Carol Shaw (born 1955) is a former video game designer, notable for being one of the first female designers in the video game industry. While working at Atari, Inc. in 1978, Shaw designed the unreleased Polo game and designed 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe the same year, both for the Atari 2600. Shaw's official job title at Atari was Microprocessor Software Engineer. Later she joined Activision, where she programmed her best-known game, River Raid. According to the River Raid manual, she is also a "scholar in the field of Computer Science."
Video Carol Shaw
Early life and education
Shaw was born in 1955 and was raised in Palo Alto, California. Her father was a mechanical engineer and worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She did not enjoy the stereotypical girl activities as a child like playing with dolls. Instead, she would mess with her brother's model railroad set. Shaw first became interested in computers in high school when she used a computer for the first time and discovered she could play text-based games on the system. Shaw attended the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1977. She went on to complete a master's degree in Computer Science at Berkeley.
Maps Carol Shaw
Atari
Shaw was hired at Atari, Inc. in 1978 to work on games for the Atari VCS (later called the 2600). While there she wrote Video Checkers (1978), 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (1978), and, with Nick Turner, Super Breakout (1978). Co-worker Mike Albaugh later put her on a list of Atari's "less publicized superstars":
I would have to include Carol Shaw, who was simply the best programmer of the 6502 and probably one of the best programmers period....in particular, [she] did the [2600] kernels, the tricky bit that actually gets the picture on the screen for a number of games that she didn't fully do the games for. She was the go-to gal for that sort of stuff.
With Keith Brewster she wrote the Atari BASIC Reference Manual.
Activision
She left Atari in 1980 to work for Tandem Computers. After 16 months she was contacted by an employee of Activision (possibly Alan Miller) with a job offer which would include stock options. She also attended an interview at Imagic but they did not offer her a position at the company on account of a lack of experience in writing action games. Shaw joined Activision in 1982. Her first game was River Raid (1982) for the Atari 2600, which was inspired by the 1981 arcade game Scramble. The game was a major hit for Activision and personally lucrative for Shaw.
Shaw also wrote Happy Trails (1983) for the Intellivision and ported River Raid to the Atari 8-bit family and Atari 5200. She left Activision in 1984.
After games
From 1984-90 Shaw worked at her former employer, Tandem. She took early retirement in 1990 and subsequently did some voluntary work including a position at the Foresight Institute. She has credited the success of River Raid as being a significant factor in enabling her to retire early.
Shaw lives in California and has been married to Ralph Merkle, a researcher in cryptography and nanotechnology since 1983.
In 2017, Shaw won the Industry Icon Award at The Game Awards.
Credits
Atari 2600
- 3D Tic-Tac-Toe (Atari, 1978)
- Polo (Atari, 1978) unreleased
- Super Breakout (Atari, 1978) with Nick Turner
- Video Checkers (Atari, 1978)
- Othello (Atari, 1978) with Ed Logg, re-released in Taiwan as Chess
- River Raid (Activision, 1982)
Intellivision
- Happy Trails (Activision, 1983)
Atari 8-bit family
- Calculator (Atari, 1979)
- River Raid (Activision, 1983) port from 2600 to Atari 8-bit and 5200.
See also
- Dona Bailey, first female coin-op video game designer
- Carla Meninsky, Shaw's sole female game designer colleague at Atari
- Joyce Weisbecker, first female designer of a commercial video game
References
External links
- Atari Age
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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