1. Carol Shaw was born on 1955 and is one of the first female game designers and programmers in the video game industry.
19 Facts About Carol Shaw
1. 2.
Carol Shaw is best known for creating the Atari 2600 vertically scrolling shooter game River Raid for Activision.
3.
Carol Shaw worked for Atari, Inc from 1978 to 1980, where she designed multiple games including 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe and Video Checkers, both for the Atari VCS before it was renamed to the 2600.
4.
Carol Shaw left game development in 1984 and retired in 1990.
5.
Carol Shaw's father was a mechanical engineer and worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
6.
Carol Shaw stated that she was gifted in mathematics throughout her childhood.
7.
Carol Shaw first used a computer in high school and discovered she could play text-based games on the system.
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Carol Shaw later completed a master's degree in computer science at Berkeley.
9.
Immediately after earning her Master's degree in 1978, Carol Shaw was hired at Atari, Inc to work on games for the Atari VCS with the title of Microprocessor Software Engineer.
10.
Carol Shaw's first published game was 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe for the Atari 2600 in 1978.
11.
Carol Shaw wrote Video Checkers and collaborated on two titles: a port of the coin-op game Super Breakout with Nick Turner and Othello with Ed Logg.
12.
Carol Shaw was the go-to gal for that sort of stuff.
13.
Carol Shaw worked on several projects for the Atari 8-bit computers.
14.
Carol Shaw developed the programmable Calculator application, published by Atari on floppy disk in 1981.
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Carol Shaw left Atari in 1980 to work for Tandem Computers as an assembly language programmer, then joining Activision in 1982.
16.
Carol Shaw wrote Happy Trails for the Intellivision and ported River Raid to the Atari 8-bit computers and Atari 5200.
17.
Carol Shaw took early retirement in 1990 and subsequently did some voluntary work including a position at the Foresight Institute.
18.
Carol Shaw has credited the success of River Raid as being a significant factor in enabling her to retire early.
19.
In 2017, Carol Shaw received the Industry Icon Award at The Game Awards.