TCW 217 - The Games of Ed Logg

[Intro Music -- Airplane Mode]

Welcome to They Create Worlds. I'm Jeffrey, and I'm joined by my co-host Alex.

Barely have time for it before DragonCon, but this will be dropping not too long before our panel, assuming the schedule holds. Of course, we don't have a final schedule yet, but we've been told Sunday. So yeah, if you happen to be at DragonCon, and for some bizarre reason are listening to this podcast at DragonCon, instead of going around enjoying DragonCon, then be sure to check your schedule for our gaming track presentation on D&D and computer games to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, and stop by and see us in a few hours.

Yes, well it's funny you should say that, because I get where you're going there with the name log, though of course he's spelled with two G's for some reason, but it's funny you should say that because Ed Logg actually was a math person. He was that before he was ever a computer programmer and thought that he was going to become some kind of mathematics professor or some such thing before his career took a turn, but we'll get into that in a little more detail in a moment. Because yes, today's episode is all about Ed Logg and the games of Ed Logg. Ed Logg is one of the most accomplished coin-operated game programmers in the history of the medium. Gave us some true classics, some big hits, some incredibly influential games. It feels like it's worth our time to kind of go in and look at that career. We did that for Eugene Jarvis, which is probably the only other American coin-op programmer and game designer that has anywhere approaching the same pedigree as Ed Logg, which one has the bigger pedigree is certainly not a debate that I care to have. They're both equally incredible, so it seemed like a good time to extend the same treatment to Atari's number one guy here in Ed.

We know that after Berkeley he ended up attending Stanford University for a time, where he was intending to get those graduate degrees in mathematics, and this is where his life really took the turn, because he had been engaged with computers for a while, like I said. I mean, if I had more details I'd give them, but we know he had been for a while, and he finally just decided this programming thing was just ever so much more fascinating than pure mathematics. He decided he didn't really want to be a mathematics instructor, which is about all you can do. You can do research and you can be a professor. There's really not much more you can do with a pure mathematics degree. Math's used in a lot of practical fields, but you know, you get degrees in engineering and other things to use math like that, not pure mathematics. So he ended up abandoning the graduate work and becoming a programmer for Control Data Corporation, which is a Minnesota-based company most known for its so-called supercomputers. But he was working in their California branch, so he wasn't picking up his roots and moving to the Midwest. He got to stay right where he was in the Valley, working for CDC as a programmer, working on a programming project for a bank.

Now, that was his day job doing programming projects for CDC. His true fascination was still with the games, and Stanford was a very important part of that because, of course, as we've talked about many times before on this podcast, Stanford was one of the very early centers of computer games because of the Stanford AI Lab, which had one of the very early installations of Space War. Ed Log played Space War on the computers that were in the computer science department at Stanford. He also was there to play the Galaxy Game, which we have talked about. We've done an episode about on this podcast before, which was the early attempt to commercialize Space War by a Stanford student, former Stanford student, Bill Pitts, and his friend Hugh Tuck, that kind of came out at roughly the same time as Nolan Bushnell's computer space, but was both a far more faithful recreation of Space War than Computer Space was, and also was correspondingly much, much more expensive and therefore never got beyond a couple of prototype units, one of which spent almost a decade in the Stanford student union. So Ed Log got to play that as well. So he wasn't just playing space war in the computer lab. He also saw the prototypical commercialized version and played that as well. He was also familiar with what was going on in coin operated gaming. He was first exposed to video games, as he said in an interview that he gave by playing games like Pong and Breakout at Pizza Time Theater, Chuck E Cheese, the first location of which was of course also opened in the valley because that was an Atari project. He was also exposed at Stanford to some of the early, early mainframe computer games, classic games like Star Trek and Adventure. He's right at the nexus of all of these movements that are happening right now that are moving us towards a viable commercial video game industry, or as we like to say for the early days, a set of video game industries. So while he was working on this project for the bank as his main job at CDC, he also took it upon himself to port a lot of these early computer games like Adventure and Star Trek from the Stanford computers, where he was presumably able to get printouts of the code, to the computers in use by CDC. Then when he would have those programs done, he would then, because he also had a connection to the ARPANET, he would then send those games out on the ARPANET. So he wasn't creating original games at this time, but he was doing his own little part to spread some of the very early classic mainframe games because he just found the whole thing very enjoyable. He also decided around 1976 or so, exact years are a little hazy, he actually created his own custom home computer. We're not talking about one of these computers like the Altair or the IMSAI that are just starting to appear in the hobbyist computing market, as we've talked about before. He built his own custom computer just to play some of the fun games that he was seeing in the arcades. For instance, his computer could play a version of the game Seawolf, the classic Midway target shooting game from Dave Nutting Associates that we've talked about from time to time. Yeah, this guy, he kind of liked games a whole, whole lot.

