Annotated Bibliography: Dona Bailey

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1. Krueger, Anne (March 1983). "Welcome to the Club". Video Games. 1 (6): 51–54, 81. Retrieved 26 May 2014.[1]

An article from the now defunct Video Games Magazine that discusses women's prescence in the male gaming business, including Dona Bailey's contributions too Atari. It is mentioned here that after Dona Bailey left Atari, she joined Videa, a design firm founded by three other former Atari employees.

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2. Ortutay, Barbara (30 June 2012). "Woman behind 'Centipede' recalls game icon's birth". Yahoo! Finance. Associated Press. Archived from the original on 10 March 2014.[2]

In this news article by AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay, Dona Bailey talks about her history with Atari, including why she first joined Atari and the creation of Centipede.

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3. "Dona Bailey". atariwomen. 2019-03-08. Retrieved 2019-10-31.[3]

AtariWomen is a research project that aims to celebrate the stories of the women who made crucial contributions to Atari in the 1970's and 80's. This is Dona Bailey's story. Information cited from this story is her educational background.

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4. Alexander, Leigh (27 August 2007). "The Original Gaming Bug: 'Centipede' Creator Dona Bailey". Gamasutra. Retrieved 3 April 2015.[4]

Gamasutra is a website dedicated to video game development. This is an interview with Dona Bailey from 2007. Bailey discusses her background, and how she went from programming at General Motors to programming Centipede at Atari. She mentions how she was first introduced to video games by hearing the song "Space Invader" by the band The Pretenders. It is also mentioned here that she was a keynote speaker at the Women in Games International Conference in 2007.

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5. Kent, Steven L. (2001). The Ultimate History of Video Games: from Pong to Pokemon and beyond...the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world. Prima. pp. 160–162. ISBN 978-0-7615-3643-7.[5]

A volume of the history of video games up until 2001. It discusses the production of Centipede, including Dona Bailey's experience with microprocessor-based systems. It also mentions how Bailey was the only woman in Atari's coin-op division at the time.

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6. "The Unsung Female Programmer Behind Atari's Centipede". VICE. 26 May 2015. Retrieved 9 October 2019.[6]

A filmed interview by VICE's Motherboard. Dona Bailey mentions in this interview that when playing the game Space Invaders, she noticed the display resembled the display she worked with at General Motors, and so she went on to work for Atari. She also specifically mentions she was the software developer and software engineer on Centipede.

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7. Ortutay, Barbara (29 June 2012). "Iconic Atari turns 40, tries to stay relevant". Yahoo! News. Associated Press.[7]

This news article discusses the history of Atari and its influence on modern video games during its 40th anniversary. Dona Bailey mentions a notebook which included around 30 game ideas Atari had. She said one idea that stood out to her was to shoot a multi-segmented insect that walks and winds down on the screen towards the player, which went on to become  Centipede.

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8. "Faculty - Department of Rhetoric and Writing". University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Archived from the original on 10 March 2014. Retrieved 15 November 2012.[8]

An archived copy of the faculty on University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The original version was removed, but an archived copy has been preserved on Wayback Machine - Internet Archive. It mentions that Bailey taught as a faculty member for UALR in the department of Rhetoric and Writing in 2008.

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9. "Dona Bailey (@dona_c_bailey) | Twitter". twitter.com. [9]

Dona Bailey's personal Twitter account. It states in her bio that she completed a script she wrote titled "Sunnyvale", which is about her time working at Atari and on Centipede. Her recent tweets mention that she is currently trying to get her script to be picked up.

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10. Rouse, Richard III (2010). "Chapter 6: Interview: Ed Logg". Game Design: Theory and Practice. Jones & Bartlett Learning. pp. 93–94. ISBN 9781449633455.[10]

This book on game development includes an interview with Ed Logg, a co-creator on Centipede. Logg mentions in this interview that he assigned Bailey to do the programming on Centipede, while he himself worked on the game's design. He also notes that Bailey did "about half the programming".

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11. "Atari - Arcade/Coin-op". web.archive.org. 2018-07-11. [11]

An archived copy of the history of Atari's Arcade/Coin-Op division. The original version from Atari's official website was removed, but an archived copy has been preserved on Wayback Machine - Internet Archive. It mentions the history of Atari's arcade releases, including Centipede, which went on to be Atari's second bestselling coin-op game.

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12. "Dona Bailey (Atari) - Interview". Arcade Attack. 2017-11-02 [12]

Dona Bailey has an interview with UK retro video game blog site Arcade Attack. Bailey discusses her time ay Atari and how she came to develop Centipede. She mentions here that after Centipede, she worked on another game at Atari called "Weather War", but it was never completed. She also mentions in this interview that she is currently working on writing film scripts for narrative films.

