Ed Logg | Code Like It's 198x

Ed Logg put his name inside his games where players would never see it. The program for Millipede carries the words “PROGRAMMED BY ED LOGG” in Morse code, and “MILLIPEDE BY ED LOGG” in the six-bit character code of Control Data computers, the machines he had worked on before Atari. Between 1978 and 1985 he wrote or co-wrote Super Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede and Gauntlet, and he kept making games with the same group of Atari engineers until the studio closed in 2003. His business card, he told Retro Gamer, read “Super Duper Game Guy”.

Fast facts

Born: 1948.
Employers: Atari’s coin-op division from 1978, which became Atari Games in 1984 and Midway Games West in 1999; the studio closed in 2003.
Arcade games: Super Breakout and Video Pinball (1978), Asteroids (1979), Centipede (with Dona Bailey, copyright 1980), Millipede (1982), Gauntlet (1985), Gauntlet II (1986), Xybots (with Bob Flanagan, 1987), Steel Talons (with Ed Rotberg) and Space Lords.
Home games: Othello for the Atari 2600; NES versions of Centipede, Millipede and Tetris for Tengen; later San Francisco Rush conversions, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey for the Nintendo 64 and Dr Muto.
Award: the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Pioneer Award, 2012.

Before Atari

Logg spent two years as a graduate student in mathematics at Stanford, where he played Spacewar! on a pair of linked PDP computers in the student coffee house. By his own account he lost most of his games. Teaching did not appeal (“I just liked programming more”), so he joined Control Data Corporation, where, he admitted, he converted the FORTRAN versions of Adventure and Star Trek to run on other machines in his spare time. In 1977 he built a computer at home and wrote a version of Sea Wolf for it. A former colleague who had gone to Atari told him the company paid people to write games. The home computer and Sea Wolf impressed the interviewers, and in 1978 he joined the coin-op division.

Super Breakout and Asteroids

His first project, a motorbike game called Dirt Bike taken over from Dennis Koble, failed its field test. Programs then went off to be typed in and took about an hour to assemble, so Logg used the waiting time to start something nobody had asked for. Owen Rubin had told him of Nolan Bushnell’s wish for an update to Breakout, and Logg wrote it on the hardware he already had. “The best part was that it was not approved by management,” he told Digital Press. “So they first saw it when it was running and everyone was already having fun playing it.” The listing of Super Breakout records the start date as 1 April 1978. Six variations went to field test; three survived, and the one players liked best was Progressive, in which the wall of bricks descended on the bat. Video Pinball, begun on 7 June 1978, followed, with a nudge control for thumping the table. He also worked on the lettering for Atari’s first vector game, Lunar Lander.

In 1979 Lyle Rains asked him to make a game about shooting rocks, and Logg insisted it should be drawn with vectors. The Asteroids entry tells that story: the saucers, the high score table he borrowed from Exidy’s Star Fire, and the change to the small saucer’s timing that let players “lurk” for days on a single quarter. It became Atari’s best-selling coin-op, with more than 70,000 machines built. Logg’s first wife had her own Asteroids machine before they met. “So naturally, she loved the creator,” he said.

Logg did not take part in the sequel, Asteroids Deluxe, because Atari had promoted him to supervisor. He hated it. “I didn’t like the hiring and firing and all the people issues. The bottom line was, I wasn’t doing games, so I quit after a year and a half,” he said. He also wrote Othello for the Atari 2600, using the display code Carol Shaw had written for Checkers; Atari listed it among its new VCS cartridges at the start of 1981.

Centipede and Millipede

Centipede came out of Atari’s book of game ideas, where a one-line entry described “a multi-segmented creature” that “breaks into pieces when shot”. Dona Bailey, a programmer who had left General Motors for Atari, took it on as her first project, with Logg as project director. The program lists both of them as programmers and gives the start date as 19 July 1980. Bailey told Blip that she got a lot of help from Logg, and that it was her idea to use a trackball after trying buttons and a joystick. Logg gave her the credit for the game’s 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.” Centipede also kept its high scores after the power went off. “By Centipede, we’d got battery backup to keep scores in memory,” Logg said, though the game’s own documentation shows the scores were kept in an EAROM, a memory chip that holds its contents without a battery; Asteroids had forgotten them.

Logg wrote the sequel himself. The Millipede listing, begun on 1 April 1982, names him as both programmer and project leader. “I wanted to fix some things I hadn’t done in the first one,” he said: expert players could start at a higher level, and up to eight spiders could be on the screen at once, which “got them off the machine quicker”.

Not everything worked. His laserdisc game Road Runner failed its field tests, and marketing sent him suggestions for saving it. He quoted one of his own rules, “Ed Logg’s Laws”: “What you get from the first test is pretty much what you’re gonna get.” When he was asked to move it to a different board, he told them to get someone else.

Gauntlet

When Warner split Atari in 1984, the coin-op division survived and went to Namco. “Hell, the Tramiels could have killed us there and then,” Logg said, “but Time Warner owed money to Namco and ended up offering our division to them.” At the renamed Atari Games he designed Gauntlet in 1985, a dungeon game for four players at once, drawing on Dungeons & Dragons and the Atari 800 game Dandy. The engineer Pat McCarthy designed a board for it that could change moving objects on the fly. Atari took out five patents on the game, four in Logg’s name; the company made him sign his rights over for $1, and he framed the dollar the lawyer threw at him.