But of course, he's also in the Valley. The Valley is where Atari is, and it just so happens that a friend of his ends up getting a job at Atari. And I would tell you who that friend is, except that Ed Logg doesn't remember who the friend was. So we don't have that piece of information. But a friend of his came to be employed at Atari and told him about it. And I believe this friend, because he mentions that in a 1977 Christmas party, he saw a prototype of the Atari VCS. Now, the VCS had just come out in holiday 1977, so there were commercial units available, but he specifically said in the interview that he saw a prototype of the VCS. So I imagine that that was at a Christmas party, and I imagine that it was probably his friend who worked at Atari that had that on display. He doesn't say that, but it only makes logical sense. So he saw the VCS. He saw this stuff Atari was doing. And of course, he had his own interest in this, as evidenced by the fact that he built his own computer just so he could play games at home. So he thought, "Hey, this seems pretty cool, and I love doing this stuff, and that sounds like a cool career." So with the help of his friend, he got his foot in the door at Atari and joined the coin-operated games division as a programmer. That was in 1978, at the beginning of 1978, that Ed Logg joined the company. Still really early in the history of the company, and we may recall, you know, Atari's been kind of up and down during this entire period. I mean, they had a big hit with Pong, then they kind of couldn't figure out what to do next. Then they got some traction again with games like Sprint 2 and especially Breakout in 1976, but the market's been very up and down. '77 wasn't as great a year. '78's not looking like it'll necessarily be the best a year. It's a company that's really in transition, as the coin-op industry is kind of going up and down, or the coin-op video game industry is going up and down, and the home product has not fully managed to carve a place for itself yet either. Kind of a pioneering time to be coming to Atari.

Actually, his very first project was to take over a project that Dennis Coble was working on, a game called Dirtbike, which was basically taking the gameplay of Sprint 2, which had been a highly successful game, changing it into a bike driving game with handlebar controllers. Now, Jeffrey often starts trolling around for games in the show notes as I'm talking. Don't bother with this one, Jeffrey, you won't find Dirtbike.

There's a fair amount of contradictory information out there about Asteroids, about the genesis of Asteroids. We'll do our best to kind of sort through that. You know, there are a few different sources. Retro Gamer did a Making of article where they talked to both Ed Logg and the co-creator of the game, Lyle Rains, which a lot of information comes from. A lot of our information in general on Ed Logg comes from the large interview he did for the excellent book ‘Game Design Theory and Practice’, which in addition to being kind of a textbook on making video games, also had a lot of interviews with prominent game designers. So becomes a good source for this stuff. We have a couple of sources, and it's clear that there are probably some memories that are a little faulty here and there, but we will do our best with the information we have.

