Classic Game Postmortem: ‘Ms. Pac-Man’ by Steve Golson
Here’s the description from the GDC website. It’s mostly accurate, but a bit more flowery than I might write:
Steve Golson, the experienced designer and engineer best known in the game industry for designing arcade game enhancement kits at General Computer of Cambridge, will be delivering a Classic Postmortem of his influential ’80s arcade game Ms. Pac-Man at GDC 2016.
In his time at General Computer, Golson worked on a variety of notable projects, from the Super Missile Attack arcade enhancement kit to the Atari 7800 ProSystem’s Maria graphics chip to Atari games like Food Fight.
His remarkable work as part of the team developing the Pac-Man arcade enhancement kit Crazy Otto drove Midway to license the game and release it as Ms. Pac-Man, which became one of the best-selling and most influential arcade games in U.S. history.
Golson currently runs his own integrated circuit consultancy, Trilobyte Systems, which he founded in 1986 after leaving General Computer.
This talk was recorded and you can watch it on the GDC Vault. The video is also available on YouTube (someday soon I’ll have to reply to the comments). And here are the slides as a rather large PDF (sorry this does not include the video clips).
My presentation resulted in some nice press:
- Ars Technica
- Gamasutra
- Polygon
- VentureBeat
- IGN and be sure and watch/listen to the Developer Let’s Play video with Jared Petty
- USgamer A fun interview, however I regret that my only mention of Steve Jobs comes across as rather disparaging. Don’t take this one incident as an indication of my opinion on Steve Jobs – he was an amazing visionary and design genius who transformed our world.
And, this talk was voted the 20th ranked presentation at GDC, out of 384! As one of the Top 50 Ranked Speakers I was included in this cool souvenir card deck. Thanks GDC!