Gauntlet II followed in 1986. A third Gauntlet, Catacombs, was to have gone into three dimensions until marketing wanted no more Gauntlet games. Logg and his co-programmer Bob Flanagan gave it a new theme, and it came out in 1987 as Xybots, with a joystick that twisted to turn the player’s view. Players struggled with it. “It became increasingly clear in our field tests that many people didn’t know that the controller rotation would actually change their viewpoint,” Logg said. “I wish I’d stuck to my guns and kept it as Catacombs.”

For Steel Talons, a helicopter game, he worked with Ed Rotberg of Battlezone. He wanted players to feel they had been hit, so the team put a pinball “thumper” under the seat; the engineer put more current through it than planned, and “it was like someone was hitting the seat with a hammer”. Logg’s initials headed the default high score table in its hardest mode. “I just put myself at the top of the high scores. Just a little vanity, okay!”

Consoles

From the mid-1980s Logg also wrote NES games for Atari Games’ home label, Tengen, among them conversions of Centipede and Millipede and a version of Tetris he wrote from scratch. Tengen’s Tetris was withdrawn after Nintendo went to court over the rights (see the Tetris legal battles). Tengen had also made its own copy of the NES lockout chip. “I was nothing to do with it,” Logg said, “but I knew the games Nintendo were playing and didn’t like it either.” He still thought his Tetris the best: “Yeah, I’ll take my version.”

According to the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, he spent 1993 and 1994 at Electronic Arts before returning to Atari Games to write console games. In the 1990s he converted the San Francisco Rush driving games for the Nintendo 64 and later the Dreamcast, and worked on Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey for the Nintendo 64. Edge found him in December 2002 still working with “the same group of developers from the late ’70s — now known as Midway Games West”, finishing Dr Muto, a game about a mad scientist, for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube. He missed the old way of working, the magazine reported, when a prototype took one or two people a few weeks instead of 30 people a year and a half.

Later

Midway closed the studio in 2003. Logg set up a small company to make games for mobile phones, three of which were published by GenPlay, and then turned to games for cable television. In 2006 he told Retro Gamer he was retiring shortly. In February 2012 the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences gave him its Pioneer Award at its Interactive Achievement Awards in Las Vegas, presented by Mark Cerny.

Sources

Paul Drury, “Desert Island Disks: Ed Logg”, Retro Gamer issue 29, 2006, pp. 76–80: date of birth and business card; Stanford, Spacewar! and Control Data; Adventure and Star Trek; Sea Wolf and joining Atari in 1978; Dirt Bike and Super Breakout; Video Pinball; Asteroids, lurking and Asteroids Deluxe; the supervisor’s job; Othello and Carol Shaw’s code; Centipede, Dona Bailey and the high score memory; Millipede; Road Runner and “Ed Logg’s Laws”; the Tramiels and Namco; Gauntlet, the patents and the dollar; Gauntlet II, Catacombs and Xybots; Steel Talons, Ed Rotberg and the thumper; Tengen, Tetris and the lockout chip; San Francisco Rush; Dr Muto; the closure in 2003, GenPlay and cable games; his wife’s Asteroids.
“Retro Gamer” feature on Xybots, Retro volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008), pp. 228–231: the home-built computer in 1977; joining Atari from Control Data; Catacombs, Bob Flanagan and the Xybots controller.
“Most memorable moments”, Digital Press issue 52, May 2003, p. 13: Logg’s own list of credits, from Othello and Dirt Bike to Space Lords and Tengen Tetris; how Super Breakout began and its six variations.
Paul Drury, “The making of Asteroids”, reprinted in The Atari Book (Retro Gamer, 2012), pp. 134–139: Rains, Lunar Lander and the vector hardware; Star Fire.
Edge issue 117, December 2002, pp. 106–109, “The making of… Asteroids”: Logg at Midway Games West, Dr Muto, one or two people instead of 30.
Blip, vol. 1 no. 4, May 1983, pp. 6–7: Dona Bailey, the idea book, the trackball and Logg as project director.
Video Games, vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983, pp. 51–52: Bailey’s move from General Motors and Logg’s “women’s market” quote.
ANALOG Computing, issue 1, January/February 1981, p. 25: Othello among Atari’s new VCS cartridges.
Program listings for Super Breakout, Video Pinball, Centipede and Millipede (Atari), published by historicalsource on GitHub, October 2021: programmers and start dates, the Centipede copyright date, and the hidden credits in Millipede. https://github.com/historicalsource/super-breakout-domestic , https://github.com/historicalsource/video-pinball , https://github.com/historicalsource/centipede , https://github.com/historicalsource/millipede
Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, “Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Honors Ed Logg as the 2012 Pioneer Award Recipient”, press release, 17 November 2011 (web, secondary): the award, Mark Cerny, 9 February 2012, Electronic Arts in 1993–94, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/academy-of-interactive-arts--sciences-honors-ed-logg-as-the-2012-pioneer-award-recipient-134060828.html ; the Academy’s list of special awards (web, secondary): https://www.interactive.org/special_awards/