He created Intellivision’s EXEC «operating system», and the first arcade game where you could log your initials with your high score.
One of the themes we spoke about in our interview with Italian game historian Andrea Contato about the hugely influential strategy game The Sumerian Game was that video game enthusiasts like to focus on tracing the first occurences of various features in video games. A simple example is the ability to enter your intitials and have them logged if you achieve the highest score in a game. The first game to do that, at least in the arcades, was Star Fire from 1979.
Star Fire was developed by Exidy, and it was programmer David Rolfe who came up with the idea of letting the top players log their initials with the game. They would then be visible for all to see, until someone beat them – or turned off the machine. This happened after Taito had made high score chasing popular with their hit Space Invaders, earlier the same year.
Naturally you could argue that if Rolfe hadn’t come up with this idea, someone else would. Making a note of who did something best is an old concept, and high score lists already existed on computer games for Plato, for instance. The limitations preventing arcade games from doing this before 1979 were mostly technical and would no longer apply going forward. Although coming up with an efficient way of allowing input via a joystick was of course also a design issue.
In any case, David Rolfe’s work on Star Fire was just a minor part of his career. More important was his work on the Intellivision console, where he created EXEC, the system that functioned as the console’s operative system. A game for the Atari 2600, for instance, would need to contain all the code the game needed to function, but thanks to EXEC an Intellivision game could offload standard things like drawing sprites to EXEC.
This allowed the developers to make deeper and more advanced, as they could spend the limited space on their cartridges on programming logic specific to their particular game.
A short «interview»
A while ago, we had a short e-mail exchange with David Rolfe. While it didn’t turn into a full interview, we thought his answers to our questions were too interesting to just leave in our archives. So here they are:
How did you get into computing in the first place?
I was born in 1955, so in my youth «smart» electronics did not exist. As a kid, I was inherently fascinated by anything mechanical the looked “smart”. My first hands-on experience with a computer was when I arrived Caltech as a freshman in 1973, and I found it the most fascinating thing I’d ever encountered in my life. This was a DEC («Digital Equipment Corporation») PDP-10, a mainframe that served the entire campus through serial cables that ran between all the buildings, and accessed by ASR-33 teletypes that printed out rolls of paper. I was drawn to the computing center whenever I was awake and not otherwise occupied. I’d arrived at Caltech not knowing where I would specialize, but I quickly realized this was what I had to do with my professional life. I had found my calling.
Here’s a section of note I’d previously written for other purposes, and you may find this relevant:
I suppose it’s hard to imagine for younger people, but until quite recently world had no computers or smart devices, except maybe in the inner sanctums of certain vital institutions. Our daily lives required human actions every step of the way. Credit cards were unusual and limited, if they existed at all. Go to a bank and fill in a paper deposit or withdrawal slip, and get the teller to stamp your bank book. TVs with twelve channels, manually turned, and signing off at night after a prayer and the National Anthem. Toll calls; long distance was expensive. No overnight parcels; the Post Office was your only practical option. Mechanical cash registers. Cash. Electric typewriters were a luxury. Photocopies were for professionals. Schools passed out mimeographs with their distinctive inky scent.
Into this world were born some misfit nerds (perhaps what we today consider to be «on the spectrum»?) who were drawn by nature into the abstractions of information organization. These people tended to be social rejects, and they flailed to find their place in the world. As kids, they had hobbies such as electric trains, and were fascinated by the switches and controls of complicated track connections.
Nobody chose to be a misfit nerd. It wasn’t a position that got you social status or girls or a bright future. As a kid, you would wish you were anyone else. Alas, you were stuck being you.
I mention these things because it seems we’ve created a new world, an upside-down world, for better or worse. Nerds not only seem to have a future, but they’ve taken over. Billionaires, and newly-minted nerds graduate to 6-figure jobs at Google. Or so it seems; I’m sure the reality is harsher than the appearance; that’s always the case. But back in the day, there was no such appearance. You might as well have been born with the Mark of Cain.
So…I guess I should speak for myself here, because I’m sure others were different, but I didn’t do what I did because of the money or the security or the status or anything like that, because those things didn’t exist. I did my job because it was life itself, and my greatest joy in life came when I realized there was a thing I should be doing and maybe, just maybe, I could survive doing it. In the Intellivision days, I devoted myself so thoroughly to these tasks that there was room for very little else in my life.
Okay, we know young people are stupid in general, and nerds with special talent tend to balance that excess by being even stupider in everyday life than normal young people, and that’s saying something. So I was an out-of-balance misfit and I knew it, and I was often pretty miserable or worse, as young people tend to be. But I had this thing, this place where I belonged, and I could throw myself into it and find a reason to keep going.
Star Fire is regarded as the first game to log player initials with the high score list. How did you come up with this idea, and was it difficult to implement?
Yes, the logging of the initials of high score players in Star Fire was my idea, and as far as I know this was the first game to do this. At the time of development, the concept of microprocessors controlling arcade games was quite new (as opposed to traditional discreet hardware), so there was suddenly great potential to throw in complex features that were previously impossible. I recall talking with Ted Michon, who was paying me to do the programming, and we were considering what features would particularly please a player. Some other games simply displayed the previous high score, and I said that what a triumphant player would really like to do is put his name on that score. I realized that we could do this, or at least input his initials using the controls, and so that feature went in.
When working on the Intellivision, you created the EXEC software that was put in the machine’s ROM. What did this do, and what advantage did it provide developers?
Have you seen this discussion with me and some of the Blue Sky people, in which we talk about the history of Intellivision? I explain about the development of the EXEC in this.
The header image is a combination of the Mobygames screenshot of Star Fire and the photo of the Intellivision console by Evan Amos. Note that Star Fire was never released on the Intellivision.