Dona Bailey | Code Like It's 198x

In 1980 Dona Bailey was writing 6502 assembly language for the computer in a Cadillac engine. A friend took her to play Space Invaders, and she saw that the screen looked like her own work. “They make these games,” she remembered thinking. “What they do every day is what I do every day. But I get Cadillac engines, and they get these games!” Within weeks she had quit and moved north to Sunnyvale. She joined Atari’s coin-op division that June as its only woman programmer, and her first game, made with Ed Logg, was Centipede, one of the biggest arcade hits of the early 1980s.

Fast facts

Born: 1955, Little Rock, Arkansas.
Education: University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a degree in psychology, graduating in 1975.
Before Atari: a programmer at General Motors in Goleta, California, on engine control and dashboard displays.
At Atari: June 1980 to September 1982, in the coin-op division.
Best-known game: Centipede (1981), programmed with Ed Logg.
Afterwards: Videa, a Sunnyvale games company started by former Atari engineers; out of the games industry by the mid-1980s.
Later: from 2008, a member of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

From statistics to Cadillacs

Bailey grew up in Little Rock and went to university there, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She graduated in psychology in 1975, and learned to program through statistics, first in the psychology department and then in a master’s course in mathematics. She tried a statistics job with the Bell System in Little Rock, and found it boring, Blip reported. Then she moved to California, where a General Motors division in Goleta hired her to program the microprocessor that controlled the engine of the Cadillac Seville. It taught her 6502 assembly language, which turned out to be the language of Atari’s coin-op games.

She found the job no more exciting than the last one. Her way into games, she told the Arkansas Times in 2015, was the Pretenders’ song “Space Invader”. She asked a friend where the title came from, and the friend took her to a bar with a Space Invaders table. She lost her three lives before she worked out the buttons, but the display looked like the ones she programmed at GM. Blip adds that she spent her lunch hours at an arcade near the plant, hooked on Space Invaders and Super Breakout.

Centipede

Atari hired her in the first week of June 1980. She was 25, and she found the coin-op division a “programmer’s heaven”. “Those first weeks, I walked around and got used to the labs and offices,” she told Blip. “I read old printouts, just to get an idea of how a game is put together. And I spent a lot of time in the company’s game room. It had every game that Atari had ever made. And they were all on free play.” Years later she remembered it less fondly. “When I started, it was basically, ‘Here’s your cubicle, now make your game,’” she told the Arkansas Times. “I didn’t have an idea. I didn’t know how to make a game.”

In Atari’s book of game ideas she found a one-line entry, a many-segmented creature that breaks into pieces when shot, and made it her first project, with Ed Logg as project director. The program’s header, dated 19 July 1980, names them both as programmers. She pushed for a trackball after buttons and a joystick failed her, and she chose the pastel pinks, greens and violets. “I really like pastels,” she told Video Games. “I really wanted it to look different, to be visually arresting.” The Centipede entry tells how the game came together, including the debugging marks that turned into its mushrooms.

The game reached the arcades in 1981 and became Atari’s second best-selling coin-op. Logg gave Bailey the credit for its audience: “Centipede was definitely aimed at the women’s market. I’m not sure that without Dona’s viewpoint it ever would have made it there.” Bailey’s own account, given to Blip the same year, was that nobody had aimed it at women; she noticed only when men she met said their wives and girlfriends liked it.

Leaving Atari

Bailey worked on one more game at Atari, which later profiles name as Weather War; it was not finished before she left. She left in September 1982, after 27 months, she told Gamasutra in 2007. At the time she gave two reasons. To Blip she said the company had grown too big: “The design group I was in became three or four times larger than it had been earlier. It was tough getting that many people to agree on anything. I had been spoiled.” To Video Games she described being the only woman in coin-op engineering. “When I first started it wasn’t so overwhelming,” she said, “but as the department grew, it was like being on another planet. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy being the only woman at times, but it was certainly bizarre. After awhile, I just wasn’t comfortable, and I think it reflected in my work.” The magazine called it “fraternity burnout”. Speaking to the Arkansas Times in 2015, she said that Atari “even smelled like a frat. Just way too many guys crammed into one place.” In the 2007 interview she put the ratio of men to women among the engineers at about 30 to 1 when she arrived and 120 to 1 when she left, and said that colleagues had told her Centipede was “either a fluke or I didn’t really do it”.