One thing that's certain is while Ed Logg was very instrumental to the success of Asteroids, as we shall see as the story progresses, the game was not initially his idea. The initial idea actually came from another engineer by the name of Lyle Rains, who was the VP of engineering in the coin-operated games division at the time. Asteroids was a direct response to Space Invaders, because obviously Space Invaders had taken the market by storm. Everyone was having to rethink what it meant to have a hit video game as Space Invaders sold and sold and sold and sold. It also cemented the space themed game as something that had really captured the public's imagination. It was already kind of starting even before Space Invaders with Cinematronic Space Wars and Exedy Starfire and of course Star Wars the movie was exciting a lot of this activity as well, but Space Invaders was kind of the point of no return, where in the near future everything was going to be space games. Quite frankly in some ways Lyle Rains was not impressed. Certainly he was impressed with the success of the game, and certainly he thought the kind of new gameplay elements, this idea that you're clearing the whole screen and that you're in mortal danger while you're doing it, was very very interesting to him. But the play action he felt was rather simplistic, because at the end of the day all you're doing is moving left and right and firing. Yeah there's some tension and there's flying saucers coming by for bonus points and aliens are getting faster as they descend and all of this stuff that's all going on, but the basic gameplay is incredibly simple. Lyle Rains feels that they can perhaps do something better. He kind of actually wanted to return to computer space of all things. Everyone would agree that the original computer space was far too finicky. The control scheme didn't ever really quite come together, the game was a little janky. I mean it's primitive, especially by the standards of 1979. However game players have become more sophisticated. Space Wars has come out and been a massive hit. So kind of that basic gameplay of having to rotate your ship and use thrust and you know space being fairly frictionless so that you know you keep moving in a direction until you exert a force in an opposite direction etc etc wasn't necessarily so alien to players anymore and wouldn't necessarily be as confusing as that gameplay was perceived to be when computer space came out in 1971. So while Reigns thought to himself what if we used the more interesting movement and ability to fly around the entire screen that you would find in a computer space or Space Wars, but combine that with the clear all the objects from the screen gameplay that Space Invaders had so successfully, not pioneered obviously since even it's taking it from Breakout, but has so successfully cemented as the gameplay loop that players want in this exact time period.

So he thought kind of basically a combination of Computer Space and Space Invaders. Now why asteroids? There's some real confusion there because everyone's memory, Lyles and Eds and everyone, is very strange on this. Ed Logg likes to make mention of a game that had a big asteroid in the center of the screen that was invulnerable but everyone wanted to shoot at anyway. A prototype. So this was not a game that I think was released but a prototype at Atari that never quite came together that featured a big asteroid that people wanted to shoot at but it was no fun. Lyle Rains makes reference to the game Planet Grab which was another prototype. This was never released but it was a game that Atari was working on where two players would fly around the screen basically trying to capture planets. You would run into a planet to capture it and you know the two players were competing to capture the most planets on the screen. He seems to indicate that as that game continued to be tweaked; that at some point it was changed where you could also blow up the planets and that that was kind of fun and that may be where some of the idea came from but it's all very confusing and I'm not convinced any of them quite have it right. Another wrinkle in this is that the game Space Wars, the Cinematronics hit of 1978, did have an asteroid or meteorite or whatever you want to call it that would periodically fly across the screen and was indestructible. So I wonder if they're really remembering an Atari prototype game like Planet Grab or if they are actually remembering Space Wars which is an actually released game that did have an indestructible piece of rock that would fly across the screen. Who knows? But whether it was from an Atari prototype or from Space Wars or from something else entirely, Lyle Rains got the idea that these should be rocks, that the player is clearing the screen of rocks. So he takes this basic idea to Ed Logg. Ed doesn't know why he in particular was chosen though he had had a couple successful games under his belt so it could have been just as simple as Lyle Rains liked the work that Ed Logg was doing and was like so here here's a game idea that I want to refine with you. Ed Logg thought it was very interesting and he made some refinements of his own. He made two suggestions right up front. One was okay, clearing the screen of rocks is great but this is a coin-op game. Coin-op games require that eventually the player stops playing the game or loses all his lives and has to continue the game so that we get more money and unlike the aliens and space invaders rocks don't shoot back at you. What do we do to prevent the player from just playing practically forever when there are just a couple of rocks left on the screen and they're very easy to avoid at that point? So he decided that there would be flying saucers that would come in that yes you could shoot for bonus points like in space invaders but also they would shoot at you when they came in. Their attacks would get more intense the longer you're playing the game as a way of trying to finally end your asteroid-busting career. The other thing that he suggested is that to add a little more strategy in the game, instead of just having rocks of multiple sizes and you shoot one and it goes away, what if the bigger asteroids broke into smaller asteroids which made you have to do a little more calculation about what order you wanted to tackle things and how much debris you wanted littering the field. Now, Rains in the Retro Gamer article kind of mentions that he already had the idea that the rocks break up. Ed Logg in his interviews says that he's the one that came up with it. So again, there's a place where memories conflict but Ed Logg certainly seems to think that it was him that came up with that idea. From that basic premise was crafted the hit game Asteroids. Of course, Ed Logg, having been an avid Space War and Galaxy Game player, not a very good one by his own admission but still a frequent player of Space War and Galaxy Game in college, very much modeled the controls on those games. He did work very carefully to balance the physics. He didn't go full accurate Newtonian physics where there's just no friction at all in space. You still have to do the very Space Wars and Computer Space thing of changing your direction by rotating your ship and firing your thrusters but there's just a little bit of friction and he really worked hard to get the exact right amount in so that the game plays well and players can kind of get a handle on it while still being mostly true to the real physics of how you would have to fly a ship in these circumstances. He also included the hyperspace function from Space War and Galaxy game, the panic button that you can press if you're in immediate danger and it'll warp you to a random spot on the screen which may even put you in more danger than when you left but at least gives you a chance to keep going.

