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Countdown to CGE 2007 ~ July 2007 ~ 28 JUL 2007 |
Classic Gaming Expo Distinguished Guest:
STEVE WOITA
This bio was written by the man himself.
After getting out of college I went to work at Apple & worked
there from 1980-82. It is there were I learned how to move graphics around
from the following people: Bill Budge, Andy Hertzfeld & Keithen.
While at Apple, Bill Budge asked me if it were possible to hook two Atari
style controllers to the Apple II (for Crazy Climber)....I said
"well let me give it a try"... After a while I got something
going & then I found out that another guy that was currently working
in the lab not too far away had a four paddle thing going. To make a long
story short, we mixed the two together & got a device that supposedly Steve
Jobs gave the OK to allow. Sirius Software acquired the rights
to produce and ship this product, and the company even sent Keithen and
myself royalty checks! I was very ecstatic as it was my first experience
in the royalty thing. The device ended up with a weird name... JOYPORT
The Joyport, introduced in 1981 for Apple II, (I co-designed the hardware)
allowed you to have 4 game paddles and 2 Atari style controllers hooked up
to the Apple II.
I then moved on to Atari where I created three games for the Atari 2600:
Taz (1984). I was the programmer, designer and artist for this
game.
Asterix (1984, for Europe). I was the programmer and designer.
The video game market soon crashed, so I stayed home and goof around with
the Macintosh and the Commodore 64. During this time, I co-designed a
piece of hardware that allowed an Atari-style joystick to hook up to the
Mac. At this time, I am now living off of the royalty checks from this
device (called the MouseStick, which I co-designed in 1985, and
playing the stock market. The MouseStick for the Mac allowed a mouse and
joystick to live together, enabling one to use whichever one you liked.
I did some more contract work for Apple but then I felt the urge to get
back into designing games. I then go back to Atari where I was going to
develop coin-op games but they found out that I worked in the consumer
division years ago and said "how about you do the coin-op thing later
and focus on our new group called Tengen?" I guess I must have
said ok, because I worked on a few things that got canned and about the
only thing I worked on that made it to market was Super Sprint for
the Nintendo Entertainment System, which I helped with the layout
and also entered the tedious track data.
Some of my buddies then left Tengen and formed Bitmasters, where
I helped out on the design for Krazy Kreatures for the NES.
At this time I leave Tengen & go to a place called MediaGenic....
No, it's not a medical company. I worked with some cool people there &
our team was the first in the USA to "get to work on" the Super
Nintendo.
I soon left MediaGenic and went to work for Sega. I had a great time
there. I got to meet and work with some of the best people in the biz.
While at Sega, I worked on three Genesis games, Kid Chameleon
(1992), where I was the co-producer, designer and programmer, Sonic 2
(1992), in which I helped out on the last two weeks of the project doing
level design, and Sonic Spinball (1993) which I co-programmed with
Dennis Koble, Lee Actor, Jason Plumb, Scott Chandler, Dave Sanner, Ken
Rose and Earl Stratin.
Jason Plumb and I were made too good of an offer from Ocean Of
America. We were both promised that we would be able to do coin-op
stuff there. Not so. When all was said and done, we had to turn WaterWorld
the movie into games on new platforms. I was co-producer, designer and
programmer for the Virtual Boy version, co-producer and was designer and
programmer for the never released Saturn version.
I then worked on some games with some friends of mine at a cool company
called Actual Entertainment, where I was co-level designer of both Gubble
and Gubble II (both for PC). I was the co-level designer of Gubble,
along with Joe Cain, Eric Ginner, Franz Lanzinger, Eugene Polonsky and
Mark Robichek. On Gubble II, I was the co-level designer along with Joe
Cain, Eric Ginner, Franz Lanzinger and Mark Robichek.
Now I'm back to working with small games... Java games... It's
like playing on the Atari 2600 but with more colors! The three games I'm
currently working on are TerraDacktel, DunkIt and Antenna.
The site is located at
http://www.tinygames.com
Quadrun (1983). I was the programmer, designer and artist, and
jointly created the sounds and voice effects... supposedly the first
home videogame with voice without the need for a hardware attachment.