From Crazy Otto to Ms. Pac-Man by Steve Golson
Here’s the description from the conference website:
Ms. Pac-Man was released in early 1982, so she turns thirty this year. Steve Golson, one of the original developers of Ms. Pac-Man at General Computer, will recount little-known stories about the creation of the game. How and why did it transform from Crazy Otto to Ms. Pac-Man? Using source code and graphics ROMs freshly extracted from his 30-year-old 8″ floppy archives, Steve will show the evolution of game play and character design.
Steve will also discuss GCC’s first product Super Missile Attack, and will reveal the SMA 2.0 version created during GCC’s lawsuit with Atari.
Crazy Otto and Super Missile Attack 2.0 will be available for play.
Errata: A former Atari employee assures me that the link between PDP11 and black/blue box was not paper tape; most likely it was a serial line. If I am wrong, please accept my apologies. I stand corrected. My slide 17 was based on two interviews I found, one with Dave Theurer. Nevertheless I feel my point is still valid: our development environment at GCC was much more interactive than what Atari used for Missile Command.
Here are the slides as a QuickTime movie and as PDF. The PDF version does not have the cool game play screenshots.
Thanks to kitkatdady1 who recorded this and made it available on YouTube: part 1 and part 2. Also many thanks to Trevor Brown who recorded me after the talk doing some show-and-tell with Super Missile Attack and Crazy Otto artifacts.