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13. Koon, David (2015-11-19). "Centipede creator teaches at UALR". Arkansas Times. [13]

A 2015 article from the Arkansas Times. The article discusses Dona Bailey's background and how she ended up teaching at University of Arkansas Little Rock. Notable mentions in the article is the popularity of Centipede with it first came out, and the reason why Bailey moved back to Arkansas, which was to take care of her aging parents and secure a teaching job at UALR.  

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14. Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play. Author, Meagan Marie. Publisher, DK Publishing, 2018. pp. 38-39. ISBN, 0241395062, 9780241395066.[14]

A book that highlights the major accomplishments of women in the gaming industry since its beginning, featuring interviews from 100 women in gaming. By Meagan Marie, a Senior Community and Social Media Manager at Crystal Dynamics. Includes an interview with Dona Bailey. It mentions that Bailey briefly worked for Activision after she left Atari, and that she earned two Master's degrees starting at the age of 48.

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15. "Women in Games: Inspire! at The Strong Museum November 15". www.museumofplay.org. 2018-10-16. [15]

Announcement of the "Women in Games: Inspire!" panel at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, as part of it's first annual "Women in Games" exhibit. It was an interactive panel where female guest speakers from the video game industry talk about their experiences. Dona Bailey was one of the honored speakers at this panel.

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16. "r/IAmA - I am Dona Bailey, former Atari programmer of arcade Centipede, Unix programmer, Linux teacher, Adobe CS teacher, Rhetoric and Writing university professor, lifelong learner, big reader. I'm here to answer any questions. AMA!". reddit.[16]

Dona Bailey AMA on Reddit

Dona Bailey answers questions on a Reddit AMA interview. She discusses her experience at Atari and the various problems she overcame while working there. Bailey also mentions that she reinvented her work in her 40s, earning two master's degrees and earning a position as a faculty member at a university. 

LyssBlyss this is super work. Small detail, I would be careful about using the AMA, as it is not secondary. I would only use it when you don't have any other sources to work from. --Theredproject (talk) 03:09, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Dona Bailey

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Dona Bailey is an American video game programmer and educator who, along with Ed Logg in 1981, created the arcade video game Centipede.[1][2]

Career

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Beginnings

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Dona Bailey graduated high school early and started attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the age of 16. She accelerated her education by taking classes year-round and in the summer, and by the age of 19, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Psychology with three minors in English, Math and Biology. She continued her education further by earning a master's degree in Math.[3] As a young programmer, Bailey was hired by General Motors and trained in assembly language programming. She worked there for two years on displays,[4] and microprocessor-based cruise control systems.[5] Bailey's first exposure to video games came from when she first heard the song "Space Invader" by The Pretenders. A friend told her the song was inspired by the arcade video game Space Invaders. After becoming interested in what a video game was, her friend took her to a nearby bar which had a Space Invaders arcade cabinet. Bailey noticed that the display on Space Invaders resembled the display she worked with on the Cadillac at GM.[6] She found out that Atari was using the same microprocessor in its games.[2]

Atari

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In 1980, Bailey joined Atari's coin-op division, where she was the only woman.[5] In an interview Bailey recalled that Atari had a notebook of possible game ideas at the time. Of the 30 or so entries the only one without "lasering or frying things" was a short description of a bug winding down the screen. "It didn't seem bad to shoot a bug".[7] Within a four-person team, she became the software developer and software engineer on Centipede.[2][6] Ed Logg, a supervisor at Atari at the time, assigned Bailey to do the programming on Centipede. Logg said he worked on the game's design, while Bailey did "about half the programming".[10] Centipede went on to become Atari's second best-selling coin-op game.[11] Due to the game's popularity, Atari's production line was forced to run two shifts to keep up with demand. [13] Centipede was also one of the first coin-op based arcade machines to have a significant female player base. This was intentional, as Logg and Bailey designed the game to appeal to a broad audience, not just male players. The game’s vibrant pastel colors and the trackball-based gameplay appealed to both male and female players. Centipede’s unique color palette is credited to Bailey. [5] While most games used bright colors, Bailey chose a pastel color palette for Centipede, which was caused by a happy accident when the game’s technician was making adjustments to the game. Bailey said, “I was in front of the cabinet, watching the changes that were cycling through on the screen as he worked. Suddenly the regular primary colors on the screen changed to hot and vivid pastel colors I had never seen before, and I made a yip of approval and asked on technician to keep those colors.” [17] After Centipede, Bailey was working on a game titled "Weather War", but since processors at the time were so limited, she was unable to make the game include everything she wanted. [2][12] Bailey left Atari before the game was finished.[12]

