Video gaming has long been considered a “boy’s club” and the development of said games have long been the same way. However, despite the way things may look, women have been involved with big-time game development since the earliest days of home consoles, and Carol Shaw was one of the forerunners of the industry.
Shaw, as the daughter of a mechanical engineer, grew up with hobbies focused more on science and math. She had her first hands-on experience with a computer in high school, where she would play text-based games. Shaw attended the University of California, Berkeley, receiving her B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1977 and later returning to the school to receive her Master’s in Computer Science.
Shortly after she received her Bachelor’s, Shaw went to work for Atari, writing Video Checkers and 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe in 1978 on her own, and partnering with Nick Turner on the wildly popular Super Breakout the same year. In 1980 she left Atari to work at Tandem Computers, a company primarily focused on systems built for banks, stock exchanges, ATMs, and so forth. She returned to the video game industry in 1982, when she was hired by Activision – the industry’s first third-party developer.
It was in her first year at Activision where Shaw developed her best-known work: River Raid for the Atari 2600. The game put players in control of a fighter jet, which flies over the River of No Return. The object is to take out as many enemy units (tankers, helicopters, jets, and so on) as possible without crashing or running out of fuel. River Raid was unique for its time, as it used procedural generation to create the terrain and the appearances of enemies – a hard task to pull off given the technical limitations of an Atari 2600 cartridge. River Raid received a number of awards upon its release and was eventually ported to other systems; Shaw’s level design is still considered a milestone for the time.
Besides River Raid, Shaw also designed Happy Trails for the Intellivision console. She left the games industry in 1984, briefly returning to work for Tandem before taking an early retirement in 1990.
Though she’s been out of the video game industry for more than 30 years now, Shaw’s legacy as a programmer – particularly as one of the first notable women in the industry – lives on. At the 2017 Game Awards, she received the Industry Icon Award in recognition of her long-standing impact on video games.
