Episode Details

Before she retired at roughly 35, Carol Shaw built part of the foundation of the modern video game industry using less memory than a single text message. This episode reconstructs her life from a 1955 Palo Alto childhood spent on model railroads instead of dolls, through dual Berkeley degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, to her 1978 hiring as a microprocessor software engineer for the Atari VCS.

We cover her early titles like 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, Video Checkers, and the unreleased Polo cologne tie-in, her reputation as Atari's best 6502 programmer and go-to writer of display kernels on a console with no frame buffer, her rewrite of the Atari BASIC Reference Manual, her assembly language work at Tandem Computers, and her move to Activision. There she created River Raid in 1982, a vertically scrolling shooter that generated its river procedurally within 128 bytes of RAM and sold over a million copies. We close with her 2017 Industry Icon Award, her donation to the Strong National Museum of Play, her marriage to Ralph Merkle, and the couple's cryopreservation arrangements with Alcor.

• How managing model train circuits trained her to think about systems before she touched a computer
• Why writing a kernel on the Atari 2600 meant feeding the TV's electron beam in real time
• How River Raid built its canyon from a formula instead of stored map data
• How Activision's royalty model turned one hit game into an early retirement
• Why her preserved source code printouts matter for future historians