Jamie Faye Fenton (born in 1954 [1] as Jay Fenton) is a video game programmer best known for the 1981 arcade video game Gorf [2] [3] and for being one of the creators of MacroMind's VideoWorks software (since renamed Macromedia Director). Jamie has been active in the transgender community and transitioned from male to female around 1998. [2]
Fenton was drawn to computer technology while in school because its highly predictable nature appealed to her and it provided a haven from being picked on by other students. [2]
In 1975, while studying computer science in the University of Wisconsin, Jamie and fellow student Tom McHugh volunteered to work at Dave Nutting Associates, who enlisted their help to redesign pinball machines and the Japanese arcade game Western Gun using Intel's 8080 microprocessor, [4] she also later worked on the Bally Astrocade, [5] and wrote the programming language Bally BASIC, based on tiny basic. [6]
In 1978, Jamie Fenton created an early example of glitch art entitled Digital TV Dinner, a 3 minutes film, with Raul Zaritsky. [7] [8] For this project, Jamie Fenton was ejecting the cartridge inserted in the Bally Astrocade in wrong moment, to create the glitches. [9] They also punched the game consol. [6] Digital TV Dinner is first presented in 1978, at the Chicago event Electronic Visualization Event 3, In Chicago. [10] A second version will be presented in 1979.
in 1981, while working at Midway Manufacturing, Jamie Fenton designed the game Gorf.
Four years later, she co-created the logicil VideoWorks, which, will then become Macromedia Director, then, after being bought by Adobe, Adobe Director. This software was a precursor of the software Flash. [6]
In 1995, with Cindy Martin and JoAnn Roberts, they created and launched tgforum.com, an online forum for transgender people. It still exists in 2024. [11]
In 2018, Digital TV Dinner was exhibited in the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition, curated by Jon Cates. [12] During the exhibition, she played Digital TV Breakfast, a video game by Whitney (Whit) Pow, inspired by Digital TV Dinner. [1] The same year, she created a new piece, Primordial Glitch Art, where she filmed herself creating glitches by ejecting Cartridge from a Bally Astrocade, while explaining how to obtain those glitches. [6]
GRASS is a programming language created to script 2D vector graphics animations. GRASS was similar to BASIC in syntax, but added numerous instructions for specifying 2D object animation, including scaling, translation and rotation over time. These functions were directly supported by the Vector General 3D graphics terminal GRASS was written for. It quickly became a hit with the artistic community who were experimenting with the new medium of computer graphics, and is most famous for its use by Larry Cuba to create the original "attacking the Death Star will not be easy" animation in Star Wars (1977).
The Bally Astrocade is a second-generation home video game console and simple computer system designed by a team at Midway, at that time the videogame division of Bally. It was originally announced as the "Bally Home Library Computer" in October 1977 and initially made available for mail order in December 1977. But due to production delays, the units were first released to stores in April 1978 and its branding changed to "Bally Professional Arcade". It was marketed only for a limited time before Bally decided to exit the market. The rights were later picked up by a third-party company, who re-released it and sold it until around 1984. The Astrocade is particularly notable for its very powerful graphics capabilities for the time of release, and for the difficulty in accessing those capabilities.
Glitch is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the 1990s which is distinguished by the deliberate use of glitch-based audio media and other sonic artifacts.
A glitch is a short-lived technical fault, such as a transient one that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among players of video games. More generally, all types of systems including human organizations and nature experience glitches.
Gun Fight, known as Western Gun in Japan and Europe, is a 1975 multidirectional shooter arcade video game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, and released by Taito in Japan and Europe and by Midway in North America. Based around two Old West cowboys armed with revolvers and squaring off in a duel, it was the first video game to depict human-to-human combat. The Midway version was also the first video game to use a microprocessor instead of TTL. The game's concept was adapted from Sega's 1969 arcade electro-mechanical game Gun Fight.
1977 had sequels such as Super Speed Race and Datsun 280 ZZZAP as well as several new titles such as Space Wars. The year's highest-grossing arcade games were F-1 and Speed Race DX in Japan, and Sea Wolf and Sprint 2 in the United States. The year's best-selling home system was Nintendo's Color TV-Game, which was only sold in Japan.
1976 was a mixed year for the expansion of the video game industry. While the consumer market in the United States for dedicated home consoles saw significant growth, the coin-operated video game market saw a decline despite individual hits. The year also marked the availability of some of the first computer game software for microcomputers, growing out of the hobbyist market.
Marc Canter is an American internet entrepreneur, speaker, technology evangelist and early pioneer of online software, and is often called the "godfather of multimedia". Canter is a CEO of Instigate, Inc. Marc is best known for being the co-founder and CEO of MacroMind, the company that became Macromedia.
Cathryn Mataga is a game programmer and founder of independent video game company Junglevision. Under the name William, she wrote Atari 8-bit computer games for Synapse Software in the early to mid 1980s, including Shamus, a flip-screen shooter.
280 ZZZAP is a racing arcade video game designed by Jamie Fenton for Dave Nutting Associates. Based on Nissan's Datsun 280Z, it is one of the earliest games with authorized branding.
MacroMind was an Apple Macintosh software company founded in Chicago in 1984 by Marc Canter, Jamie Fenton and Mark Stephen Pierce. The company's first product was SoundVision, a combined music and graphics editor. Before the release, the graphics editor was removed, and SoundVision became MusicWorks and the animation creativity tool VideoWorks. Along with other early programs, MusicWorks and VideoWorks were originally published and distributed by Hayden Software.
David Judd Nutting was an industrial design engineer who played a role in the early video game industry. He also designed the exterior of the Jeep Wagoneer.
Michael Betancourt is a critical theorist, film theorist, art & film historian, and animator. His principal published works focus on the critique of digital capitalism, motion graphics, visual music, new media art, theory, and formalist study of motion pictures.
Rob Fulop is an American game programmer who created two of the Atari 2600's biggest hits: the port of arcade game Missile Command and 1982's Demon Attack, which won Electronic Games' Game of the Year award. While at Atari, Fulop also ported Night Driver to the 2600 and Space Invaders to the Atari 8-bit computers.
Phil Morton (1945–2003) was an influential American video artist and activist who founded the Video Area in 1970 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for many years.
Surround is a video game programmed by Alan Miller and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari Video Computer System. In the game, players navigate a continuously moving block around an enclosed space as a wall trails behind it. Every time the opposite player hits a wall with their block, the other player earns a single point. The first player to reach ten points is the winner.
Glitch art is an art movement centering around the practice of using digital or analog errors, more so glitches, for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. It has been also regarded as an increasing trend in new media art, with it retroactively being described as developing over the course of the 20th century onward.
"A Glitch Is a Glitch" is the fifteenth episode of the fifth season of the American animated television series Adventure Time. It was written, storyboarded, and directed by Irish filmmaker David OReilly. It originally aired on Cartoon Network on April 1, 2013.
The 1970s was the first decade in the history of the video game industry. The 1970s saw the development of some of the earliest video games, chiefly in the arcade game industry, but also several for the earliest video game consoles and personal computers.
In computer animation, a T-pose is a default posing for a humanoid 3D model's skeleton before it is animated. It is called so because of its shape: the straight legs and arms of a humanoid model combine to form a capital letter T. When the arms are angled downwards, the pose is sometimes referred to as an A-pose instead. Likewise, if the arms are angled upward, it is called a Y-pose. Generic terms encompassing all these include bind pose, blind pose, and reference pose.
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