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The Ted Dabney Experience

The Ted Dabney Experience. Intimate conversations with leading lights from the golden age of video arcade gaming. A podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander). Brought to you in association with The American Classic Arcade Museum (US) and Arcade Archive (UK).

Copyright: © 2020 The Ted Dabney Experience

Latest Episodes:

This is The Ted Dabney Experience Aug 01, 2024
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 in-depth conversations with the creative leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op Video Arcade gaming.

TDE EP39 - Rob Quinn of Stern Jul 31, 2024

Rob Quinn joined Stern just as the company was branching out from it's core pinball business to explore the brave new world of videogames. Rob talks about his involvement with the company's early hit, Berzerk, his experiments with laser disc technology and his personal misgivings about how the company was managed.

TDE EP38 - Atari and Bally Midway Game Designer Mark Pierce Jul 12, 2024
Mark Pierce was a game designer at Atari and Bally Midway. We talk to him about the protracted development of Escape From The Planet of The Robot Monsters, the axonometric, somewhat baroque B-movie arcade adventure, and the conversely swift creation of the tile-stacking puzzler classic, KLAX. Pierce also shares some amusing anecdotes about scouting for muscular male models for the visually ground-breaking arcade beat-em-up, Pit Fighter, and provides us with a unique insight into why Atari faltered and ultimately folded in The Noughties.

TDE EP37 - Jersey Jack Pinball Founder Jack Guarnieri May 13, 2024
From 1975 to present day, Jack Guarnieri has seen and done it all; from servicingmechanicalpinball machines in the dive bars and laundrettes of Seventies New York, bearing first-hand witness to the inflation - and rapid deflation - of the video game bubble of popular lore, running his own operator route during the ‘80s and then to selling video and pinball machines directly to consumers. All of this led him to found one of the most innovative pinball manufacturers, Jersey Jack.

TDE EP36 - Strong Museum Assistant VP Jeremy Saucier Mar 14, 2024
Jeremy Saucier is Assistant VP at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
Jeremy talks to us about the history and evolution of the Strong Museum and its pedagogical remit - from American history and Industrialisation to a focus on play - and gives us a fascinating insight into the day-to-day management of a museum.
With a doctoral degree in history and a degree in American Studies, Jeremy was a natural fit for his role at The Strong, with its extensive archive of original material, from concept art and design documents to internal company memos from Video Arcade stalwarts such as Williams, Bally and most notably Atari.

TDE EP35 - Atari Inc Coin-Op Engineer Jeff Bell Feb 07, 2024
Jeff Bell was a hardware engineer in Atari Inc’s coin-op division and officially the longest serving employee of the company; literally the last person to switch off the lights in 2004. Jeff walks us through his formative years learning the basics of electronics at his father’s desk, the brotherhood of Atari Inc, suspected mob involvement in the early videogames industry and Nolan Bushnell’s Bermuda shorts.

TDE EP34 - Atari Pong Creator Allan Alcorn Aug 08, 2023
For this episode we speak with none other than Allan Alcorn, Atari employee number three after Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, and the engineer of Pong, one of the very first video arcade games.

TDE EP33 - Atari Inc Designer and R&D Manager Roger Hector Jun 29, 2023
Senior corporate executive, serial entrepreneur, automotive designer and fine artist. Roger Hector is not only a successful businessman but a bona fide creative polymath. A long time ago, Roger sharpened his pencils at Atari Inc, working alongside co-founder Nolan Bushnell and creative director George Opperman on a vast range of videogame projects. Hector became R&D manager at Atari, before leaving to co-found his own games company, Videa, with Howard Delman and Ed Rotberg, programmer of Atari’s Battlezone.

TDE EP32 - Eugene Jarvis - Part 2 May 01, 2023
Part 2: Eugene Jarvis cut his teeth in the Atari pinball division before going on to produce the groundbreaking Defender for Williams Electronics. Also for Williams (contracted as Vid Kids, his new company with Defender co-creator Larry DeMar) was Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Jarvis left Vid Kids in 1984 to attend Stanford University where he gained an MBA in 1986. He then returned to Williams to design the OTT run and gun title Narc (programmed with George Petro) and, with Mark Turmell, Robotron’s spiritual successor, Smash TV. To this day Eugene produces popular arcade video game titles for his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc.

TDE EP32 - Eugene Jarvis - Part 1 May 01, 2023
Part 1: Eugene Jarvis cut his teeth in the Atari pinball division before going on to produce the groundbreaking Defender for Williams Electronics. Also for Williams (contracted as Vid Kids, his new company with Defender co-creator Larry DeMar) was Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Jarvis left Vid Kids in 1984 to attend Stanford University where he gained an MBA in 1986. He then returned to Williams to design the OTT run and gun title Narc (programmed with George Petro) and, with Mark Turmell, Robotron’s spiritual successor, Smash TV. To this day Eugene produces popular arcade video game titles for his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc.

