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Countdown to CGE 2007 ~ July 2007 ~ 28 JUL 2007 |
Classic Gaming Expo Distinguished Guest:
STEPHEN RONEY
Stephen Roney co-designed and co-programmed the Intellivoice games Space Spartans, B-17 Bomber and Space Shuttle, designed and programmed the unreleased Intellivision game Hypnotic Lights and programmed the conversion of the Intellivision game Utopia to the Aquarius Home Computer System. He is co-founder and Vice President of Intellivision Productions, Inc.; he developed the Macintosh game player for the Intellivision Lives! CD-ROM.
Steve came to Mattel Electronics from the aerospace industry. The personnel department was reluctant to grant him an interview -- he had far more experience than Mattel was then looking for, and a higher salary requirement. But Steve, a game aficionado, was persistent. After a month of trying, he finally got an interview, and a job offer a few days later.
His experience proved invaluable. His initial project was Space Spartans, the first Intellivoice game. The voice-handling routines he wrote for the game were used for all subsequent voice games.
He next was assigned to B-17 Bomber, then he programmed the three (unreleased) foreign language versions of Space Spartans.
When he had time, he also worked on Hypnotic Lights, a game loosely based on Rubik's Cube. Steve never had a chance to finish it.
Steve took on the Aquarius translation of Utopia in order to experiment with using a higher-level language for game development. Up to that point, all Intellivision and Aquarius programming had been done in Assembly Language. Steve chose to program Utopia in the language C, bringing it in ahead of schedule.
He then returned to voice games, taking over Space Shuttle. Intellivoice was discontinued before the game could be finished.
In recognition of his expertise, Steve was made a Member of the Technical Staff, a job classification on par with Manager. Steve regularly helped other programmers debug or write tricky routines.
Keith Robinson tells this story about Steve: "While working on TRON Solar Sailer, I was programming very fast but very sloppy. My boss, Mike Minkoff, assigned Gene Smith to clean up after me -- to tighten up the code. Gene kept wailing about how inefficient my programming was. Finally, after he got particularly upset over one routine I'd written, I issued a challenge -- let's see who could re-write the routine with the fewest instructions. I wanted to prove that I actually COULD write efficient code. Gene, Mike and I sweated over the routine, and after about fifteen minutes we compared results: my version was a bit shorter than either of theirs. Feeling pretty proud of myself, I bragged about the competition during lunch that day to Steve. 'What's the routine supposed to do?' he asked. I told him, he thought for a moment, and without even setting down his teriyaki burger he quickly wrote out a few instructions on his napkin: a shorter, better version of the routine. His is the version that's in the game."
After Mattel Electronics closed, Steve, Bill Fisher and Michael Breen started their own company, Quicksilver Software. One of Quicksilver's first clients was INTV Corporation, which asked them to prepare some of the unreleased Intellivision games for manufacturing.
Steve was offered a full-time job in the computer-aided industry, so he sold his interest in Quicksilver Software to Bill. But 10 years later, Steve went freelance. His first contract: computer game design for Quicksilver Software.
Steve is one of the founders of Intellivision Productions, Inc., which in 1997 purchased the rights to the Intellivision system. Vice President of Software Development, Steve developed the Macintosh game player for the Intellivision Lives! CD-ROM.