Originally an Atari employee, Carol Shaw is said to be the first female video game designer (for her unreleased Polo game in 1978, and 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe game in 1979). Later she joined Activision, where she programmed her best known game, River Raid. According to the manual of River Raid, she is also a “scholar in the field of Computer Science.”
With Keith Brewster she worked on the Atari Basic Reference Manual.
Carol Shaw left Activision in 1984 after designing Happy Trails for the Intellivision and River Raid for the Atari 800 and Atari 5200. Her other credits include Checkers in 1981 and 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe in 1980 for the Atari 2600. She also worked on Super Breakout. Shaw lives in California, and is now retired and married to Ralph Merkle, a researcher in nanotechnology.
Famous quotes containing the words carol, shaw and/or game:
“It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!”
—Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
“If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all—no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself—a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)