After Atari

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Bailey left Atari in 1982 and went to work at Videa (later renamed Sente Technologies), founded by three former Atari employees.[1] During her time at Videa, one of the games she worked on that never made it past the prototype phase, was a game that she called “The Glass Bead Game”, named after the Hermann Hesse novel by the same name.[18] She later took PC contract roles for Activision, working on a two-person game with Paul Allen Newell.[14] In 1985, after she left Activision, she decided to leave the video game industry altogether.[18] In 1997, Bailey moved back to Arkansas to take care of her aging parents.[13] At 48 years old, Bailey earned two more master's degrees. Her first master's degree is in Education in Instructional Design, and her second master's degree is in Professional and Technical Writing.[14][16] In 2007, she was the keynote speaker at the Women in Games International Conference.[4] In 2008, Bailey taught as a faculty member in the department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock [8] until her retirement. In addition to writing classes, Bailey taught multimedia classes and the software 3DSMax.[4]

Recent Years

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In April of 2013, Dona Bailey was a guest speaker at Indie Tech Talk, a lecture series presented by the Game Innovation Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.[19][18]In November of 2018, Dona Bailey was an honored guest speaker alongside Bonnie Ross, Brenda Laurel, Megan Gaiser, Amy Henning, Susan Jaekel, Jen MacLean, Sheri Graner Ray, and Victoria Van Voorhis at the "Women in Games: Inspire!" panel, as part of the first annual "Women in Games" exhibit at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.[15][20] The panel was the opening event for the exhibit which celebrates the contributions of women in the video game industry.[21] As of 2019, Bailey had written a screenplay titled Sunnyvale based on her experiences at Atari as a programmer on Centipede, and is trying to get it picked up. [9] She is also currently writing scripts for other narrative projects. [12]

  1. ^ a b c Krueger, Anne (1983). "Welcome to the Club". Video Games. 1. pp. 51–54.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Woman behind 'Centipede' recalls game icon's birth - Yahoo Finance". web.archive.org. 2014-03-10. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  3. ^ a b "Dona Bailey". atariwomen. 2019-03-08. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  4. ^ a b c d "The Original Gaming Bug: Centipede Creator Dona Bailey". www.gamasutra.com. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  5. ^ a b c d Kent, Steve L. (2001). The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond : the Story Behind the Craze that Touched Our Lives and Changed the World. Prima Pub. pp. 160–162. ISBN 9780761536437.
  6. ^ a b c "The Unsung Female Programmer Behind Atari's Centipede". Video. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  7. ^ a b "Iconic Atari turns 40, tries to stay relevant". news.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  8. ^ a b "Department Faculty | Department of Rhetoric and Writing | University of Arkansas at Little Rock". web.archive.org. 2014-03-10. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  9. ^ a b "Dona Bailey (@dona_c_bailey) | Twitter". twitter.com. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  10. ^ a b III, Richard Rouse (2010-03-18). Game Design: Theory and Practice, Second Edition. Jones & Bartlett Learning. pp. 93–94. ISBN 9781449633455.
  11. ^ a b "Atari - Arcade/Coin-op". web.archive.org. 2018-07-11. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  12. ^ a b c d "Dona Bailey (Atari) - Interview". Arcade Attack. 2017-11-02. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  13. ^ a b c Koon, David (2015-11-19). "Centipede creator teaches at UALR". Arkansas Times. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  14. ^ a b c Marie, Meagan (2018-12-04). Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play. Penguin. pp. 38–39. ISBN 9780744019933.
  15. ^ a b "Women in Games: Inspire! at The Strong Museum November 15". www.museumofplay.org. 2018-10-16. Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  16. ^ a b "r/IAmA - I am Dona Bailey, former Atari programmer of arcade Centipede, Unix programmer, Linux teacher, Adobe CS teacher, Rhetoric and Writing university professor, lifelong learner, big reader. I'm here to answer any questions. AMA!". reddit. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  17. ^ Porges, Seth. "The Happy Accidents That Led To The Arcade Classic 'Centipede'". Forbes. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  18. ^ a b c Indie Tech Talk 9: Talking about Centipede +30 with Dona Bailey (FULL VERSION), retrieved 2019-12-02
  19. ^ "Indie Tech Talk 09: Centipede +30 hosted with Dona Bailey". Retrieved 2019-12-02.
  20. ^ Dona Bailey at Women in Games: Inspire!, retrieved 2019-11-20
  21. ^ "Strong National Museum of Play recognizes herstory". VentureBeat. 2018-11-17. Retrieved 2019-11-20.