Performa
Member
Hello all!
March is here, and with it another Women's History Month! For those who might not know, March is a time of celebration of women's achievements across just about everything you can think of, who may have been overlooked, left uncredited, or otherwise had their impact on the world unrecognized. I'm always excited to take this time to learn more, and there is always more to learn- much of it fascinating stuff that I didn't know about. Some of the most surprising things are things I thought I knew, but turns out I didn't know the full story.
Today, I want to talk about the game RIVER RAID and it's creator, Carol Shaw.
For those that don't know, River Raid is a vertical shoot em' up style game, and one of the first of it's kind on a home console. It's aged beautifully, and sold like crazy, while also being ported to pretty much every platform under the sun. As a fun arcade game anyone can pick up and ply that looks great on just about any system, we have it on a range of machines, and it's been deployed many times in many places over the years at WCC shows. I knew that there was a woman on the development team (as told to me by a video game store employee years and years ago) but I didn't know the full story. Carol Shaw was the games' creator, full stop, and what's more, she's considered one of the first women working in commercial video game development- a pretty significant achievement. She's also credited for 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, which I like, but I understand why others find it kinda mind bending.
River Raid was also a way bigger success than I ever thought it was. I knew it sold well (otherwise they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of porting it to the PC Jr. and MSX platform) but this was Atari's biggest game of 1983, with sales through the roof. Shaw won a pile of internal and industry awards at the time, which is pretty cool!
More info is at Wikipedia, with River Raid HERE and Carol Shaw herself HERE.
I learned about this from the "Secret Histories of nerd Mysteries" podcast which I recommend and can be found HERE. (Language warning)
March is here, and with it another Women's History Month! For those who might not know, March is a time of celebration of women's achievements across just about everything you can think of, who may have been overlooked, left uncredited, or otherwise had their impact on the world unrecognized. I'm always excited to take this time to learn more, and there is always more to learn- much of it fascinating stuff that I didn't know about. Some of the most surprising things are things I thought I knew, but turns out I didn't know the full story.
Today, I want to talk about the game RIVER RAID and it's creator, Carol Shaw.
For those that don't know, River Raid is a vertical shoot em' up style game, and one of the first of it's kind on a home console. It's aged beautifully, and sold like crazy, while also being ported to pretty much every platform under the sun. As a fun arcade game anyone can pick up and ply that looks great on just about any system, we have it on a range of machines, and it's been deployed many times in many places over the years at WCC shows. I knew that there was a woman on the development team (as told to me by a video game store employee years and years ago) but I didn't know the full story. Carol Shaw was the games' creator, full stop, and what's more, she's considered one of the first women working in commercial video game development- a pretty significant achievement. She's also credited for 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, which I like, but I understand why others find it kinda mind bending.
River Raid was also a way bigger success than I ever thought it was. I knew it sold well (otherwise they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of porting it to the PC Jr. and MSX platform) but this was Atari's biggest game of 1983, with sales through the roof. Shaw won a pile of internal and industry awards at the time, which is pretty cool!
More info is at Wikipedia, with River Raid HERE and Carol Shaw herself HERE.
I learned about this from the "Secret Histories of nerd Mysteries" podcast which I recommend and can be found HERE. (Language warning)