If at some point in the 1980s you ever hastily jammed your hand into your pocket for another quarter only to find yourself fresh out, Ed Logg was probably to blame.
It’s impossible to know precisely which arcade game designer was responsible for making the most money off coin-operated machines, 25 cents at a time. But Logg would be on anyone’s short list. As a designer of Asteroids, Centipede and Gauntlet he kept Atari at the forefront of the arcade business for many years. In February, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will honor Logg’s early accomplishments with its Pioneer Award, the group has revealed exclusively to Wired.com.
Logg readily admits that he didn’t come up with the original concepts for his biggest games. Asteroids was suggested by an Atari executive; Gauntlet was based on an older Atari computer game called Dandy. But Logg had a gift for taking raw brainstormed ideas and coming up with the perfect mix of gameplay elements that turned them into quarter-munching hits.
“It wasn’t virtuoso coding that made [Logg’s] games a success as much as putting all the proper
features in the game in the right order,” said former Atari arcade game designer Mark Cerny (Marble Madness) in a statement provided by AIAS. “Of course, you needed an amazing intuition as to which were the proper features.”
Now in its third year, the AIAS Pioneer Award is given to the gamemakers whose groundbreaking early work laid the foundations of the multi-billion dollar videogame industry. Previous award recipients include Pitfall! creator David Crane and Pinball Construction Set designer Bill Budge.
Space Cadets
George Edward Logg was born in 1948 in Seattle. He studied mathematics and computer science at Berkeley and then Stanford, where he’d played the original computer game Spacewar! in the school’s Artifical Intelligence Lab.
After school he interviewed at Xerox PARC, which was doing groundbreaking work in graphical user interfaces (“When I saw the Mac, I knew where it had came from, no doubt about it”) but instead took a job at Control Data Corporation. It happened to be across the street from a startup called Atari, to which one of his coworkers soon jumped ship. Having been very impressed with the company’s new Video Computer System home gaming machine, Logg decided to take a job opening in coin-op games.
In the coin-op division, field testing was of paramount importance. It cost thousands of dollars to buy an arcade cabinet, and owners wouldn’t take the plunge unless they knew they could recoup that cost. That meant players couldn’t get tired of the games after a week or a month, and the only way to know was to place a prototype game in a local watering hole and carefully watch the quarter intake. Dirt Bike, which would have been Logg’s first game, failed the field test and was shelved.