left Atari in 1982 and went to work at Videa (later renamed Sente Technologies), founded by three former Atari employees. [1] During her time at Videa, one of the games she worked on that never made it past the prototype phase, was a game that she called “The Glass Bead Game”, named after the Hermann Hesse novel by the same name. [14] She later took PC contract roles for Activision, working on a two-person game with Paul Allen Newell. [15] In 1985, after she left Activision, she decided to leave the video game industry altogether. [14]
In 1997, Bailey moved back to Arkansas to take care of her aging parents. [11] At 48 years old, Bailey earned two more master's degrees. Her second master's degree is in Education in Instructional Design, and her third master's degree is in Professional and Technical Writing. [15] [16] In 2007, she was the keynote speaker at the Women in Games International Conference. [5]
In 2008, Bailey joined the faculty in the department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock [17] where she taught until her retirement. [4] In addition to writing classes, Bailey taught multimedia classes and the software 3ds Max. [5] [14]
In April 2013, Dona Bailey was a guest speaker at Indie Tech Talk, a lecture series presented by the Game Innovation Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. [14] In September 2015, she was a guest speaker at The Venture Center in Little Rock, Arkansas at their monthly technical speaker event, Code•IT! [18] In November 2018, Dona Bailey was an honored guest speaker alongside Bonnie Ross, Brenda Laurel, Megan Gaiser, Amy Hennig, Susan Jaekel, Jen MacLean, Sheri Graner Ray, and Victoria Van Voorhis at the "Women in Games: Inspire!" panel, as part of the first annual "Women in Games" exhibit at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. [19] [20] The panel was the opening event for the exhibit which celebrates the contributions of women in the video game industry. [21]
As of 2019, Bailey had written a screenplay titled, Sunnyvale based on her experiences at Atari as a programmer on Centipede, and is trying to get it picked up. [22] She is also currently writing scripts for other narrative projects. [13]
In 2013, she was the recipient of the Women in Gaming Lifetime Achievement Award.[ by whom? ]
Asteroids is a space-themed multidirectional shooter arcade video game designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a single spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers, while not colliding with either, or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.
The Atari 2600 is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System, it popularized microprocessor-based hardware and games stored on swappable ROM cartridges, a format first used with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976. The VCS was bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a game cartridge—initially Combat and later Pac-Man. Sears sold the system as the Tele-Games Video Arcade. Atari rebranded the VCS as the Atari 2600 in November 1982, alongside the release of the Atari 5200.
The Atari 7800 ProSystem, or simply the Atari 7800, is a home video game console officially released by Atari Corporation in 1986 as the successor to both the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200. It can run almost all Atari 2600 cartridges, making it one of the first consoles with backward compatibility. It shipped with a different joystick than the 2600-standard CX40 and included Pole Position II as the pack-in game. The European model has a gamepad instead of a joystick. Most of the early releases for the system are ports of 1981–1983 arcade video games. The final wave of 7800 cartridges are closer in style to what was available on other late 1980s consoles, such as Scrapyard Dog and Midnight Mutants.
Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.
Millipede is a fixed shooter video game released in arcades by Atari, Inc. in 1982. The sequel to 1981's Centipede, it has more gameplay variety and a wider array of insects than the original. The objective is to score as many points as possible by destroying all segments of the millipede as it moves toward the bottom of the screen, as well as eliminating or avoiding other enemies. The game is played with a trackball and a single fire button which can be held down for rapid-fire.
Missile Command is a 1980 shoot 'em up arcade video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. and later licensed to Sega for Japanese and European releases. It was designed by Dave Theurer, who also designed Atari's vector graphics game Tempest from the same year. The game was released during the Cold War, and the player uses a trackball to defend six cities from intercontinental ballistic missiles by launching anti-ballistic missiles from three bases.
Danielle Bunten Berry, formerly known as Dan Bunten, was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game M.U.L.E., one of the first influential multiplayer video games, and 1984's The Seven Cities of Gold.
Centipede is a 1981 fixed shooter arcade video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. Designed by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg, it was one of the most commercially successful games from the golden age of arcade video games and one of the first with a significant female player base. The primary objective is to shoot all the segments of a centipede that winds down the playing field. An arcade sequel, Millipede, followed in 1982.