TDE EP31 - Arcade Britannia author Dr Alan Meades Feb 23, 2023
Dr Alan Meades teaches the undergraduate and post-graduate game design courses at Canterbury Christ Church University and is the author of Arcade Britannia, published by MIT Press. After dedicating so many episodes of the show to the mythic American arcade of the late Seventies and early Eighties (in some ways perhaps more a figment of our collective imagination than we might care to admit) it was wonderful having Alan provide a much wider historical context of the amusement arcade, actually dating back hundreds of years and all via a uniquely British lens.

TDE EP30 - Atari Engineer Dave Sherman Feb 05, 2023
Dave Sherman joined Atari shortly prior to Nolan Bushnell’s departure and was at the company through its precipitous near-collapse and subsequent restructuring during the infamous market crash of ’83 and ’84. Sherman worked alongside Dave Theurer on iconic such as I, Robot and Missile Command, and shares many an anecdote about those early days, including soundly beating Bushnell at his own predilection, the strategy board game, Go. After Atari, Dave engineered a dual-purpose CAD system, generating fluid, texture-mapped polygon graphics for videogame application a good eight years before Sony ruled the roost with the Playstation.

This is The Ted Dabney Experience Dec 08, 2022
The Ted Dabney Experience is a podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander). We host long-form conversations with the leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op video arcade gaming. Our guests have included Evelyn Seto (graphic designer at Atari, Inc., alongside George Opperman), Warren Davis (Q*Bert), Jeff Lee (Q*Bert, Mad Planets), Mike Hally (Star Wars, Akka Arrh), Ed Logg (Asteroids, Centipede), 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), Walter Day (founder of the world-famous Twin Galaxies arcade), John Newcomer (Joust, Sinistar) and many more. The podcast is produced and edited by Richard May with a bespoke sound suite by Ghost of Wood.

TDE EP29 - Crystal Castles programmer Franz Lanzinger Nov 29, 2022
Franz Lanzinger programmed the singular Crystal Castles for Atari, Inc. Released in the summer of 1983 and housed within a typically eye-catching Atari cabinet, the game found modest success as a coin-op title and was adapted for numerous home platforms. Franz talks to us about being the person to establish the long-overdue display of creator credits in video arcade games, meeting avid arcade gamer Steven Spielberg during the development of Atari’s ill-fated Gremlins arcade game, and then quitting the company in a fit of pique following a dispute with management over proposed creator royalties.

TDE EP28 - Food Fight programmer Jonathan Hurd Oct 31, 2022
Jonathan Hurd coded Food Fight at General Computer Corp for Atari. A decidedly ‘non-violent’ game amid a galaxy of shooters, Food Fight was GCC’s first title for a smart-thinking Atari after the infamous Super Missile Attack lawsuit was settled (for more on Super Missile Attack, listen to our interview with GCC’s Steve Golson).

TDE EP27 - Bally Midway graphic artist Paul Niemeyer Sep 16, 2022
In any video arcade, especially during the proverbial Golden Age of the Seventies and Eighties, it wasn’t always the games on screen that first caught the eye but the colourful, imposing, sometimes lurid cabinets that housed them. This was bona fide pop art for the coin-op kids of America and beyond.
Paul Niemeyer started his career at developer Bally Midway during the early Eighties, working on such titles as Ms. Pac-Man, Tapper and Spy Hunter. He also had a hand in creating such impressive cabinets as Discs of Tron, Satan’s Hollow and the peculiar Wacko. Niemeyer tells us about the precision art of cutting and layering art screens, life at Midway during the Bally takeover, working with the so-called Bally Pinball art gods, the development of the notorious and enduring Mortal Kombat and having his homework marked by Sylvester Stallone.

TDE EP26 - Twin Galaxies founder Walter Day Jun 17, 2022
We speak with Walter Day, the grandfather of e-sports and the inspiration for Wreck-it-Ralph’s avuncular arcade manager, Mr Litwack. Walter is the founder of the long-defunct but world-famous Twin Galaxies video arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the international scoreboard of the same name. Day waxes lyrical about the trials and tribulations of running an arcade during the Golden Age of electronic gaming, the films Chasing Ghosts and King of Kong, his brief stint as an oil futures trader and, of course, transcendental meditation. We also ask Walter for his official position on the ongoing furore surrounding Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong high-scores.

TDE EP25 - Centuri coder Lee Feuling Apr 07, 2022
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.

TDE EP24 - Death Race creator Howell Ivy Feb 18, 2022
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.

TDE EP23 - Atari graphic designer Evelyn Seto Jan 21, 2022
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

TDE EP23 - Atari graphic designer Evelyn Seto Jan 21, 2022
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

TDE EP22 - Atari Battlezone and S.T.U.N. Runner programmer Ed Rotberg Dec 14, 2021
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.

TDE CLIPS - EP01 Nov 29, 2021
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.

This is The Ted Dabney Experience Nov 22, 2021
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.

TDE EP21 - Gravitar and Missile Command programmer Rich Adam Nov 19, 2021
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.

