BETTY RYAN
As the first female engineer hired by General Computer Corporation, Betty blazed a trail, both for women in the games industry and on-screen with her dazzling coin-op debut, Quantum. The company had made its name producing Super Missile Attack, an ingenious hack of Missile Command, and the outcome of the resulting court case led to an agreement with Atari to create both arcade and console games. She worked closely with Doug Macrae, the cofounder of GCC, as well as Mike Horowitz and Steve Golson, part of the team that produced Ms Pac-Man for Bally Midway. Though she had to battle gender stereotypes and the attitudes of some unreconstructed male coworkers, she speaks about her time at GCC with affection. “I’ve rarely done interviews about my time making games,” says Betty, with a smile, “but this has been fun!”
You’ve spoken at the American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot in New Hampshire to college students about your time making games in the early Eighties. How did you find that whole experience?
It’s a very different world now. It seemed more like a frontier back then. A lot was undiscovered and a lot of what we did felt like hacks. Or ‘clever implementations’ I should say [laughs].
Were any of the students surprised that a woman was making games in those pioneering days?
One girl asked me about what it was like to be a woman in the industry back then and it caught me off-guard. When I joined GCC [General Computer Corporation] in 1982, I was the first female engineer and I was the only one for a long time. You probably know the stereotype of how young, male engineers can behave. My experience was… mixed. Overall, it was positive but at times I found it very difficult.
Did you encounter some sexism, then?
When I was in high school, I took a Saturday course in Fortran at MIT [Massachusetts Institute Of Technology] and in one class, I asked
