Name Carol Shaw | Role Video Game Designer | |
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Carol Shaw (born 1955) is a retired video game developer, believed to be the first female video game designer. While working at Atari 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.”
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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.
Atari
While with Atari, Shaw wrote Video Checkers (1978), 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (1978), and, with Nick Turner, Super Breakout (1978), all for the Atari 2600. Co-worker Mike Albaugh later included 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.
Carol Shaw left Activision in 1984 after designing Happy Trails (1983) for the Intellivision and porting River Raid to the Atari 800 and Atari 5200.
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.
Credits
Atari 2600
Intellivision
Atari 8-bit family