Short interview with Mr. Steve Cartwright

[lazzeri]

Hello,

 

I did a (really) short e-mail interview with Mr. Cartwright for a little article I´m writing about "Megamania" for a local magazine. Nothing fancy, six short questions, but you guys might like it.

 

1- You were the first designer to join the original Activision founders. How did that happened? Did you have previous programming or game development experience?

(The end of this answer is going to surprise you.. )

I had gone to college with Dave Crane. He was a semester or 2 ahead of me. After college, Dave got a job at National Semiconductor. When I graduated, he arranged for a job interview in his group at National - so ended up following him to the Bay Area.

Now Dave was a big tennis payer - and his doubles partner was a guy named Al Miller. Al worked at a little startup called Atari. Al was a program manager in the arcade game division. Al had one particularly creative designer - but he was also a very difficult employee — impossible to work with — didn't get along with anyone. Not only that, Al discovered this difficult employee was actually paying his friend under the table to do his work for him. So Al fired this employee - and hired his friend Dave to join Atari.

Shortly after, the Atari 2600 hit the stores and was a huge success. But Atari was already working on the next generation of products - the Atari 400/800 home computer.
But Al was having more problems with employees. A contractor they had hired to do the operating system never delivered (turns out he was working for IBM on the side on the operating system for the first IBM PC) Al & Dave worked 24/7 for a month to write the entire operating system from scratch. After that, they had had enough of Atari and quit to start their own company. They didn’t really know what they wanted to do — but they decided to make some video games in the meantime. That company was - of course Activision.

Six months later, Activision was booming - and they needed to expand their design efforts. Of course there really was no such thing as an experienced game designer back then - so Dave suggested to Al that they hire me. If they couldn’t teach me to program - they figured I could do the soldering on the development systems..

Oh by the way… that difficult employee All fired to make room for his friend Dave? None other than Steve Jobs. And the guy Steve Jobs was paying under the table to do his work for him? You guessed it — The Woz.

And finally — the contractor that had been hired to do the Atari 400/800 operating system - but never delivered? The one who was working on the operating system for the first IBM PC? Bill Gates, of course…




2- Activision had creative liberty and developer´s recognition as cornerstones. How was the work environment on those first years? Was there a free flow of information and ideas? Did new game ideas get discussed in groups or formal meetings, or did every programmer had full liberty to work in whatever he/she wished, from start to end?

Back then, we pretty much made things up as we went along. We took a lot of inspiration from the arcades (I think we went to Chuck E. Cheese 3 times a week)
We all sat in a room on stools at work benches. Everyone could see everyone else’s screen. We discussed ideas freely — and everyone had input into everyone else’s game. Nothing was formalized. The business was so new there was really no roadmap to follow.




3- Activision´s "developer´s recognition" policy made the "golden age" game developers public figures. How was that back in the day? Did people recognized you in public places and asked for autographs? And how do you feel today being known all around the world as one of the best game developers of your time and the responsible for games that gave so much players so many great moment?


The recognition of the designer was the idea of Jim Levy - Activision’s president. Jim had come from the record business - and thought the designer’s work should be recognized just like a recording artist.

As for being recognized in public? Not really. I think the waiter at Chuck E. Cheese recognized us once — but probably only because we were all wearing Activision t-shirts..
We did sign autographs at trade shows — but mostly for sales reps who wanted it for their kids.




4- You developed five of the most influent and praised games of the Atari 2600 Age, three of them (Megamania, Frostbite and Seaquest) frequently listed among the "top ten A2600 games'". Did that crossed your mind back in the day? Have you imagined such a legacy, with your games being played (and re-released) some 35 years after launch?



Considering the amount of time and effort what went in to “tuning” the playability of those games - it’s extremely gratifying to hear people say they still hold those 3 particular games in such high regard. Many times I’ve run into people who say something like — “Oh… you worked at the original Activision? Do you remember a game called “Megamania”? (Or Seaquest.. or Frostbite) That’s still my favorite game of all-time!” Of course they’re completely blown away when I tell them it was, in fact, my game..



5- Megamania took an innovative approach by being a "humorous" shooter with cartoonish enemies instead of the classic "alien invaders". Where did that idea came from? What were your influences? How did the game creation evolved?


At the time, the games market was flooded with “space” games. But the company thought we were sitting on something that was a generation ahead of the competition in terms of playability - and we needed some way to make the game stand out. So they decided to try marketing it completely different than other space games. The first title marketing suggested was “Gadzooks!”. We (the designers) loved the idea in general — but felt “Gadzooks” wasn’t quite it.
The next idea was “Megamania - A Space Nightmare.” Marketing thought all the enemy ships actually looked like hamburgers, bow ties, tumbling dice, etc. Of course they were originally designed to look like enemy ships — but with 8-but graphics there was only so much I could do..


6- The VCS extremely limited resources forced game developers to perform "magic tricks" on their code in every game. For instance, the questions i´m sending you use more memory than the games you made. How was it like creating games in such arid conditions? Did you have to gave up a lot of ideas? How was it like to make a game from scratch, developing the idea, graphics, audio and game kernel?


It’s true — a screen that takes a few hours today to mock up using Photoshop and Unity used to take month to build pixel-by-pixel… line-by-line.
I remember one day in particular - I had been up all night trying to squeeze about 30 bytes out of the Seaquest code to make room for some sound effects. It was a process by which you starred at a computer printout of assembly language and hex codes looking for duplicate bytes… rewriting code segments to save a byte here… another byte there…etc. When I came into work the next day, I said to Dave “there’s only a handful of people in the world who know how hard this”. We both laughed — and still remember that comment to this day because it was so true.

 

[+cvga]

Thanks for sharing. I still enjoy Megamania a great deal and would be interested in reading your article when it is finished.

[lazzeri]

As soon as it´s ready I´ll let you know!

[high voltage]

Nice reading, especially the Jobs/Woz/Gates info.

[Good_Times]

Really cool, thanks so much for sharing!

 

 

[Shawn]

Epic.

[+wongojack]

On 8/21/2017 at 4:11 PM, lazzeri said:

As soon as it´s ready I´ll let you know!

I could swear that I watched a video of your interview.  I was talking to someone from Brazil recently and thought about it.  Went to find it and came up empty.  Is a video of this interview "out there" somewhere?