An excerpt appeared in the print version of Stanford.
Favorite video game:
“The coolest thing about being a video game designer in the early days was the complete absence of management and bureaucracy, as game teams were solo lone-wolf jobs or involved a very small team. Budgets were super low, but designers had near perfect creative freedom within hardware constraints. You could design the game you wanted to play free from focus groups and marketing groupthink. (No one is as stupid as all of us put together!)
So not surprisingly, my all-time favorite game was one I designed in 1982—Robotron: 2084. I have played this game for thousands of hours, never quite making it to the 1-million-point mark. I still have flashbacks with dreams inhabited by Robotrons! ‘The human race is inefficient and therefore must be destroyed!’ The cool thing today is that with an iPad and standard development tools anyone can design their ultimate video game! No excuse for playing commercial product!”
Stanford video game memory:
“I was a feral Palo Alto kid looking for trouble so I spent a lot of time in my pre-college years hanging out at Stanford for kicks; my early video game experiences at Stanford were as an outsider. (It wasn’t ’til 1984 that I became a legit Stanford grad student.) The three Stanford video game experiences that stand out:
1) Hanging out as a teenager at Tresidder in the early ’70s watching the college kids play the multi-console version of the Galaxy Game—the game seemed to be always packed and I could never get on it!
2) Learning about microcomputers at the Home Brew Computer Club at SLAC in the mid 1970s, and seeing Jobs and Wozniak demo the Apple I, precursor to the Apple II—one of the greatest video/computer game platforms of all time.
3) Sneaking into the old AI lab at Felt Lake and checking out the crazy AI robotics stuff going on—really just a big meatspace computer game.”
