The Ted Dabney Experience

David Thiel is perhaps best known for his pinball audio work on titles such as Tron: Legacy, Alien, Dialed In, Avatar and Family Guy, but he was also responsible for everything aural on all the Golden Age Gottlieb video classics (Reactor, Q*Bert, Mad Planets, Krull, The Three Stooges).

From synth salesman to local rock star to Gottlieb and beyond (Commodore 64 and SID chip fans take note), David continues to produce outstanding interactive audio to this day.

Tim Lapetino on the underrated yet enduring legacy of Atari creative director George Opperman, and behind the scenes on both The Art of Atari and the forthcoming Pac-Man: The Birth of an Icon.

Honing his coding skills producing games for the Apple II, Bob Flanagan joined Atari in 1984. It was a difficult time for the company and the industry as a whole, yet Bob still managed to work on some of their best loved releases, including Paperboy, Marble Madness and Gauntlet. Bob tells us about collaborating with the brilliant but demanding Mark Cerny, having Ed Logg as a mentor and his experience of designing the swashbuckling Skull & Crossbones.

Jeff Lee was the original video artist at D. Gottlieb and Company, designing the character Q*Bert and working on titles such as Krull, The Three Stooges and the late Kan Yabumoto’s seminal Mad Planets. Jeff talks to The Ted Dabney Experience about his days at Gottlieb (later Mylstar) and, most importantly, the origin of Q*Bert’s vestigial limb.

Recruited by the company in 1976, Dennis Koble was one of Atari’s earliest coin-op game designers. Koble stayed with Atari for five years and was responsible for such notable titles as Avalanche, Sprint 2 and Dominos, before leaving to co-found Imagic. In 1984 Dennis would return to coin-op as Director of Software for Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell’s Sente. At no point did he sit in a hot tub.

The inimitable Steve Golson reminisces about his days evading Atari’s radar with GCC, subsequently being co-opted by the former for arcade classics such as the frantic Food Fight and the singular Quantum, and of course Crazy Otto (aka Midway’s Ms. Pac-Man).

A brief introduction to The Ted Dabney Experience podcast. Originally released as a segment for the Retro Asylum Christmas Special episode, 2020. The Ted Dabney Experience is brought to you in association with ACAM, The American Classic Arcade Museum.

We talk with Rampage co-creator Brian Colin about the early days at Bally Midway, applying his traditional animation know-how to the seminal Discs of Tron and meeting The Rock.