Ms. Pac-Man is a 1982 maze arcade video game developed by General Computer Corporation and published by Midway. It is a spin-off sequel to Pac-Man (1980) and the first entry in the series to not be made by Namco. Controlling the title character, Pac-Man's wife, the player is tasked with eating all of the pellets in an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating the larger "power pellets" lets the player eat the ghosts, which turn blue and flee.
Lyle Rains was a senior executive at the arcade game company Atari and is sometimes, with Ed Logg, listed as a co-developer of the video game Asteroids. In fact, Rains called Logg into his office and said "Well, why don’t we have a game where you shoot the rocks and blow them up?". Rains also served as Executive Producer for a large number of Atari coin-op games. An avid gamer, he wrote a popular online FAQ for the Atari coin-op game KLAX.
George Edward "Ed" Logg is a retired American arcade video game designer, first employed at Atari, Inc. and later at Atari Games. He currently resides in San Jose, California. He was educated at University of California, Berkeley and also attended Stanford University.
Tetris is a puzzle game developed by Atari Games and originally released for arcades in 1988. Based on Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris, Atari Games' version features the same gameplay as the computer editions of the game, as players must stack differently shaped falling blocks to form and eliminate horizontal lines from the playing field. The game features several difficulty levels and two-player simultaneous play.
Xybots is a 1987 third-person shooter arcade game by Atari Games. In Xybots, up to two players control "Major Rock Hardy" and "Captain Ace Gunn", who must travel through a 3D maze and fight against a series of robots known as the Xybots whose mission is to destroy all mankind. The game features a split screen display showing the gameplay on the bottom half of the screen and information on player status and the current level on the top half. Designed by Ed Logg, it was originally conceived as a sequel to his previous title, Gauntlet. The game was well received, with reviewers lauding the game's various features, particularly the cooperative multiplayer aspect. Despite this, it was met with limited financial success, which has been attributed to its unique control scheme that involves rotating the joystick to turn the player character.
Carol Shaw is one of the first female game designers and programmers in the video game industry. She is best known for creating the Atari 2600 vertically scrolling shooter game River Raid (1982) for Activision. She worked for Atari, Inc. from 1978 to 1980, where she designed multiple games including 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (1978) and Video Checkers (1980), both for the Atari VCS before it was renamed to the 2600. She left game development in 1984 and retired in 1990.
Dandy is a dungeon crawl maze video game for Atari 8-bit computers published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1983. It is one of the first video games with four-player, simultaneous cooperative play. Players equipped with bows and unlimited arrows fight through a maze containing monsters, monster spawners, keys, locked doors, food, and bombs in search of the exit leading to the next level. If a player dies, they can be revived by finding and shooting a heart. The game includes an editor for making new dungeons.
Super Bug is an arcade video game developed, manufactured, and released by Atari, Inc. in 1977. The player steers a yellow Volkswagen Beetle along a multi-directionally scrolling track, avoiding the boundaries and occasional obstacles. The game ends when fuel runs out. Super Bug is in black and white, and the colored car comes from a yellow overlay in the center of the monitor.
Sente Technologies was an arcade game company. Founded as Videa in 1982 by ex-Atari employees Roger Hector, Wendi Allen, and Ed Rotberg, the company was bought by Nolan Bushnell and made a division of his Pizza Time Theatre company in 1983. In 1984 the division was acquired by Bally Midway who continued to operate it until closing it down in 1988. The name Sente, like Atari, is another reference to Bushnell's favorite game, Go and means "having the initiative."
Bug Attack is a fixed shooter video game written by Jim Nitchals for the Apple II and published by Cavalier Computer in 1981. A version for Atari 8-bit computers was released in 1982. Bug Attack is based on Atari, Inc.'s Centipede arcade game.
Elizabeth Ryan is an American game developer and programmer. She worked for General Computer Corporation (GCC) in the 1980s and was the 9th employee and first woman video game programmer at GCC. She programmed the 1982 Atari, Inc. arcade game Quantum as well as working on games for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Atari 7800.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) Part 2: doi : 10.1109/MSPEC.1982.6366912; Part 3: doi : 10.1109/MSPEC.1982.6366913.
