What cherished games would you take to the island?
A great idea for a game can hit you at any time. And for Matt Householder, it almost literally did. “It was a Saturday morning in the summer of 1986 and my wife, Candi, and I were walking to a coffee shop for breakfast,” recalls Matt, “when this kid on a skateboard rolls past us down the hill, making this horrible racket with the old hard wheels. My wife said, ‘You should do a game with skateboarding in it’ and I’m like, ‘Woah! You’re right! And we should have roller-skating and hacky sack and surfing… I think I designed the whole of California Games in the next 30 seconds.”
Matt had always been open to inspiration from unexpected sources. After completing his degree in computer engineering at the University Of Michigan, he had joined the corporate world of Bell Labs in January 1980, working alongside 2,000 other programmers in a huge building in Naperville, Illinois. Unsurprisingly, he hated it, though stuck it out as the company promised to send him to grad school to complete a Masters degree and it was there he met the VP of engineering of Gaming Devices Inc (GDI), a small videogame division of the famous jukebox manufacturers, Seeburg.
“This guy starts talking to me at the end ofa couple of videogames from Irem in Japan,” says Matt. “He offered me a job and so the day I graduated, which would be August 1981, I quit Bell Labs, became a programmer at GDI and soon they flew me out to Japan!”
