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Katie BiittnerMacEwan University
Katie Biittner (PhD, University of Alberta) is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, Economics, and Political Science at MacEwan University, Canada. Her research focuses broadly on the technologies that make us human; this has included examining the Stone Age artifacts of the earliest members of our species in East Africa, the basket-weaving traditions of women in rural Tanzania, and the digital artifacts of video games from our contemporary past. The latter work applies anthropological and archaeological theory, notably the chaîne opératoire and ethnoarchaeology, to investigating early video game implementation.
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Carl TherrienUniversity of Montreal
Carl Therrien is a professor of game studies at Université de Montréal. He has published extensively on the challenges of video game historiography, focusing on specific genres such as horror games, first-person shooters, and visual novels. In The Media Snatcher (Platform Studies, MIT Press, 2019), Therrien extends this work through a comparative study of the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine, exploring American and Japanese perspectives on this expansive technological platform. He cofounded the History of Games international conference series and has contributed to the annual Game History Symposium in Montreal since 2014.
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John AycockUniversity of Calgary
John Aycock is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary, Canada. In collaboration with archaeologists, game historians, and others, he researches the implementation of old computer games. He has published two books on the topic (Retrogame Archaeology: Exploring Old Computer Games, 2016; and Amnesia Remembered: Reverse Engineering a Digital Artifact, 2023) in addition to numerous journal and conference publications.
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Dona Bailey
In her professional life, Dona Bailey was a microprocessor programmer in the 1980s in California. She worked for Atari, Videa/Sente, and Activision. Bailey completed her career(s) as a faculty member in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
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Paul Allen Newell
Paul Allen Newell was in the video game industry from 1981 to 1984 with released games Scramble (1982, Vectrex), Towering Inferno (1982, Atari 2600), and Simutrek’s ill-fated Cube Quest (1983, arcade). Behind the scenes, he and Duncan Muirhead created the endless maze algorithm used in Entombed (1982, Atari 2600). Post-Simutrek, Newell worked on CGI/VFX at Abels, Electric Image (London), Rhythm & Hues (with an animation-software screen credit for Babe), Disney Feature Animation, and DreamWorks Animation. He is also codirector of the documentary Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Here’s the Bollocks about the Los Angeles punk scene in 1978–79 (first public screening in 1979).
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Abstract
Computer Theatre is an unreleased game prototype commissioned by Activision in the mid-1980s. Through interviews and a large collection of physical and digital artifacts, we present and contextualize this never-before-seen prototype from disparate disciplinary points of view: game history, computer science, anthropology, and archaeology. Specifically, we argue that Computer Theatre is an early entry in what we would now call the visual novel genre. This multifaceted genre focuses on both social interactions and on the playful exploration of branching paths; it also exhibits first steps toward hypertext and multiform games. Due to the people involved and the time period, we are additionally able to enhance the knowledge of contributions from women in the early game industry and document some of the human ramifications of the 1983 (predominantly North American) video game crash.