Rediscovering History’s Lost First Female Video Game Designer Joyce Weisbecker

[Lime]

Great article on Fast Co-Design that digs into the history of game technology, programming and Joyce Weisbecker's career as the "the first 'indie' video game programmer"

Joyce Weisbecker's work—which I was alerted to by a fellow tech historian, Marty Goldberg—is so little known that back in 2011, I declared Carol Shaw, who worked at Atari beginning in 1978 and later designed Activision's classic game River Raid, to be "the first female professional video game designer." Though Shaw's work remains historically significant, it turns out that Joyce Weisbecker's work predates it by roughly two years.

And she accomplished it without ever being on staff at RCA. "I know there were no other women at RCA doing the programming," she says today. "A couple of guys did and they were employees. I think I was the only person outside the company that actually got paid to do a video game. So I was the first contractor . . . and possibly the first independent video game developer, because I came up with the idea and pitched it, and they said okay."

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After development of FRED concluded in the basement, Joyce's father set up his machine in the back enclosed porch just off the dining room of the family's 1,300-square-foot house in Cherry Hill. Soon both Joyce and her younger sister, Jean, found themselves playing with it, encouraged by their father. And Joyce even began programming it.

"It was a natural interest," she recalls. "Dad showed my sister and me how to do it. My sister was more into taking horse-riding lessons. But I thought, 'This is like really cool puzzles. It's just that puzzle nature–it either gets you or it doesn't.'" It definitely got Joyce, who had been one of the few in her high school to learn how to use the school's programmable 100 step calculator.

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In October of 1976, Joyce programmed two action games: Speedway and Tag. In Speedway, the player pilots a small car on an overhead racetrack verses a second human player. There was only one problem: The Studio II's extremely low graphical resolution of 64 by 32 pixels left very little room for detail.

"People who work with modern computers don't understand the restrictions," says Joyce. "The hard part was not fitting the code in 2K or running on a slow processor–there's plenty of things you can do with that. The problem was how do how could you display the state of the game on such a limited thing? You had the equivalent of two black-and-white 32-by-32 Windows icons, and that was your entire screen."

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In 1977, still under contract with RCA, Joyce programmed three games–Slide, Sum Fun, and Sequence Shoot–for a commercial supplement to the VIP's included documentation called the RCA Cosmac VIP Game Manual. Just after that, her contract expired. When the time came to decide whether to keep pursuing game development, she decided to instead focus on school, picking stability over the uncertainty of forging ahead in the rapidly growing early home PC game market.

"You look around and you say, 'Okay, do I really want to live at home and spend every night duplicating cassettes, and going down to the post office and making photocopies of the instruction manual, and coming home and putting them in little plastic Ziploc bags and mailing them off to people?'" says Joyce. "That was the computer game industry at the time."

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Much more at the link: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90147592/rediscovering-historys-lost-first-female-video-game-designer

 

[CortexVortex]

I'm really interested in video game history but never heard of her before. Thanks a lot for sharing the article, I will read it once I'm at home!

 

[Lime]

A great companion to the above is this academic article by Laine Nooney on the 'archeologies of gender in video game history:

The history of videogames has largely been imagined as a patrilineal timeline. Women, when they emerge as participants in the game industry, are typically figured as outliers, exceptions, or early exemplars of "diversity" in the game industry. Yet the common practice of "adding women on" to game history in a gesture of inclusiveness fails to critically inquire into the ways gender is an infrastructure that profoundly affects who has access to what kinds of historical possibilities at a specific moment in time and space. This contribution aims to shift the relevant question from "Where are women in game history?" to "Why are they there in the way that they are?"

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Is the weird historical trick here that what we have written thus far are not histories of gaming but a history of gamers -- and that is why so much gets left out? The curious lives of Roberta Williams, of Elizabeth Hood, of the women who make confessions of their ludic pasts to me at conferences, suggest that we may need to flip the sentence: what does it take for a life to fit a game? Within game history, the only people we have made historically visible are those we have organized ourselves to see, those who have made the game a certain type of culture. But there have been others.

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It's also a great read on Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line if anyone is interested in it.

 

[Weltall Zero]

This is pretty cool. Thanks a lot for sharing!

Edit: Mother of god, her father was no slouch himself:

At the time, a typical minicomputer might cost anywhere between $6,000 and $25,000. (To put that in perspective, the average yearly income for American families during 1972 was $11,286.) Working at night for hours in his home's basement, Joseph designed a complete computer system himself, including a custom central processing unit, out of discrete components and circuits.

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That computer is the "FRED" referred to in the OP's quote. Reminds me of how my own father was who got me into games, computers and programming back in the early 80s.

Edit 2: It's easy to forget a lot of early coding was all done in assembly, and she did it on paper. That's some Nasir Gebelli level of mental skills right there, damn. O_o

 

[Onions]

Thanks for this! I'd also recommend the FEMICOM museum's work to anyone interested in lost women's gaming history