Hasta La Ideas

Even if you’ve at one point pilfered an entire week’s allowance on games like Asteroids or Gauntlet, you might not know the man who was responsible for those hours of fun and sore button-smashing fingers. Ed Logg is his name and he’s soon to receive the 2012 AIAS Pioneer Award (pdf) from The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences for his work in game design. Logg will receive the award at the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, held this upcoming February. Here’s a bit about his early work:

Dedicating long hours of programming at Stanford University’s AI Lab, Logg soon realized he could turn his hobby and passion into a career. Joining Atari’s arcade division, Logg was instrumental in the development of a string of wildly successful games – Super Breakout in 1978, Asteroids in 1979, Centipede in 1980, and Millipede in 1982. Further inspired by his son’s love of Dungeons and Dragons, Logg developed a fantasy dungeon-crawler Gauntlet for Atari Games in 1985. There was initial resistance to the cooperative multiplayer aspect, but this format later evolved to became an arcade staple. It was this intuition that helped Logg produce a further string of coin-op successes for Atari Games from the mid-to-late eighties

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