Carol Shaw

Person
Born 1955 in United States

Carol Shaw is an American video game designer who created notable works for Atari and Activision in the 1980s. She was the games industry's first female professional developer. Shaw's Atari 2600 game River Raid was a million seller and is regarded as a classic title of the era.

Game credits

Designer
- River Raid

Personal details

Born	1955 United States

Personal life

1 2

Early years

Carol Shaw was born in 1955 in Palo Alto, California and also grew up there. Shaw had "little interest in dolls as a kid, instead preferring to tinker with her brothers’ model railroad layout," according to a Vintage Computing and Gaming profile.

Parents

Shaw's father was was a mechanical engineer. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom, but also worked at the Stanford library for a time when Shaw's father was out of work.

Marriage to Ralph Merkle

Shaw married Ralph Merkle, an American computer scientist and mathematician who helped invent cryptographic hashing, in 1983. The pair met in 1976 while studying computer science at Berkeley.

Education

1 2

Computer science degrees

Shaw completed both a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science at University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s, a time when there were few women in the field.

High school computing

Shaw became interested in computing while at high school. She told Vintage Computing and Gaming: "They had a time sharing system with BASIC. You’d type in BASIC programs on teletypes, and I also discovered they had games on the system that you could play, like Star Trek. Of course, they were text-based games."

Talent for mathematics

Shaw won mathematics contents and awards while at school. She told Vintage Computing and Gaming: "Of course, people would say, 'Gee, you’re good at math — for a girl'. That was kind of annoying. Why shouldn’t girls be good at math?"

Career

1 2

Trailblazing at Atari

Shaw is believed to have been the first professional female game developer. She interviewed for Atari while completing her masters degree in computing science, joining the company in 1978 to program games for the Atari VCS console. Shaw became Atari's "go-to coder for the trickier programming tasks" and chose to join Atari "because they paid her to play games," according to a profile by The Centre for Computing History. Atari VCS titles worked on by Shaw include 3-D Tic Tac Toe, Video Checkers, and Super Breakout.

1 2

First female game designer

Shaw moved from Tandem Computers to Activision, where she was the industry's first female game designer. She created her most notable title while at Activision, the award-winning side-scrolling shooter River Raid. She told Vintage Computing and Gaming: "Since I worked at Tandem, that meant that I could then get hired by Activision, because Activision got sued by Atari and they had an agreement not to steal people away from Atari."

1 2

Departure from games industry

The financial success of River Raid enabled Shaw to retire at an early age. She left Activision and the video game industry in 1984.

2 3

Break from gaming at Tandem Computers

Shaw left Atari in 1980 to join Tandem Computers. She told Vintage Computing and Gaming: "Atari wasn’t as fun as it used to be, so I went over there... I think they probably did pay somewhat more, but I don’t think that was the major factor in it. It was just, 'I’ve done games for a while. Let’s try something different.'" At Tandem, Shaw used her knowledge of the 68000 assembly language to help create a line of fault-tolerant computers. She left the company after 16 months when she was offered a job by Activision.

Recognition and commentary

Praise for River Raid

Shaw's Atari 2600 game River Raid was "almost universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design," according to Vintage Computing and Gaming.

Named on the box

Several versions of River Raid featured Shaw's name on the box, which was an uncommon practice at the time.

Industry icon award

Shaw was the recipient of The Game Awards Industry Icon award in 2017.

Impact and influence

3 5

Museum exhibits

In 2017, Shaw donated a collection of memorabilia from her game development career to the The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, USA. The collection included console games, printed source code, design documents, sketches, reference materials, and promotional objects. These materials "serve as tangible evidence that women were involved in the creation of home video games from their inception," according to the museum.

References

The Centre for Computing History (n.d.). Carol Shaw. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/47370/Carol-Shaw/.
Edwards, B. (2011, October 12). VC&G Interview: Carol Shaw, Atari’s First Female Video Game Developer. Vintage Computing and Gaming. https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/800/vcg-interview-carol-shaw-female-video-game-pioneer-2.
Symonds, S. (2017, July 19). Preserving Carol Shaw’s Trailblazing Video Game Career. The Strong National Museum of Play. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/preserving-carol-shaws-trailblazing-video-game-career/.
Pajot, L. & Swirsky, J. (2017, December 9). Carol Shaw: The Game Awards Industry Icon (Extended) [video]. thegameawards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a78uBNlI8Z0.
Mozuch, M. (2022, December 10). 40 years ago, one woman changed the video game industry forever. Inverse. BDG Media, Inc. https://www.inverse.com/gaming/river-raid-40th-anniversary-carol-shaw.

Written content in this article ©2024 by Dbljump Editors is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. You are free to share or adapt this work, but you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. View the license

Last updated 15 July 2024 at 03:01pm