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characters, emotions, and actions. I could imagine other worlds through the
looking glass, and I could imagine reaching into them.
Working at CyberVision was a time of wonder. It was also a time of
wrestling with unfamiliar technologies with for novel purposes, ham-
strung by the tiny RAM, the slow BAUD rate, fat pixels and “cyberwind”
that smeared colors across the screen, and an alphanumeric keypad as
an input device. The ability to synchronize audio with video was a great
aspect of cassette tape; oxide dropouts were emphatically not. Most trou-
bling was the need to create converging nodes in our branching tree archi-
tectures because consequential choices could not be held in tiny memory
past the boundary of a 2K data load. A vision of possibility was emerging
for me—meaningful interactions, responsive worlds—but I didn't know
how to pursue it.
When CyberVision folded to its competition (an upstart company called
Atari), I asked my boss to help me think about what kind of job to look
for next. He said, “Why don't you go work for a bank? They need people
to help design automated teller machines.” “I don't know anything about
that,” I cried. “Of course you do,” he replied. “That's human factors.” In
response to my blank look, he elaborated, “That's making computer things
easy for people to use.”
What a concept!
I ended up going to work for Atari, not a bank, but the notion of ease
of use as a design criterion fi t neatly and permanently into my developing
intuitions about how theatrical expertise could inform the art of design-
ing software. There's nothing between the audience and the stage but some
good illusion. Clearly, I was on the right track. But I hadn't run into the
other “i” word yet.
I got off to a rocky start in the software branch of the newly-minted
Atari Home Computer Division, fi rst as a software specialist for educa-
tional applications, then as a producer, and fi nally as director of software
product management. That job included thinking up what would make
good applications, getting buy-ins from marketing and engineering, and
doing much of the basic design work. Various producers managed budding
application areas as we struggled to understand what would differentiate
the Atari 400/800 from the Atari Video Computer System (VCS, later 2600)
as well as from competitors like the Apple 2.
Product differentiation (or imaginings of what personal computers could
do) was the sticking point between me and the president of the company.
He wanted me to devote 80% of our budget to porting VCS games to the
