Stanford Magazine - May/June 2012

BILL PITTS, ’68
CREATOR OF
THE GALAXY GAME

STANFORD VIDEO

GAME MEMORY:

“We installed [the Galaxy

Game] upstairs in Tresidder, where there used to be soundproofed rooms for listening to music. Outside two of the rooms was a kind of a lobby area and so the game was put there in the corner. Now this first version, there wasn’t room in the cabinet for the computer so there was a big cable that came out the back, went up the wall and then in the attic up above we had the computer sitting up there. The response we got initially was just incredible. People were packed around the machine continuously and standing on chairs trying to look over to watch. At that time, a game like that was just magical to see these little things that you could steer and fire torpedoes.

The kids there developed their own rules. Friday, Saturday evenings there’d be a crowd of young guys around the machine, and there’d be people waiting to play, and when you’d come up you’d take your quarter and you would put it on top of the machine and there’d be a line of quarters and that was the waiting line. When it came your turn you’d take your quarter and drop it in and that got you three games. It was 10 cents a game, three for a quarter, and if you won it didn’t cost you anything. So people who were really good could put their quarter in and sit there for half an hour.”

TRIP HAWKINS, MBA ’78 FOUNDER OF ELECTRONIC ARTS, 3DO AND DIGITAL CHOCOLATE

FAVORITE VIDEO GAME:

“Doctor J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. This was my
baby, the first commercial sports game from EA, pub-
lished in October 1983 on the Apple II and appearing
on many other platforms
over the years. It was argu-
ably EA’s first true ‘hit’
because it got to the No. 2
rank on the Apple SoftDisk
game chart and then went
big on every other platform.
It was the first video game in
which a celebrity appeared
as a character, which began a
huge trend of its own in addi-

tion to the birth of EA Sports. I did everything for this game—I designed it, down to the last details including the touch controls and the janitor sweeping up after you broke the backboard with a Darryl Dawkins-caliber slam dunk. I produced it. I hired, set the compensation and closely managed every person that worked on it. I made the deals with Erving and Bird, the first of their kind. The success of this game then spurred me to take on the bigger challenge of 11-on-11 football, my personal dream, which became Madden Football. Even by today’s standards in terms of technology, graphics and UI, the One-on-One game would be considered a classic and would be just as fun today as then.”

RICHARD MARKS, MS ’91, PHD ’96
CREATOR OF EYETOY CAMERA
AND MOVE CONTROLLER FOR
PLAYSTATION

FAVORITE VIDEO GAME:

“It is hard to pick just one, but my favorite is probably Sea Battle for Intellivision. It was a two-player-only game, as many games were back then. My father and I played hours and hours of Intellivision, but I liked

Sea Battle the best because it had such a strong strate-
gic element. Playing those games is a great memory; I’m
glad there was not a single-player version.

Similarly, I love Gauntlet because of the countless quarters I spent on it with my close friends in high school. We actually didn’t play many games then, because it was right around the time of the console crash. But since Gauntlet was for four players, it was a lot of fun to do as a group. The Warrior always burned through about twice as many quarters as everyone else (sorry Chuck!) We played it most often in a 7-Eleven, which seems pretty strange now.”

STANFORD VIDEO GAME MEMORY:
“My graduate research at Stanford was using computer
vision for controlling an underwater robot. Working in
robotics is highly related to working in video games.
(Video games just don’t have quite as many real-world
constraints!) The lab I was a part of, the Aerospace
Robotics Lab, really
focused on making things
that truly worked, not just
ivory-tower research. That
same mentality has worked
well for me in the R&D
group at PlayStation."