“Unfortunately, and not to the credit of Atari, Linda was laid-off not once, but twice during the development of Paperboy. “A technician back then was just as much a part of your team as a build engineer now,” says Salwitz. Linda Sinkovic joined the team as technician, and worked with Snyder to debug and improve the arcade hardware throughout development. Paperboy’s hardware was designed another long-time collaborator, hardware engineer Doug Snyder. “You would present a thin game description, some idea of your hardware, and maybe a schedule.”īased on this more detailed presentation, Paperboy was quickly approved, and development started almost immediately. “At Atari, to get a game started officially, you had to survive what was known as an initiation meeting,” Salwitz says. Salwitz was initially reluctant to work on the game – preferring the likes of Missile Command or Asteroids – but he came around to the idea and joined the development team. Praise indeed, and an unofficial nod to develop the concept further. “Dave showed us this idea for a kid riding down a street, delivering papers on a single transparency for an overhead projector,” Salwitz remembers.Īt the end of the presentation, Ralston was awarded three ‘attaboys’ from the Atari leadership. It was Ralston who first originated the idea for Paperboy, coming up with the concept during one of Atari’s regular brainstorming sessions in 1983. However, Atari executive, Dan Van Elderen, instead said: “Great try for a bunch of rookies. Following a poor field test – where the game was outshone by Eugene Jarvis’ Robotron, Salwitz thought his time at Atari might be up. One of the first titles Salwitz and Ralston worked on together was an unreleased arcade game called Akka Arrh. “This was an incredibly creative atmosphere and you could learn about what it would take for your game to be successful, and frankly get a little intimidated in the process. You could, and would, regularly walk out of your lab and go to an adjacent lab to play somebody else’s game,” recalls Salwitz. And the games were all made within spitting distance of each other. “We worked at one of the few centres of video game making on Earth. It was, he says, one of the best jobs he ever had. Much of this work was alongside artist and designer, Dave Ralston. John Salwitz joined Atari in 1981 as a programmer, spending ten years with the company and working on games including 720º and Klax. In his retrospective at last month’s Game Developers Conference, John Salwitz looked back at the creation of coin-op classic, Paperboy, and working for Atari in the 1980s.
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