Sure, National Video Game Day may be a “nonsense holiday” or even a “dumb fake bad holiday”. But we’re still going to take it as an opportunity to shine a little light today on Joyce Weisbecker, the first female commercial video game designer and first indie game developer, seen here with her sister Jean in the 1970s.
Joyce’s claim to video game fame comes from her work during this era. Her father, Joseph Weisbecker, was an engineer at RCA who invented an 8-bit microcomputer architecture that would serve as the foundation of RCA’s future microprocessor business, and who contributed to the development of RCA’s programmable video game and educational systems: FRED, STUDIO II, STUDIO III, and STUDIO IV, and Microtutor.
In 1976, with Joseph’s encouragement, Joyce spent the summer after her high school graduation programming video games for the RCA Cosmac VIP as an independent contractor. Among the games she designed that summer was an educational game called TV Schoolhouse I. While earlier games like Snake Race and Jackpot had earned her credit in RCA game programming manuals and little else, TV Schoolhouse I sold to RCA for $250. Later sales that summer included Speedway and Tag, followed by Slide, Sum Fun, and Sequence Shoot in 1977.
Joyce graduated from Rider University in 1980 with a double major in computer engineering and actuarial science in 1980. Following a career as an actuary, in 1998, she earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a masters in computer science, and began work as a radar signal processing engineer designing digital filters.
In addition to his work at RCA, Joseph Weisbecker ran his own business, Komputer Pastimes, which made simple games based on computer language for children and adults. He also wrote children’s books and designed toys and greeting cards. Much of this activity has been preserved in the Hagley Library’s Joseph A. Weisbecker papers records group of our David Sarnoff Research Center records (Accession 2464.09).
You can view the Joe Weisbecker Video Game digital collection in our Digital Archive now by clicking here. In addition to the photos shared here, this collection also comprises digital files extracted from cassette tapes found in Weisbecker's collection as well as selected documents related to RCA's video game systems and Weisbecker's work with Komputer Pastimes. The video clips of gameplay were provided by Kevin Bunch working from binaries converted from tapes by Andy Modla and Marcel van Tongeren.
You can also check out some new research from this collection! In this episode of the Hagley’s Stories from the Stacks, Elizabeth Badger, PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, discusses the early history of video game culture, focusing on the effects of the commodification of games. Badger suggests that gaming culture initially focused on collective effort and community ethos, and that a turning point in the 1980s lead to the re-conception of video games a consumer commodities controlled by corporate interests. Badger situates her project in the context of her own experience with gaming and video game culture, noting the widespread prejudice against video games, and the sexism within gaming culture.
Here’s the one machine from Douglas Crawford’s Visicalc exhibit that I omitted earlier: an RCA COSMAC VIP running something unique. See, nobody in their right mind would actually run VIsicalc or something similar on a little 1802 based machine. Yet, here we see a “what if” of something close, but running a tiny 4x4 grid of something spreadsheet-like. While I didn’t ask him, I got the impression that Doug programmed this himself, along with a slideshow demo to exercise the VIP.
This COSMAC VIP has all the bells and whistles for something based on this processor. The PIXIE graphics display adapter is rather limited, but it does a decent enough job.