She went to Videa, a small Sunnyvale company founded by former Atari coin-op engineers, among them Ed Rotberg and Howard Delman, whom she had worked with in her first year. “We want to do state-of-the-art games,” she told Video Games in 1983. “Games that are funny without being sickeningly cute.” In 1983 Nolan Bushnell bought Videa and renamed it Sente. Bailey left the games industry by the middle of the decade; the dates given in later profiles vary between 1984 and 1985.

Arkansas and teaching

In 1997 Bailey moved back to Arkansas to look after her parents. She taught at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and from 2008 until her retirement was a faculty member in its Department of Rhetoric and Writing, teaching writing and multimedia. In 2007 she gave the keynote at the Women in Games International conference in Austin, Texas, and she has since spoken about Centipede at universities and museums. By 2019 she was writing a screenplay based on her time at Atari. In 2020 The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Centipede into its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

Her name

Bailey spells her first name with one n. Some period magazines printed it as “Donna”: Video Games did so in its December 1982 history of Atari, and correctly as “Dona” three months later.

Sources

Blip, vol. 1 no. 4, May 1983, pp. 6–8: Little Rock, the psychology degree and the Bell System; General Motors and the Cadillac Seville; lunch hours with Super Breakout and Space Invaders; “They make these games”; aged 25 on joining; the first weeks at Atari; the idea book, the trackball and Logg as project director; the men whose wives and girlfriends liked the game; leaving for Videa late in 1982 and why.
Anne Krueger, “Welcome to the Club”, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983, pp. 51–54 and 81: leaving General Motors for Atari’s coin-op division in 1980; pastels; Logg’s “women’s market” quote; “fraternity burnout”; the only woman in coin-op engineering; Videa, Rotberg and Delman.
Steve Bloom, “The incredible, incredible story of Atari”, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, p. 49: “Donna Bailey programmed it.”
Edge issue 217, August 2010, pp. 84 and 87, “When videogames ruled the world”: Bailey at General Motors; Videa founded by Delman, Rotberg and Roger Hector.
David Koon, “Centipede creator teaches at UALR”, Arkansas Times, 19 November 2015 (web, secondary): graduating in 1975, General Motors in Goleta, the Pretenders and Space Invaders, joining Atari in June 1980, “Here’s your cubicle”, the frat house, leaving in September 1982, the return to Arkansas and UALR. https://arktimes.com/entertainment/ae-feature/2015/11/19/centipede-creator-teaches-at-ualr
Leigh Alexander, “The Original Gaming Bug: Centipede Creator Dona Bailey”, Gamasutra, 27 August 2007 (web, secondary): 27 months at Atari, the 30-to-1 and 120-to-1 ratios, the “fluke”, the 2007 Women in Games International keynote in Austin, teaching at UALR. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/the-original-gaming-bug-i-centipede-i-creator-dona-bailey
“Dona Bailey”, AtariWomen, 2019 (web, secondary): her degrees and first programming; 6502 at GM; moving north at the end of April 1980 and starting at Atari in the first week of June; the idea book; Videa, Sente and Nolan Bushnell; the move to Arkansas in 1997; teaching in Rhetoric and Writing from 2008; the screenplay. http://www.atariwomen.org/stories/dona-bailey/
“Dona Bailey”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): born 1955; Weather War; leaving the games industry in 1985; her talks at NYU’s Indie Tech Talk series in April 2013 and at The Strong in November 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dona_Bailey
Centipede program listing (Atari, 1980), published by historicalsource on GitHub, 2021: “PROGRAMMER: DONA BAILEY / ED LOGG”, “DATE INITIATED: JULY 19,1980”. https://github.com/historicalsource/centipede
The Strong National Museum of Play, “Centipede”, World Video Game Hall of Fame (web, secondary): the 2020 induction. https://www.museumofplay.org/games/centipede/