The other very important thing that he did is he made the case to do the game using Atari's brand new vector graphics engine because this was going to be a game that was very dependent on the facing of your ship. You were going to be rotating your ship around because of the Newtonian physics you can't turn on a dime so in order to destroy asteroids near you you're going to have to do a lot of rotation you can't just zoom around the screen. The raster monitor resolutions at the time did not lend themselves to that because you would basically have a small blob that you would barely be able to tell what end was what. They needed the higher resolution graphics that you could get from a vector display. He had done a little work on the vector engine, he had done a little work on Lunar Lander which was their first vector game. He was not the primary guy on it but he kind of just chipped in a little bit on it so he knew that that system was around and was very excited about it and so he convinced Lyle Rains to let them use that system as well which was also instrumental to the game's success. We kind of see it all coming together here with this game. I mean clearly this is a person that understands what makes a good game. He's figured out how to add a little more strategy with the rocks breaking up. He's come up with a system that in theory, emphasis on the in theory, is going to stop players from just lurking at the end of the game by having the saucers come out that shoot at them. He's thinking about the presentation elements, what he's going to need in terms of technology to make this work well, and of course he's putting a lot of time into refining the physics to make sure that it just has a really good feel to the player. So you put all of these things together and you get the massive hit that is Asteroids that sells 70,000 units. It's important for a number of reasons that we've talked about in other episodes. I do think, and I'm not the one that came up with this, I've heard this theory espoused by people that were there at the time. It's not unique to me but Pong came out and then had a bunch of clones and the clones weren't that much different and then the market collapsed. The very same thing could have happened with Space Invaders where you just had Space Invaders and you had a bunch of Space Invaders clones and then everyone got tired of it and the market collapsed. It could have just been another single game fad. But Asteroids coming out on the heel of Space Invaders with a similar theme in that it's a space shooting game but implemented in a completely different way where you're zipping around the entire screen, five button control scheme, hyperspace, Newtonian physics, asteroids that break into smaller pieces. You know, a very different way of doing the same kind of gameplay kind of showed that Space Invaders was not a one-game fad this time. That, hey, we have more ideas of what you can do and these ideas are going to vary and we can actually have a diverse video game offering. So I think it was really important for that reason. And the other thing is that it truly was the game that popularized the high score table. Ed Logg himself has been very candid that he took the high score table from Exidy Starfire, which we talked about in our Exidy episode. He didn't invent the high score table but it's just asteroids was a massive, massive, massive hit, 70,000 units. So that was the game that really popularized the high score table. Space Invaders popularized the high score but didn't have a table with initials. Exidy with Starfire introduced the table with initials and that gave it some traction but that game was a relatively low selling game. Asteroids, which takes the high score table from Starfire, blows up everywhere and now the high score table has become a standard part of the arcade experience. Again, it speaks to Ed Logg's ability here that in this case, yeah, it's not something that he invented himself but he recognized a great feature from another product. Though in his own words, he didn't have any conception of how big the high score table would become. He thought it was interesting and he thought it was something worth putting in but even he was surprised at how important that became in arcade culture. So there you have it. Now one thing that he did fail on is I said that those flying saucers would in theory stop a player from lurking on the screen forever when there was just a couple of asteroids left. Well, I used those words in theory very deliberately because in practice it didn't quite work out that way because you see, originally he had it so that the saucer would basically, as the game progressed, would come out and basically shoot at you immediately after it appeared. So if you were kind of on the edge of the screen where the saucer was going to appear, you basically had no chance to avoid it. So in play tests, players complained, said that was very unfair, that they could just die before they had any chance to react. Ed Logg grudgingly agreed and so he put a one second delay on the shooting after the spaceship, the saucer, appeared. That was all the time a really good player needed to kill the saucer before it had a chance to fire. The saucer gave you points when you destroyed it. As with many games at the time, additional points, you know, would eventually give you extra men, extra lives, extra ships. The lurking strategy was very viable. Ed Logg knew this was a possibility, but when he was playing it himself, he was never successful at it, so he was like, "Ah, this won't be a problem." But you may remember that I said earlier that Ed Logg wasn't necessarily the best player of Space War in Galaxy Game back in college, so his play skills were probably also not the best ones to gauge whether a player would be able to successfully lurk. Boy did players successfully lurk. Lurking is just a strategy where you leave one asteroid, so it's very easy to avoid, and you just wait for the flying saucer to appear and shoot it over and over and over again for points. This literally allowed players, the best players, to play the game for multiple days on a single quarter.

