In 1978 a young Atari programmer played the text game Adventure on a mainframe at Stanford and decided to put it on the Atari 2600, a console with 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. His boss told him it was impossible. Warren Robinett’s Adventure sold about a million copies, and it showed that a home console could hold a world of rooms to explore and objects to carry. Atari never put his name on it, so he put it there himself, in a room that only the most thorough players would ever find.
Fast facts
- Born: 1951.
- Education: Rice University, then a master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976.
- At Atari: 1977 to 1979. Slot Racers, Adventure and the BASIC Programming cartridge.
- Hidden credit: “Created by Warren Robinett”, in a secret room in Adventure.
- After Atari: co-founder of The Learning Company (1980) and co-designer of Rocky’s Boots (1982); virtual reality at NASA Ames and the University of North Carolina; computer architecture research at HP Labs.
Getting into Atari
Robinett studied at Rice and took a master’s in computer science at Berkeley in 1976. He spent 1977 building log cabins and cycling across the United States, he told Retro Gamer, then ran out of money, applied to Atari with “a little essay about why I would be perfect for them”, and was hired. On his first day, he told Edge, his boss Larry Kaplan said: “Your job is to design videogames. Design one.”
His first game, Slot Racers, was a maze game of cars firing missiles at each other. He did not think much of it: “It wouldn’t have made it over the bar if there’d been one back then, but Atari were desperate for product and would publish anything that the designers handed them.”
Adventure
Early in 1978 his housemate Julius Smith, a graduate student at Stanford, took him to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab to play Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Adventure, the text game that “took the nerd world by storm in 1978”. Robinett wanted to keep its network of rooms, the objects you could carry from place to place and the obstacles they got you past, and show them as pictures: one room to a screen, objects as small shapes, the player as another shape.
His boss knew that the text game needed more than 100K on a mainframe. “We had 4K bytes on the 2600,” Robinett said. “So he told me it was impossible, and not to work on it.” He built a prototype anyway, in about a month of 15-hour days: a player moving from screen to screen, chased by a dragon. Marketing liked it and wanted it turned into a game of the Superman film; his colleague John Dunn took that job instead, working from a copy of Robinett’s unfinished code, and Robinett went on with his own game.
The limits shaped the design. The player carries one object at a time, which meant the object could be drawn next to the player on screen with no inventory screen to pause the action. The player is a plain square, because the 2600 had only two good sprites and he wanted them for the objects and creatures. The three dragons, Yorgle, Grundle and Rhindle, are finite-state machines with four states he called Chasing, Biting, Swallowed-Man and Dead, and each creature has its own list of objects it wants or fears, so the bat will swap your sword for a dragon. Dark “catacomb” mazes, lit only in a square around the player, were his version of the text game’s dark caves. Stuck halfway through, he put the game aside for a few months to write the BASIC Programming cartridge, then finished both. He said the whole game took a year.
Accounts of the release date differ. Robinett and Edge give 1979; other published accounts put it in early 1980. Either way, Robinett had left before it reached the shops, and by his account nobody thanked him for it: “No congratulations, no pat on the back, not even a pizza.” Royalties were out of the question. Edge put his Atari salary at $22,000 and the game’s sales at a million copies at $25 each.
The secret room
Atari kept its programmers’ names off its boxes, and Robinett found it irritating. “Atari had the power to keep my name off the box, but I had the power to put it on screen,” he told Edge. In the catacombs of the black castle, in a scrap of maze that only the bridge can reach, lies a single grey dot, almost invisible. Carry it to the screen above the passage to the white castle, bring two or more other objects there so that the line barrier on that screen starts to flicker, and the player can walk straight through it into a room with the words “Created by Warren Robinett” flashing across it. When he told his boss he was quitting, he said, “I guess I forgot to tell him that I had my name hidden in the final game code.”
Players found it. The first known finder was a teenager in Salt Lake City, who wrote to Atari in August 1980; Edge says he was 12, and a note with his letter gives 15. In September 1982 Video Games Player told the story like this: “Atari didn’t know about the kink until the game was in the stores. Customers got such a kick out of finding Robinette that Atari has loosened up and plans to plant more clues in future cartridges.” The British TV Gamer heard that Atari in America had at first flatly denied the rumours, until it was sent a photograph. The hidden messages soon had a name. In December 1981 Atari’s Steve Wright told Electronic Games: “From now on, we’re going to plant little ‘Easter eggs’ like that in the games.” By June 1982 the magazine was printing readers’ letters about “Easter Eggs” in Atari cartridges, and Atari Age was dropping hints about the initials in Howard Scott Warshaw’s Yars’ Revenge. Later accounts add that Wright, Atari’s director of software development, decided to leave Robinett’s room in.
