Don Daglow - Intellivision and Electronic Arts in The 1980s

Intellivision and Electronic Arts in The 1980s

In 1980 Daglow was hired as one of the original five in-house Intellivision programmers at Mattel during the first Console wars. Intellivision titles where he did programming and extensive ongoing design include:

• Geography Challenge (1981) — an educational title for the ill-fated Intellivision Keyboard component.
• Utopia — the first sim game or god game (1982). Utopia was a surprise hit and received wide press coverage for its unique design in an arcade-dominated era. The game has been named to two different video game halls of fame.
• Intellivision World Series Baseball (1983) — the first video game to use multiple camera angles to display the action rather than a static playfield.

As the team grew into what in 1982 became known as the Blue Sky Rangers Daglow was promoted to be Director of Intellivision Game Development, where he created the original designs for a number of Mattel titles in 1982-83 that were enhanced and expanded by other programmers, including:

• Tron Deadly Discs (programmed by Steve Sents)
• Shark! Shark! (programmed by Ji-Wen Tsao)
• Buzz Bombers (programmed by Michael Breen)
• Pinball (programmed by Minh-Chau Tran).

During the Video Game Crash of 1983 Daglow was recruited to join Electronic Arts by founder Trip Hawkins, where he joined the EA producer team of Joe Ybarra and Stewart Bonn. His EA titles include:

• Realm of Impossibility (1984)
• Adventure Construction Set (1985)
• Racing Destruction Set (1985)
• Mail Order Monsters (1985)
• Thomas M. Disch's Amnesia (1986)
• Lords of Conquest (1986)
• World Tour Golf (1986)
• Super Boulder Dash (1986)
• Ultimate Wizard (1986)
• Earl Weaver Baseball (1987) — again teamed with Eddie Dombrower. One of the earliest EA Sports titles, EWB was later named to the computer game Hall of Fame by Computer Gaming World and GameSpy. CGW named it as one of the top 25 games of all time in 1996.
• Patton Versus Rommel (1987)
• Return to Atlantis (1987)

In addition to Dombrower, at EA, Daglow often worked with former members of the Intellivision team, including programmer Rick Koenig, artist Connie Goldman and musician Dave Warhol.

Daglow spent 1987–88 at Brøderbund as head of the company's Entertainment and Education Division. Although he supervised the creation of games like Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia, Star Wars, the Ancient Art of War series, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, his role was executive rather than creative. He took a lead role in signing the original distribution deal for SimCity with Maxis, and acquired the Star Wars license for Brøderbund from LucasFilm.