RDA is Rich Adam, junior programmer on Missile Command.
#SPELLTOWER HIGH SCORE SOFTWARE#
As chief Engineer of Software Engineering, Steve was Theurer’s boss, and was involved in the early conceptualisation of what would become Missile Command. Dave joined Atari right out of Berkeley during Atari’s heyday, and was the hardware lead on the game. No surprise he took the number 1 slot.ĭLS is Dave Sherman. The lead software engineer who created Missile Command. Missile Command’s default high score tableĭFT is Dave Theurer himself. So who is going to notice if you program your own initials within the game’s default high score table? Atari didn’t want Williams or Gottlieb to poach their talent, and vice versa – perfectly understandable of course, but programmers were human and wanted to put their names to their game to be immortalised forever. The main reason cited for this was one of competition.
Many manufacturers of arcade games wouldn’t allow their programmers to bask in any sort of publicity. Atari’s Steve Calfeeīut programming functioning high score tables gave the designers of arcade games an unexpected seldom-discussed opportunity.
But manufacturers had to be careful about letting Joe public loose on CRT screens:īack then we restricted high score initials to 3 letters as a way to limit obscenities in our game attract mode. This added to the competitive nature of video games to come to the fore to gamers of all abilities. By providing a “table” of the top 20 and top 10 high scores respectively, they gave players the ability to enter their initials alongside their scores in a three character format.
Star Fire by Exidy and Atari’s Asteroids both took this concept one stage further a couple of years later. (CMOS, short for “complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor” is a term used to describe a small amount of memory on an arcade PCB capable of storing data even after the main power to it is shut off).Īlthough it didn’t provide the capability to enter player’s initials, Taito’s Space Invaders is generally regarded as the first arcade game to display the highest score achieved by previous players (although I’m reliably informed that Midway’s Sea Wolf takes the honours by a couple of years). For others, scores would be held in CMOS for example, powered by an onboard battery and would remain on the machine for much longer periods of time. One of the ultimate high score arcade battlegroundsįor some gamers, the glory would only last for the day, with a game’s high scores being wiped back to default at the end of the day when everything was powered off.
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