Robinett’s own website calls the room the first Easter egg in a video game, and it is often described that way. It is the most famous early example, but not the first known. The researcher Ed Fries has found a hidden “Hi Ron!” message in Atari’s 1977 arcade game Starship 1, and Fairchild’s Video Whizball for the Channel F, from 1978, also hides its programmers’ names. Robinett has been wry about the title. “If they’d been nice to me, they wouldn’t have provoked me into hiding my signature in the game,” he told Retro Gamer in 2008, “and then I couldn’t cavalierly disdain the title of Easter egg inventor.”
BASIC Programming
The cartridge Robinett wrote alongside Adventure taught programming on a machine with almost no memory. Atari’s BASIC Programming (1979) used two keyboard controllers locked together as a 24-key keyboard, and split the screen into six regions: the program, a stack showing intermediate results, the variables, the output, a status line showing free memory and speed, and a graphics area with two coloured squares a program could move. After the manual’s first two-line exercise, the status region shows 52 bytes left.
The Learning Company and Rocky’s Boots
In 1980 Robinett joined the educational psychologist Ann Piestrup, who had founded The Learning Company to carry out a federal research grant, and he has described himself as a co-founder; BYTE called him “a member of the original group of programmers at Atari”. There, with Leslie Grimm, he designed Rocky’s Boots (1982), in which children build working machines from logic gates, sensors and a kicking boot, moving from room to room and carrying parts about much as the player does in Adventure. The Rocky’s Boots and Learning Company entries tell that story. Rocky’s Boots also gave its code to Robot Odyssey.
Virtual reality and later work
From the mid-1980s Robinett worked on virtual reality. At NASA’s Ames Research Center he wrote the software for the Virtual Environment Workstation, one of the first systems to use a glove, and designed its gestures: point to fly, grab to move an object. In the early 1990s at the University of North Carolina he co-invented the nanoManipulator, which let a scientist see and, through force feedback, feel and push around objects as small as strands of DNA under a scanning-probe microscope. He started a company to make virtual-reality games in the mid-1990s, and from 2003 to 2012 did computer architecture research at HP Labs.
He announced The Annotated Adventure, a study of the game’s program, for 2016; only its planned contents have been posted.
Sources
- Video Games Player vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982: Atari designers’ names kept off its boxes; the “Created by Warren Robinette” message, found after the game was in the shops.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 1, December 1981, p. 14: Steve Wright, “we’re going to plant little ‘Easter eggs’ like that in the games”.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 4, June 1982, p. 24: readers’ letters on “Easter Eggs” in Atari cartridges, including Adventure.
- Atari Age vol. 1 no. 3, September–October 1982: letters page (the “HSW” initials in Yars’ Revenge).
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 2, December 1982: “Created by Warren Robinett” and how to reach it.
- TV Gamer, December 1983: the secret room, Atari’s denials, and how to find the grey dot.
- BYTE vol. 8 no. 5, May 1983, pp. 268–269, “BYTE West Coast: Ferment in Silicon Valley”: Piestrup’s founding of The Learning Company and Robinett.
- BASIC Programming game program instructions (Atari, 1979): the keyboard controllers, the six screen regions and the 52 bytes.
- Edge issue 156, December 2005, “The making of Adventure”: Kaplan’s instruction, Slot Racers, Stanford, the prototype, George Simcock and Superman, the one-item inventory and the square, the creatures’ desires and fears, 1979, a million copies at $25, the $22,000 salary, “not even a pizza”, the grey dot, the boy from Salt Lake City, his later research at NASA, UNC and HP.
- Retro Gamer issue 46, 2008, Atari programmers’ round table: joining Atari in 1977 and “cavalierly disdain the title of Easter egg inventor”.
- Edge issue 217, August 2010, “When videogames ruled the world”: Stanford in early 1978, John Dunn and Superman, “the power to put it on screen”, the name hidden from his boss, Adventure’s sales.
- Retro Gamer issue 115, June 2013, pp. 72–75, “The making of: Adventure”: Rice and Berkeley, 1977, the job application, 4K and 128 bytes, “impossible”, the dragons’ states and names, the catacombs, BASIC Programming, a year’s work, co-founding The Learning Company in 1980.
- Warren Robinett, warrenrobinett.com, home page and Adventure page (web, secondary): Adventure published in 1979 and “the first Easter egg”; NASA Ames, the nanoManipulator, the VR games company, HP Labs 2003–2012, The Annotated Adventure. http://www.warrenrobinett.com/
- “Warren Robinett” and “Adventure (1980 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): date and place of birth; an early-1980 release date; Steve Wright and the name “Easter egg”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Robinett and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(1980_video_game)
- Ed Fries, “The Hunt for the First Arcade Game Easter Egg”, Kotaku, 24 March 2017 (web, secondary): Starship 1 (1977) and Video Whizball (1978). https://kotaku.com/the-hunt-for-the-first-arcade-game-easter-egg-1793593889