Josh Littlefield @joshlitt

Aside from playing Pong with a neighbor around 1971 (could that be?), I never played video games until I was hired at GCC, where I knew the founders. I was the first engineer hired to do home video games for a new partnership with Warner Communications, which owned Atari. With the source code for some random game as my guide, and with Doug Macrae's help and encouragement, I figured out 2600 programming, and wrote Atari Video Cube, a 4K game. Having built the rotating cube, I couldn't manage the vertical rotations of each cube "slice", so I came up with an alternative. I figured no one wanted a TV simulation of what you could hold in your hand and work much more easily, so I built a game for those that just wanted to pull the stickers off the squares and rearrange them to "solve" the puzzle, and that's what Atari Video Cube is all about. Atari couldn't decide whether to market it or not. Not close enough to "Rubik" to use that name? Too close to use another? They finally made a small production run with the different name. From there, for me, it was Ms. Pacman, and Centipede, Kangaroo, and Pole Position, while I managed the development of other 2600 games, and eventually consulted on the programming aspects of the Maria chip, and helped lead the development of all the 7800 games for the launch of that (GCC developed) platform. Then along came Jack Tramiel and Commodore, who killed Atari, and the 7800 launch was long delayed that era of video games was over.