"Inside Gaming: Meet Bob Ogdon, The Man Behind the Wizard"
"Electronic Games," May 1982
By Arnie Katz


[Picture Caption: Ogdon's design successes run the gamut from sports titles 
like Football to SF shoot-'em-ups like Space Fortress.]


It takes three things to make a good designer," says Bob Ogdon, President of 
Action Graphics and a vital force at Dave Nutting Associates. "First, I look 
for people who have other interests besides computers, things like photography 
or carpentry. We don't want the stereotypical 'computer nerd.' Then, of course, 
a good designer needs a lot of creativity. And a designer should love the 
field."

Unconsciously, the soft-spoken 26-year-old had described himself perfectly. 
Since graduating from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., with a 
degree in psychology, Ogdon has produced an impressively varied array of games 
for both the coin-operated and home arcade fields. His latest achievements, 
Space Fortress and The Wizard, both for Astrovision, stamp him as one of 
today's truly outstanding game creators.

Ogdon is unstinting in his praise of Dave Nutting, who, with Jeff Frederickson, 
designed what is now the Astro Professional Arcade for Bally Manufacturing Co. 
"He is my mentor," Ogdon asserts. "I've learned everything from him." He 
credits Nutting with the inspiration for two of Bally's greatest coin-op hits, 
Gorf and Wizard of Wor.

As with many of us, the designer entered his chosen career as a result of a 
lucky accident. Bob Ogdon's wife Julie introduced him to Dave Nutting, who flew 
him to Chicago for a mutual look-see. Excited by this exploratory trip, the 
couple threw everything they owned into the back of their Datsun and headed for 
the Second City.

Under the direction of Nutting, Ogdon joined the 20 designers working on games 
for what was then called the Bally Professional Arcade. His first assignment 
was to create a version of the ball-and-paddle wall-bashing game for the 
system. Of Brickyard, he notes, "There were no copyright laws covering 
electronic games at that time. It was common practice to adapt existing ones to 
new systems."

The same cartridge also included Clowns. Bally purchased the design from Exidy 
and had Ogdon perform the translation of the coin-op original to the home 
screen in a form that has still not been surpassed.

Brickyard/Clowns, even apart from the fact that it represents Bob Ogdon's 
debut, has had a far-reaching effect on the hobby. It was the first ROM 
cartridge utilizing 4K of memory. "At first ROMs were too expensive, so we had 
only 2K games," he recalls. "Clowns was the first 4K. Now all our games for the 
Astro system are 8K."

Once acclimated to the demands of his new career, Ogdon really began to hit his 
stride. "I had always played football in high school and college," says the 
electronic game artist, who still has the lithe build of a quarterback or free 
safety. "They had a football game, but I convinced them to try mine." State-of-
the-art when introduced, Astrovision's Football has only Intellivison's NFL 
Football to rival it for pigskin supremacy.

"I try to recreate reality," Ogdon explains, "and I wanted something more than 
blips on the screen." That's why, though his game offers a wide variety of 
possible plays, coaches can still ad-lib at the line of scrimmage just like Dan 
Fouts or Joe Montana. "You can give a lot of power to the players," he adds. 
The first use of horizontal scrolling greatly enhances Astro's Football, 
opening up the action by providing a larger gridiron.

A three-quarters perspective was considered for Football, but ultimately the 
decision was to stick with the overhead view. "Football takes a lot more 
exactitude than a sport like soccer."

The circumstances under which Pinball came into being are still vividly etched 
in Ogdon's memory. "Our home is out in the country and rather isolated," he 
says. "We had a big snowstorm that kept us in the house for about a month." 
When he emerged from this enforced seclusion it was with the basics of this 
two-playfield cartridge in hand.

Shortly thereafter, Bally got a case of cold feet and withdrew from the home 
arcade sweepstakes to concentrate on the business it knew best-- coin-op 
amusement machines. Mindful of Ogdon's success with Football, Dave Nutting 
Associates put him to work on Extra Bases, the latest in a distinguished line 
of Bally baseball machines. "Hardware problems prevented it from becoming a 
true success," he observes.

The same could hardly be said of Ogdon's next major effort, Gorf. The guiding 
concept in this case was to give good players a little more variety than found 
in the usual invasion game. The result was the first multi-field commercial 
arcade unit.

And then came Wizard of Wor. "We wanted to get away from simply moving the gun 
left and right and shooting upward, and we wanted a game which two people could 
play together or against each other," he says. "We decided on a maze, because 
mazes introduce strategy."

"When we put a voice into the machine, that got us into the mythology of who, 
exactly, was doing the talking. So we invented the Wizard. We used the Wizard 
to disrupt the flow of the game."

Ogdon and the crew working with him on the project next decided to make the 
Wizard a mystery, "so that players would have to work to get at him." Then to 
make the game increasingly challenging, they started subtracting the walls of 
the maze at the higher skill levels. "That way, there's a whole series of 
goals," he says. "Of course, getting to the pit is the ultimate."

Originally, Wizard of Wor had relatively small on-screen characters. Somehow, 
it didn't look just right. After Ogdon and staff saw a then-new coin-op called 
Pac-Man, they switched to much larger characters for their game.

Great advances in technique are speeding the game-design process, according to 
Ogdon. Now it is possible for a company to get a game from a new addition 
within six months, instead of the two years it once took. After drawing a 
picture of what he'd like on the screen, a graphics programming language 
similar to FORTH allows him to animate it in less than an hour! "With this 
language," Ogdon boasts, "you don't have to be a nitty-gritty bit-biter."

Right now, Ogdon is supervising a new designer, Dave Armstrong's first project 
using this secret, patented system. He confidently predicts great success for 
Armstrong's Quest for the Orb program for the Astro Arcade, due out later this 
year.

And when those promised innovative designs reach the commercial arcades and 
retail electronic game stores, it's a safe bet that several of them will bear 
Bob Ogdon's stamp of creativity.