The Ted Dabney Experience

The Ted Dabney Experience is a podcast project by Richard May, Paul Drury (Retro Gamer magazine) and Tony Temple (author of Missile Commander - A Journey to The Top of an Arcade Classic). We host intimate conversations with the leading lights and supporting cast from the Golden Age of coin-op Video Arcade gaming. Our guests have included Warren Davis and Jeff Lee (Q*Bert), Mike Hally (Star Wars),...

Rich Adam joined Atari in 1978, initially working on the company’s pinball games before being assigned the role of Junior Programmer on Dave Thuerer’s Missile Command. Rich went on to take the captain’s chair for the hard-as-nails Gravitar, arguably the pinnacle of Atari’s vector game output, and the game for which he is most well known. Talking to Rich was a real treat. He was by turns amusingly...

Matt Householder co-designed Gottlieb’s underrated arcade adaptation of Peter Yates’s ill-fated Krull, before going on to join Atari’s consumer division to work on home adaptations of video arcade hits. With his partner Candi Strecker he went on to create and produce the critically acclaimed California Games (and much more) for Epyx. We chat with Matt about programming in the Seventies, video poke...

Ed Logg, AKA Super Duper Game Guy, is the programmer’s programmer. Cited by his contemporaries as one of the all-time greats, Ed designed and co-developed arcade smash hits such as Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Super Breakout and Gauntlet. In 2011, Logg was awarded a Pioneer Award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in recognition of his groundbreaking videogame work.

Steve Calfee has rarely gone on record about his time at Atari. His managerial role at the company’s Coin-Op division saw him channel the work of well-known programmers such as Rich Adam, Dennis Koble, Dave Theurer and Howard Delman into Video Arcade smash hits such as Canyon Bomber, Space Duel and Missile Command.

David Thiel is perhaps best known for his pinball audio work on titles such as Tron: Legacy, Alien, Dialed In, Avatar and Family Guy, but he was also responsible for everything aural on all the Golden Age Gottlieb classics (Q*Bert, Mad Planets, and Reactor to name but a few). From synth salesman to local rock star to Gottlieb and beyond (Commodore 64 and SID chip fans take note), David continues t...

Tim Lapetino on the underrated yet enduring legacy of Atari creative director George Opperman, and behind the scenes on both The Art of Atari and the forthcoming Pac-Man: The Birth of an Icon.

Honing his coding skills producing games for the Apple II, Bob Flanagan joined Atari in 1984. It was a difficult time for the company and the industry as a whole, yet Bob still managed to work on some of their best loved releases, including Paperboy, Marble Madness and Gauntlet. Bob tells us about collaborating with the brilliant but demanding Mark Cerny, having Ed Logg as a mentor and his experie...

Jeff Lee was the original video artist at D. Gottlieb and Company, designing the character Q*Bert and working on titles such as Krull, The Three Stooges and the late Kan Yabumoto’s seminal Mad Planets. Jeff talks to The Ted Dabney Experience about his days at Gottlieb (later Mylstar) and, most importantly, the origin of Q*Bert’s vestigial limb.

Recruited by the company in 1976, Dennis Koble was one of Atari’s earliest coin-op game designers. Koble stayed with Atari for five years and was responsible for such notable titles as Avalanche, Sprint 2 and Dominos, before leaving to co-found Imagic. In 1984 Dennis would return to coin-op as Director of Software for Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell’s Sente. At no point did he sit in a hot tub.

The inimitable Steve Golson reminisces about his days evading Atari’s radar with GCC, subsequently being co-opted by the former for arcade classics such as the frantic Food Fight and the singular Quantum, and of course Crazy Otto (aka Midway’s Ms. Pac-Man).

A brief introduction to The Ted Dabney Experience podcast. Originally released as a segment for the Retro Asylum Christmas Special episode, 2020.

We talk with Rampage co-creator Brian Colin about the early days at Bally Midway, applying his traditional animation know-how to the seminal Discs of Tron and meeting The Rock.

The Ted Dabney Experience podcast talks with Kevin Hayes, former Managing Director of Atari Ireland. If you played an Atari arcade game in Europe during the proverbial Golden Age of video games, including popular third-party licences such as Cinematronics’ Dragon’s Lair, it bore Kevin’s fingerprints. We also discuss goat slaughter, littering and smoking the reefer.

TDE Podcast takes you from the North East Yorkshire coastal town of Bridlington to Miami Beach with one of the very few Brits to have developed coin-op videogames for the American market during the Golden Age, Mr Andy Walker.

An in-depth discussion with John Newcomer, designer and lead developer of one of the most unique and enduring arcade games of the Golden Age, Joust. John talks to The Ted Dabney Experience about his influences and inspirations, hits and misses, his design philosophy, videogame violence and working with Eugene Jarvis, Warren Davis and the late, great Python Anghelo at Williams Electronics. And rubb...

Electrohome supplied CRT monitors to all the big-name video arcade game manufacturers of the Golden Age, including Atari, Gremlin and Midway. Doug talks to us about how the company was saved from potential oblivion by arcade gaming; the pen, paper and handshake conception of Atari’s first vector monitor (over a pinball machine in Chuck E. Cheese) and the finer details of doing business with an ear...

Mike Hally devoted a quarter of a century to Atari, from the Sunnyvale years through Time Warner, literally turning off the lights when the company (that most of us would recognise) closed its doors for good in 2002. The Ted Dabney Experience talks with Mike about the gentleman’s arcade game, Gravitar, lost classic Akka Arrh, shooting aliens on toilets and of course Atari’s seminal coin-op title,...

The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast talks to Space Duel designer Owen Rubin about the frontier days of videogame creation at Atari, the volatility of vector hardware, the original Boss Key, disco dancing, and Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell’s infamous pool parties.

The Ted Dabney Experience Podcast catches up with a long-time friend, ACAM’s Gary Vincent. We discuss Gary’s early days at Funspot, NH, his participation in Randy Fromm’s Arcade School, Funspot’s transition from electromechanical to video arcade and the establishment of ACAM. Gary shares his views on repairing ageing CRT monitors, The King of Kong and its continued legacy, the Covid-19 lockdown an...

TDE sits down with Jamie Fenton, the developer of the original multi-game shooter, Gorf. We dig deep into Jamie’s early life and career with Dave Nutting Associates and Midway, covering transgender issues, Datsun sports cars, Larry Cuba of Star Wars SFX fame, the original US military application of the Gorf flight stick, the ill-fated Robby Roto, and the fascinating (yet ultimately aborted) develo...

TDE talks to Q*Bert co-creator Warren Davis about the early days of videogame design at Gottlieb, lost Laserdisc classic Us Vs Them, his time at Williams Electronics working alongside Eugene Jarvis, and hanging out with Aerosmith.