Game iPad

Graduating from the University of California, Berkley, with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he started out designing aerospace control systems before beginning his career at Atari in 1977. There, he coded early titles for the 2600 console like Basketball, Surround and Hangman, but, frustrated by the lack of royalities at the company, co-founded Activision. In 1984, he moved on to launch seminal publisher Accolade.

Recently, I spoke to Alan about his incredibly career in the industry, and his views on where he sees game development heading. Here's what he had to say.

Did you apply for a job at Atari?
Yes, I worked in the valley for three or four years, then saw that Atari was advertising, and it was a very interesting display. When I was growing up, I was the oldest of six children and part of my job was to get my younger brothers and sisters amused so I 'd Art has been creating fun activities for kids my whole life - this is one of the reasons was I was very interested in Atari. The other attraction was that they were products based on microprocessor technology, which was something I wanted to get into.

What you have to program?
There were no personal computers back in those days. When I started at Atari, was largely the work on a timesharing system. We have terminals in the office, we would enter our code, it would be to go to a central computer that we would be the time from an assembler program and let it transform our source code in assembler code. We would then be downloaded to the development for the Atari 2600, we have worked. Over time some of us thought that this was pretty kludgy, so that we based our own in-house development of systems designed to PDP-11 minicomputer - we have to develop after a few years.

There was a sense of camaraderie there? Was it fun?

What did that teach you about online games?

Are there universal laws of game design that run through from your time at Atari?

Jeez, the future is very interesting. I think we're going to see a lot more people playing games on mobile devices – duh – but they're becoming more sophisticated, the data networks are faster and so it will be much more of a seamless experience. Whether you're playing on a mobile device or on your computer at home. And at some point in the future I do think advertising will become a significant monetisation source for games. I mean, it does tremendously for Google – they're not a game publisher but they're starting to make some very aggressive moves toward the games industry. It will be interesting to see where they go with that. Mobile phones are also developing the capability to wirelessly send information to HD televisions – people are going to be using their phone as a controller and looking at the game on a screen ten feet away – that's going to be a very interesting change for the industry. The console publishers face a very challenging future.

The most interesting game I designed was Law of the West. I incorporated a system in which the player could do bad things – you could shoot lots of people – but it had consequences. And I think that was interesting – to develop a darker story. I also tried to have all the characters react differently to you depending on what you had done previously. But the C64 wasn't such a wonderfully robust machine and we didn't have a lot of space.