Carol Shaw: A true female Atari story
Antti MuttaCarol Shaw is a real game-changer and an industry icon as one of the very first female game developers.
Shaw started her career at Atari, Inc. in 1978. The same year Atari released her first game, 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, for the 2600 system. This was followed by Othello (together with Ed Logg), Video Checkers (in 1980) and Super Breakout (1981, with Nick Turner). She also worked as a developer on software for Atari's 8-bit computers.
Shaw left Atari in 1980 and after a stint at Tandem Computers, she landed a job at Activision in 1982. Her first game for the company was one for the ages. River Raid for Atari 2600/VCS became a smash hit, selling over a million cartridges. That's not even counting the ports to other platforms, which Shaw handled the Atari 8-bit computer and Atari 5200 ports herself.
“Probably one of the best programmers period…”
– Mike Albaugh commented on Carol Shaw in an interview.
Carol Shaw received the Industry Icon Award in 2017 at The Game Awards.