Centipede's another game where there's a little bit of confusion around the game, both because of differing memories of the participants, but also because there is a real desire to give credit for the game to the other programmer on the project, Donna Bailey, because she was a pioneer in a way in being a female video game programmer. In point of fact, while Donna Bailey made some very important contributions, which you are going to cover, and I think it's fair to say the game would probably not have been quite as successful without her, this was really primarily an Ed Logg game, not a Donna Bailey game. Ed Logg truly does deserve most of the credit, and to be clear, this isn't some kind of woman erasure thing or a man taking credit for something that a woman actually did. That's not what this is at all. It's a fact that Ed Logg did slightly more of the work on the game than Donna Bailey did, but it's also a fact, as we'll see, that Donna Bailey made a couple of very important contributions that aided the success. So not about diminishing her at all, it's just about keeping the record straight.

Donna Bailey was a fresh hire at Atari in 1980, and because she had never done any game programming work before, previous to that she had been working on cruise control in automobiles. Ed Logg had her look through the book of game ideas that the company kept that was made up of all the ideas that people came up with that were considered to have some merit at the company's yearly brainstorming sessions. They would have off-sites at places like Bajaro Dunes where basically everyone could pitch game ideas. Most of them came from programmers and hardware engineers, but artists would also contribute and even sometimes people from other disciplines. Sometimes these ideas would just be a couple of sentences. Sometimes they would be full-blown game ideas with storyboards and everything. It would really vary. These ideas would be gathered in advance, a lot of them, and then they would go over them at the brainstorming sessions, then they would split into groups and discuss them some more and maybe bring up some new ideas, and then at the end any ideas that the majority people thought had merit would be added to this book of game ideas. So Donna Bailey was turned loose on this book, and most of the ideas, which is not surprising in 1980, involved in some way shape or form spaceships and lasers and aliens and explosions and all of this kind of stuff, and she just wasn't interested in that. But she finally came across one that intrigued her that was merely titled Bug Shooter. We have no idea whose idea Bug Shooter was. No one has come forward to take credit for it. It was not Ed Logg’s idea. This Bug Shooter idea just basically said that a multi-segmented centipede or bug is moving across and down the screen and you have to shoot it segment by segment. She thought that was kind of a cool idea, and so she chose that as the game. But the game design was done by Ed Logg. Donna Bailey had never designed a game before, so Ed Logg took it upon himself to design the game and then he assigned Donna Bailey to be the programmer on the game. So there's a lot of similarities to Asteroids and kind of the choices he made here. First of all, according to Donna Bailey, it had a multi-button control scheme in the beginning that was very similar to the Asteroid scheme. And then he really wanted there to be these strategic elements again. He wanted to make sure that the player was always on their toes, so he added in the spider, which was kind of akin to the saucers in Asteroids, which would go after the player separately from the centipede to always kind of keep the player on his toes. He added a field of blocks that later morphed into mushrooms that would be arrayed across the screen and would cause the centipede to change direction and move lower every time that it hit one of these blocks, which made the game a little more unpredictable than just a centipede always coming down the screen in the exact same pattern. In the beginning, the game still lacked something with these basic features. Until their coworker, Ed Logg's coworker, Dan Van Eldren, brought up the very good point of "Why can't you shoot the mushrooms?" Ed Logg was like, "Why can't you shoot the mushrooms?" So he made it so that the mushrooms were also destructible, and then added additional critters, a flea that spreads more mushrooms on the screen, a scorpion that can poison the mushrooms, and then if the centipede hits a poison mushroom, it gives up its meandering path down the screen and goes straight for you at the bottom. And of course, if the centipede hits the bottom screen, you lose the game. So that one simple change, being able to shoot the mushrooms, opened up other creative ideas in Ed Logg's mind as well that made the game even more strategic. That's when they kind of had a winner of a game.

