COLLECTED WORKS ED LOGG
When John Salwitz [co-creator of coin-op classic Paperboy] left Atari, he had a T-shirt made saying ‘Golden Boy’ and gave it me as a parting gift,” Ed Logg says, grinning. “I think he started that. And when I was at Tengen, I was heading to my first CES and they said I needed a business card. They asked what I wanted as my job title and I said I didn’t care. A producer, Howard Lehr, suggested ‘Super Duper Game Guy’. I said, ‘Fine.’”
Monikers to be proud of, indeed, but then when you’ve created Atari’s bestselling coin-op, Asteroids, along with such iconic titles as Gauntlet and Centipede, they are perhaps to be expected.
It didn’t start out like that, though. When Logg joined Atari in 1978, he was assigned to a project already in development, Dirt Bike, and later joined the team working on Wolf Pack, an ambitious submarine commander game featuring a hulking periscope you could rotate 360 degrees. Neither went into production. After all that, did he ever wonder whether he’d made a mistake getting into the fledging world of videogame development?
“Oh, I had no doubt I’d made the right decision,” he says today. “You make something and it doesn’t always work. Games can look good on paper but you take them to the public and they don’t always like them.”
Logg’s early games were literally drafted on paper, such was the state of game development in those frontier days, but he stayed in the videogame business through the next three decades, producing dozens of titles for both the arcade and home consoles. In 2012, he was presented with the Pioneer Award by The Academy Of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Here, he takes us on a journey that begins in Sunnyvale, CA among piles of paper tape.