TDE EP20 - Gottlieb, Atari and Epyx alumnus Matt Householder Oct 28, 2021
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.

TDE EP19 - Asteroids, Centipede and Gauntlet programmer Ed Logg Sep 29, 2021
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.

TDE EP18 - Former Atari VP Steve Calfee Aug 24, 2021
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.

TDE EP17 - Pinball audio engineer and Gottlieb alumnus David Thiel Jul 21, 2021
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.

TDE EP16 - Art of Atari author Tim Lapetino Jun 17, 2021
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.

TDE EP15 - Atari Programmer Bob Flanagan May 20, 2021
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.

TDE EP14 - Q*Bert co-creator Jeff Lee Apr 16, 2021
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.

TDE EP13 - Atari veteran Dennis Koble Mar 19, 2021
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.

TDE EP12 - Atari market researcher Carol Kantor Feb 19, 2021

TDE EP11 - GCC’s Steve Golson (Ms. Pac-Man, Super Missile Attack) Jan 22, 2021
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).

The Retro Asylum Interview Dec 27, 2020
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.

TDE EP10 - Rampage co-creator Brian Colin Dec 17, 2020
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.

TDE EP09 - Kevin Hayes of Atari Ireland Nov 19, 2020
The Ted Dabney Experience podcast talks with Kevin Hayes, former Managing Director of Atari Ireland. If you played an Atari arcade game in Europe during the proverbial Golden Age of video games, including popular third-party licences such as Cinematronics’ Dragon’s Lair, it bore Kevin’s fingerprints. We also discuss goat slaughter, littering and smoking the reefer.

TDE EP08 - The Pit co-designer Andy Walker Oct 19, 2020
TDE Podcast takes you from the North East Yorkshire coastal town of Bridlington to Miami Beach with one of the very few Brits to have developed coin-op videogames for the American market during the Golden Age, Mr Andy Walker.

TDE EP07 - Joust and Sinistar designer John Newcomer Sep 21, 2020
An in-depth discussion with John Newcomer, designer and lead developer of one of the most unique and enduring arcade games of the Golden Age, Joust. John talks to The Ted Dabney Experience about his influences and inspirations, hits and misses, his design philosophy, videogame violence and working with Eugene Jarvis, Warren Davis and the late, great Python Anghelo at Williams Electronics. And rubber chickens.

TDE EP06 - Doug Wismer of Canadian monitor manufacturer Electrohome Sep 04, 2020
Electrohome supplied CRT monitors to all the big-name video arcade game manufacturers of the Golden Age, including Atari, Gremlin and Midway. Doug talks to us about how the company was saved from potential oblivion by arcade gaming; the pen, paper and handshake conception of Atari’s first vector monitor (over a pinball machine in Chuck E. Cheese) and the finer details of doing business with an early-Eighties JVC. Naturally, Paul asks about hot tubs at Atari.

TDE EP05 - Mike Hally of Atari on Lucasfilm, Star Wars, lost classic Akka Arrh and Gravitar Jul 23, 2020
Mike Hally devoted a quarter of a century to Atari, from the Sunnyvale years through Time Warner, literally turning off the lights when the company closed its doors for good in 2002. The Ted Dabney Experience talks with Mike about the gentleman’s arcade game, Gravitar, lost classic Akka Arrh, shooting aliens on toilets and Atari’s seminal coin-op title, Star Wars.

TDE EP04 - Owen Rubin of Atari on Space Duel and Major Havoc Jun 26, 2020
The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast talks to Space Duel designer Owen Rubin about the frontier days of videogame creation at Atari, the volatility of vector hardware, the original Boss Key, disco dancing and Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell’s infamous pool parties.

TDE EP03 - ACAM Founder and President Gary Vincent May 25, 2020
The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast catches up with a long-time friend, ACAM’s Gary Vincent. We discuss Gary’s early days at Funspot, NH, his participation in Randy Fromm’s Arcade School, Funspot’s transition from electromechanical to video arcade and the establishment of ACAM. Gary shares his views on keeping old games alive, ACAM’s educational mission, The King of Kong, the Covid-19 lockdown and the future of The American Classic Arcade Museum.

TDE EP02 - Gorf and Robby Roto Developer Jamie Fenton May 15, 2020
TDE sits down with Jamie Fenton, the developer of the original multi-game shooter, Gorf. Digging deep into Jamie’s early life and career with Dave Nutting Associates and Midway, we talk transgender issues, Datsun sports cars, Larry Cuba of Star Wars SFX fame, the original US military application of the Gorf flight stick, the ill-fated Robby Roto and the fascinating (yet ultimately aborted) development of Ms.Gorf.

TDE EP01 - Q*Bert Co-Creator Warren Davis Apr 06, 2020
TDE talks to Q*Bert co-creator Warren Davis about the early days of videogame design at Gottlieb, lost Laserdisc classic Us Vs Them, his time at Williams Electronics working alongside Eugene Jarvis, and hanging out with Aerosmith.

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