COLLECTED WORKS ED ROTBERG

Meet a man from the forefront of gaming’s momentous leap into 3D

- Paul Drury

Designer and programmer Ed Rotberg has some wise words for those planning a career in videogame development. “Panic early and often,” he suggests. “That was always my mantra, and it’s why most of my games were delivered on time and within budget.”

The philosophy served him well during his four decades of making games. Rotberg joined Atari in January of 1979 and began work on Baseball, a mod kit for the successful Atari Football cabinet, which featured a very early example of speech synthesis in a coin-op, though that particular feature never made it out of the lab. Following ‘Theurer’s Law’ – named after Missile Command and Tempest creator, Dave Theurer, which states that any coder’s first game will not be a hit – Baseball failed to score a home run, but Rotberg was still having a ball. “It was like I’d died and gone to heaven,” he smiles. “I’d always goofed around on the computers at my old jobs, making little games, and now I was being paid to do it.”

His second production,