What did Donna Bailey do? Even though this is an Ed Logg episode, we don't want to diminish Donna Bailey's contributions. Well, she actually had a lot of problems getting a handle on video game programming, which was very different from what she had done previously and you know involved graphics and all of this other stuff that she was not familiar with. Ed Logg, in this period, decided that he hated being a supervisor. He hated having all the managerial responsibilities, personnel management and whatnot. Ed Logg actually voluntarily gave up his supervisor job in return to being just a mere programmer and ended up helping Donna Bailey on the programming. So they each programmed about half the game. Donna Bailey's real contributions were twofold. First of all, she was really focused on the color scheme of the game, and she wanted a color scheme that would be very striking in the arcade. So she had the technician poke around in the color generator, activating different palettes by tweaking the hardware until they came across a striking pastel color palette that Donna Bailey implemented in the game. And then she implemented it by having each object be made of two complementary colors, one outline color and one fill color. So the graphics are vibrant and beautiful. Obviously we'll put the game in the show notes, but as with a lot of these early arcade games, it doesn't necessarily fully capture what it felt like seeing that in an arcade on a CRT, which is a very different experience. They really popped in comparison to most other games which made the game stand out. So that was a big contribution of Donna Bailey. The other was the use of the trackball as the main control scheme. Now, this is one place where memories differ. Ed Logg claims that the trackball was his idea. He had already worked with a trackball on the football games, which is true. He would have done so, and that he had it there the whole time. I think it's just faulty memory. I don't think anyone's trying to diminish anybody. In this case, I do believe Donna Bailey, because Donna Bailey, in her interview with Retro Gamer, was very detailed and specific on how they got to the trackball. And it all feels very plausible. So I think Ed Logg is probably just misremembering there. But basically, she wasn't very good at using the buttons. So they tried a joystick, and that wasn't really working very well either. Then her and Steve Calfee, another guy, they kind of hit on using a trackball instead, and that just felt like a really good control scheme. So the trackball was a controller in the pastel graphics were very much Donna Bailey, as was about half the code, the game design, and about half the programming was Ed Logg. Between them, they created a monumental hit. It sold 50,000 units. It was popular with women, one of the games in the wake of Pac-Man that was drawing a broader audience into the arcade. And again, just showed Ed Logg's penchant for really solid game designs that had a lot of interesting strategic possibilities, whether it's asteroids breaking into multiple pieces, or it's mushrooms that are randomly altering the course of a centipede. He really knows how to put enticing gameplay elements into his products.

We're kind of gonna go through the rest of Ed Logg's career pretty rapidly here. There's really not enough fodder for a two-part episode but we also don't want this episode to be five hours long. And those were really his most significant games. Definitely the most significant stuff he did was Asteroids, Centipede, and Gauntlet. So spending so much of our time on those three games and kind of blowing through some of the rest feels appropriate. After Gauntlet he did do a sequel, Gauntlet II. It was basically just a way to incorporate again, just like with Millipede, it was just incorporating a few more ideas that he had had and really couldn't get into Gauntlet. It's just kind of an extension in that way. More interesting was the next game. It started as another Gauntlet game by the name of Catacombs. Basically he had seen some early first-person shooter. In various interviews he talks about Castle Wolfenstein, by which I think he actually meant Wolfenstein 3D, and in one interview he even talked about Doom. Well, Catacombs, which would morph into Zybots, came out in 1987. So he hadn't seen any Wolfenstein 3D or Doom in 1987. They didn't exist yet. Castle Wolfenstein doesn't strictly make sense. While that did form the basis for Wolfenstein 3D, it is in no way a 3D game. My guess is he saw perhaps Midi Maze or some other... there were a couple of first-person games that had come out. He basically wanted to see if he could create a first-person game using the Atari System 1 hardware, which wasn't really designed to do that. So he took up that challenge and created basically a 3D Gauntlet. Marketing decided that they were all gauntleted out and didn't want another Gauntlet, so he changed the theme to be more like Atari's earlier sci-fi coin-op game Major Havoc and kind of set it in the Major Havoc universe, turned it sci-fi, turned the enemies into robots, and created the game Xybots. It's an interesting footnote because it was a first-person shooter, a very early first-person shooter, and in the arcade no less, which was not a place where you would expect to see that kind of thing. But it was not completely successful. He never really solved moving around in a 3D space. They had a joystick for movement, and then they had this little thing on top that you could use to rotate your character. But it was all very difficult and slow and clunky, and it was too easy to get shot by a robot that you never saw coming. So Xybots was not particularly successful, but it is interesting in that it was a very early first-person game that in some ways basically took the Gauntlet formula and turned it into 3D, even though it used a sci-fi setting. So he did Xybots, and then after that he actually, for a long time, got more into console game programming. He kind of left the arcade scene behind.

