STEVE GOLSON
“I got a phone call from Midway telling me to give Pac-Man an eye, lipstick and hair!”
Steve Golson
Halfway through our marathon two-and-a-half-hour Zoom conversation, Steve says excitedly, “Let me show you it,” and disappears off screen. He returns a few minutes later with a box full of computer print outs and scribbled notes and sketches. It’s all the paperwork for Super Missile Attack from 1981, the hack of Missile Command he and his MIT buddies produced, which laid the foundations for GCC, creators of Ms Pac-Man and the Atari 7800 hardware. He grins as he flicks through the pages, stopping to read out handwritten annotations or point out key aspects of the code, and you realise that though his time in the videogame business was short, his passion for it is enduring. We could have talked all night.
Steve, we saw you on the Netflix documentary High Score. Were you surprised to be featured?
I was a little but then it’s a really fun story: college dropouts produce biggest selling coin-op in American history!
Has anyone come up to you on the street and said, ‘Hey, I saw you on TV!’
[Laughs] No, but then I haven’t been out much, what with the pandemic! I have been contacted by old high school friends that saw me on TV, saying, ‘Steve, I had no idea you did Ms Pac-Man!’
You attended MIT, the birthplace of Spacewar!, which is usually credited as being the first ‘proper’ videogame, yet you studied earth sciences. How did you get into the brave new world of coin-op gaming?
Just dumb luck. By chance, I ended up living in a dormitory with Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran. They were a year behind me at MIT so this would be 1977. They created a partnership to put pinball machines in our dorm and I got involved helping them with that really early on. When the two of them moved off campus to a house in Brookline, I started
