by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
Video games were once considered to be only of interest to boys, and the early games industry was dominated by men. Despite that, a teenage girl, Joyce Weisbecker, was one of the pioneers of commercial game development.
Originally, video games were seen as toys for boys. Gradually it was realised that there was a market for female game players too, if only suitably interesting games were developed, so the games companies eventually started to tailor games for them. That also meant, very late in the day, they started to employ women as games programmers. Now it is a totally normal thing to do. However, women were also there from the start, designing games. The first female commercial programmer (and possibly first independent developer) was Joyce Weisbecker. Working as an independent contractor she wrote her first games for sale in 1976 for the RCA Studio II games console that was released in January 1977.
Joyce was only a teenager when she started to learn to program computers and wrote her first games. She learnt on a computer that her engineer father designed and built at home called FRED (Flexible Recreational and Educational Device). He worked for RCA (originally the Radio Corporation of America), one of the major electronics, radio, TV and record companies of the 20th century. The company diversified their business into computers and Joyce’s father designed them for RCA (as well as at home for a hobby). He also invented a programming language called CHIP-8 that was used to program the RCA computers. This all meant Joyce was in a position to learn CHIP-8 and then to write programs for RCA computers including their new RCA Studio II games console before the machine was released, as a post-high school summer job.
The code for two games that she wrote in 1976, called Snake Race and Jackpot, were included in the manual for an RCA microcomputer called the COSMAC VIP, and she also wrote more programs for it the following year. These computers came in kit form for the buyer to build themselves. Her programs were example programs included for the owner to type in and then play once they had built the machine. Including them meant their new computer could do something immediately.
She also wrote the first game that she was paid for in that Summer of 1976. It was for the RCA Studio II games console, and it earned her $250 – well over $1000 in today’s money, so worth having for a teenager who would soon be going on to college. It was a quiz program, called TV School House I. It pitted two people against each other, answering questions on topics such as maths, history and geography, with two levels of difficulty. Questions were read from question booklets and whoever typed in the multiple choice answer number the fastest got the points for a question, with more points the faster they were. There is currently a craze for apps that augment physical games and this was a very early version of the genre.
She quickly followed it with racing and chase games, Speedway and Tag, though as screens were still very limited then, with only tiny screens, the graphics of all these games were very, very simple – eg racing rectangles around a blocky, rectangular racing track.
Unfortunately, the RCA games console itself was a commercial failure as it couldn’t compete with consoles like the Atari 2600, so RCA soon ended production. Joyce, meanwhile, retired from the games industry, still a teenager, ultimately becoming a radar signal processing engineer.
While games like Pong had come much earlier, the Atari 2600, which is credited with launching the first video game boom, was released in 1977, with Space Invaders, one of the most influential video games of all time, released in 1980. Joyce really was at the forefront of commercial games design. As a result her papers related to games programming, including letters and program listings, are now archived in the Strong National Museum of Play in New York.
More on …
- The First Female Video Game Designer Blog from the Strong National Museum of Play [EXTERNAL]
- TV Schoolhouse I game in the the Strong National Museum of Play [EXTERNAL]
- The Women are still here
- Diversity in Computing
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This blog is funded through EPSRC grant EP/W033615/1.
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