He had actually done one VCS game while he was at Atari. He had done an Othello game for the VCS. He was not primarily a VCS programmer. He did it in his own time. He used a kernel that Carol Shaw had used for her checkers game as a base, and then created this Othello game just for the fun of it. At Atari Games, where of course he's at now by this time period, all the Atari corporate shenanigans that we've talked about in the past, he actually started playing around with the family computer. We have to remember that in this time period, a large chunk of Atari Games, the majority of it in fact, was owned by Namco, a Japanese company. So they kind of had a window into what was going on in Japan with the Family Computer. They decided that they would probably like to release some of their classic Atari games in Japan for the Family Computer. It wasn't coming over to the United States yet at this time. So he actually reverse engineered the Pamily Computer. To be clear, we are talking about the Family Computer, not the NES, because of course Atari Games is going to very famously have themselves a bit of an oopsie trying to reverse engineer the lockout chip on the Nintendo Entertainment System. That is not the reverse engineering Ed Logg is doing. Ed Log was not part of that project. He reverse engineered the Famicom, which did not have that chip. He actually worked on Centipede and Millipede conversions for the Family Computer. But at that point, there was a big legal struggle going on between Atari Corporation, Jack Tramiel's company that had bought the former home computer and console divisions of Atari, and Atari Games, which was primarily the coin-op division over who owned what property. There was a lawsuit going on over who had the rights to those early games, because those early games had been coin-operated games first, but then they had all been made into VCS versions. There had been home conversions of Centipede and Millipede and Breakout and Asteroids and everything else. There were lawsuits going back and forth about who owned the property, and the judge just didn't want to deal with it and said, "Okay, fine. Everything coin-op before the split is owned by Atari Games. Everything console before the split is owned by Atari Corporation." Basically, Tengen could not do home versions of Atari's pre-1984 arcade games, because the home rights as that lawsuit was settled stayed with Atari Corporation. That ended any plans to release Centipede and Millipede on the Famicom.

