Ed Logg

 

 

George Edward Logg, best known as Ed Logg, is a retired arcade video game designer, employed at Atari, Inc. Edward 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 Space Wars 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.

 

Another game passed with flying colors. "I'd played Breakout at the pizza parlors in San Jose", Logg recalls of the hit block-breaking game produced by his division. He heard that company founder Nolan Bushnell wanted the game updated; 1978's Super Breakout was the first game that Logg worked on that went into production.

 

Ed Logg credits at arcade-history

Article created on	Tuesday 10 April 2012 at 11h50
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