The Ted Dabney Experience

Lee Feuling is a retired United States Airforce and American Airlines pilot who, once upon a time, was a coder for Centuri Video Games in Hialeah, Florida. Centuri was best known for its hugely popular licensed releases of Japanese titles such as Track & Field and Phoenix, but of far more interest to TDE listeners is Tim Stryker’s vector shooter, Aztarac, and for an even deeper cut, the unreleased Grabber Goose (another Stryker vector title); not to mention Feuling’s very own, also unreleased, Freddy Flames. Lee reminisces at length about his close relationship with the visionary Tim Stryker, Centuri’s productive but underutilsed in-house R&D department and flying fast jets over Saudi Arabia.

Howell Ivy is the creator of Exidy’s infamous Death Race. Released in 1976, this was the first arcade game to stir a moral panic over videogame violence in America, leading the company to hire round-the-clock security in response to many green-ink letters and phoned-in death threats. Exidy followed Death Race with the relatively innocuous but very successful Circus; Venture, arguably the spiritual forerunner to Atari’s Gauntlet, and then back to controversy with the genuinely gruesome light gun game, Chiller (1986). Howell departed Exidy under somewhat difficult circumstances and joined Sega of America where he oversaw the development of the company’s early Virtua series of games, and his long tenure at the company saw him bear witness to one of the most revolutionary periods of videogame design.

Evelyn Seto worked at Atari under creative director George Opperman on some of the company’s most iconic graphic material, including arcade cabinets such as Fire Truck and Soccer, a wealth of arcade game sell sheets, and console packaging for the consumer division. Not to mention the famous Atari ‘Fuji’ logo. Evelyn’s long and storied career also saw her employed by industry giants HP and Apple, and Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell at his post-Atari toy/tech ventures AG Bear and Androbot.

With guest co-host Tim Lapetino, author of Art of Atari and co-author of Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon.

L-R: Evelyn Seto, George Opperman and Bob Flemate. Photograph courtesy of The Strong Museum of Play

In accordance with Theurer’s Law - named after Missile Command and Tempest programmer Dave Theurer, which states that every programmer’s first game will be a relative failure - Ed Rotberg’s first game for Atari, Baseball, didn’t exactly score a home run. However his sophomore title, 1981’s Battlezone, with its distinctive green XY monitor graphics and unique periscope-adorned cabinet is rightly regarded as one of Atari’s finest releases of the coin-op videogame Golden Age. You’ll also learn about Battlezone variants, such as the well-documented but still fascinating development of the Bradley Trainer (a version of the game adapted for military training purposes) and a unique Stereoscopic Battlezone that never left the lab.

Excerpts from our interviews with the gentlemen who created Gottlieb’s Golden Age Video Arcade titles Q*Bert, Mad Planets and Krull. Featuring Warren Davis, Jeff Lee, Matt Householder and David Thiel.

The Ted Dabney Experience is a podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander - A Journey to The Top of an Arcade Classic). We host intimate conversations with the leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op Video Arcade gaming. Our guests have included Warren Davis and Jeff Lee (Q*Bert), Mike Hally (Star Wars), Ed Logg (Asteroids, Centipede), Jamie Fenton (Gorf), Owen Rubin (Space Duel, Major Havoc), Carol Kantor (the industry’s very first market researcher), Doug Wismer (Canadian monitor manufacturer Electrohome), Kevin Hayes (former MD of Atari Ireland) and many more.

Rich Adam joined Atari in 1978, initially working on the company’s pinball games before being assigned the role of Junior Programmer on Dave Thuerer’s Missile Command. Rich went on to take the captain’s chair for the hard-as-nails Gravitar, arguably the pinnacle of Atari’s vector game output, and the game for which he is most well known. Talking to Rich was a real treat. He was by turns amusingly candid and quietly philosophical, and Paul was finally able to take further notes for The Official TDE Hot Tub Logbook.

Matt Householder co-designed Gottlieb’s underrated arcade adaptation of Peter Yates’s ill-fated Krull, before going on to join Atari’s consumer division to work on home adaptations of video arcade hits. With his partner Candi Strecker he went on to create and produce the critically acclaimed California Games (and much more) for Epyx. We chat with Matt about programming in the Seventies, video poker, high-voltage electrocution, Tim Skelly and Komedy Krull.

Ed Logg, AKA Super Duper Game Guy, is the programmer’s programmer. Cited by his contemporaries as one of the all-time greats, Ed designed and co-developed arcade smash hits such as Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Super Breakout and Gauntlet. In 2011, Logg was awarded a Pioneer Award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in recognition of his groundbreaking videogame work.

Steve Calfee has rarely gone on record about his time at Atari. His managerial role at the company’s Coin-Op division saw him channel the work of well-known programmers such as Rich Adam, Dennis Koble, Dave Theurer and Howard Delman into Video Arcade smash hits such as Canyon Bomber, Space Duel and Missile Command.