A while later, he saw Tetris on the Atari ST computer in one of its computer game releases, was immediately enamored by the game and told Atari Games attorney Dennis Wood that they absolutely had to get the rights for it. This is in Ed Logg's telling. So, of course, we've gone over the whole Tetris story. We won't repeat that here, but Ed Logg, according to Ed himself, was the reason that Atari went after the Tetris rights. Originally, Ed Logg was going to do both the coin-op and NES versions of the game. That ended up being too much work, so he handed off the coin-op version, but he actually was the creator of the Tengen Tetris game, which of course ended up being taken off the shelves, because of all of the lawsuit stuff that we talk about in other episodes and don't need to get into here. After that, he did one more coin-operated game called Steel Talons with Ed Rothberg, which is mostly notable for the fact that it was a very early polygonal game that came out in 1991, third-person shooter kind of game. Then shortly after that, he actually left Atari and joined Electronic Arts. The funny thing is, he joined Electronic Arts because he wanted to do console games with them. He was getting more and more interested in console games. But Electronic Arts at the time was hiring a bunch of former Atari people to start its own coin-op division. Yes, Electronic Arts very briefly had a coin-op division, because there was this idea that all the biggest hits like Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam and Street Fighter II were coming out of the arcade. So companies like Electronic Arts and Acclaim decided that they should have coin-op divisions so that they could create in-house the next console hits, first creating the coin-op version and then being able to do the console conversions of their own games themselves. So he ended up joining the very short-lived coin-op division of Electronic Arts, worked on a puzzle game and a shooting game there, neither one of which was ever released. Then Electronic Arts very quickly closed down that division, which was a mistake to do in the first place. That left him unemployed. You know, he wanted to do console games. He was going to go in with another former coworker at EA to create a new startup to do that, but then his partner found another opportunity. So he actually, as it was not planned, he actually ended up right back at Atari Games. [Jeffrey Laughs] A lot of people think that he spent his whole career at Atari Games because he ended up right back there very quickly after he left, but there was actually a very brief interval where he worked at Electronic Arts because Atari Games was looking for somebody to convert their arcade game, Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey, to the N64. He joined that group and did that conversion, then devoted himself to making conversions of the San Francisco Rush games, racing games, also for the N64. There's really not much to say about these. We don't have a lot of information on the making of them. They are in a way just ports, but I will say that Ed Logg did say that his philosophy with doing these kinds of console ports was he understood that a console game is never going to compete with a coin-op game in graphics and sound and unique control schemes and all of that stuff. His philosophy when doing these ports was to pack the ports full of content. He figured that the one thing that you could do in the home that you couldn't do in the arcade is create a game meant to be played by a player for a very long time and have other things for them to find and collect. So like his port of San Francisco Rush Extreme Racing, the first San Francisco Rush game that he ported, it has more tracks than the original, plus it has secret courses that you can discover within the tracks, and there are collectible hidden keys on the tracks that can be used to unlock additional vehicles. He added new secrets, he added new collectibles, he added new customization options, all of these kind of things. He wasn't just doing a straight port of the arcade game into the home because he knew that would be a loser. He was trying to give a little value add there.

Then he ended up working on a original 3D platform game called Dr. Muto that didn't really do all of that well. Then Atari Games, Midway Games West by this time closed down, and he spent the rest of his time basically looking back at making simpler games like back in the old days. You know, the cell phone market was picking up, so he joined a startup called Gen PlayGames, along with several other people from Midway Games West, the former Atari Games, to create some cell phone games. He moved on from there to making simple games for cable TV systems. Then he was one of several people that joined a company called Innovative Leisure that brought together a lot of ex-Atari people to make mobile games, smartphone games, that for a variety of reasons never panned out. I'm not sure if he worked for any other companies other than those, but you know he just basically kind of did that kind of stuff until retiring. None of the later work was particularly noteworthy that he did, but a lot of the old guard kind of turned to things like mobile gaming and smartphone gaming in the later stages of their career, just because those were projects more like what they had worked on in the beginning, where you had very small teams of people doing relatively simple compared to modern AAA games, relatively simple projects, and it just felt a lot like the world that they had left behind from the beginnings of their career, because games had just been getting more and more and more complex.

I know we kind of rushed there. I think I left out some other projects. He also did a game before he left Atari Games the first time after Steel Talons called Space Lords. There was an attempt at a multiplayer space game where everyone had their own monitor. You could play up to four players, each two players per cabinet, and then the cabinets could be linked. I left that out. It didn't do very well. I might have left out something else too, but that is basically, in a nutshell, the career of Ed Log. While his later output wasn't necessarily as notable as his earlier output, he was in the industry for a long time. I mean, anyone would kill to have a resume that included Asteroids, Centipede, and Gauntlet. Truly one of the legends in the coin-operated video game space.

Check out our show notes at podcast.theycreateworlds.com, where we have linked to some of the things that we discussed in this and other episodes. You can check out Alex's video game history blog at videogamehistorian.wordpress.com. Alex's book, They Create Worlds, the story of the people and companies that shaped the video game industry, volume one, can now be ordered through CRC Press and at major online retailers. Email us at feedback@theycreateworlds.com. Please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/theycreateworlds. Please help get the word out by leaving a review on your favorite podcasting service. We now have the podcast available on YouTube. Intro Music is Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward, found at joshwoodward.com/song/airplanemode, used under a creative commons attribution license. Outro Music is Bacterial Love by Rolem Music, found at freemusicarchive.org, used under a creative commons attribution license.