The Ted Dabney Experience

Rob Quinn joined Stern just as the company was branching out from it's core pinball business to explore the brave new world of videogames. Rob talks about his involvement with the company's early hit, Berzerk, his experiments with laser disc technology and his personal misgivings about how the company was managed.

Mark Pierce was a game designer at Atari and Bally Midway. We talk to him about the protracted development of Escape From The Planet of The Robot Monsters, the axonometric, somewhat baroque B-movie arcade adventure, and the conversely swift creation of the tile-stacking puzzler classic, KLAX. Pierce also shares some amusing anecdotes about scouting for muscular male models for the visually ground-breaking arcade beat-em-up, Pit Fighter, and provides us with a unique insight into why Atari faltered and ultimately folded in The Noughties.

From 1975 to present day, Jack Guarnieri has seen and done it all; from servicing mechanical pinball machines in the dive bars and laundrettes of Seventies New York, bearing first-hand witness to the inflation - and rapid deflation - of the video game bubble of popular lore, running his own operator route during the ‘80s and then to selling video and pinball machines directly to consumers. All of this led him to found one of the most innovative pinball manufacturers, Jersey Jack.

Jeremy Saucier is Assistant VP at The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.Jeremy talks to us about the history and evolution of the Strong Museum and its pedagogical remit - from American history and Industrialisation to a focus on play - and gives us a fascinating insight into the day-to-day management of a museum. With a doctoral degree in history and a degree in American Studies, Jeremy was a natural fit for his role at The Strong, with its extensive archive of original material, from concept art and design documents to internal company memos from Video Arcade stalwarts such as Williams, Bally and most notably Atari.