The philosophy served him well during his four decades of making games. Rotberg joined Atari in January of 1979 and began work on Baseball, a mod kit for the successful Atari Football cabinet, which featured a very early example of speech synthesis in a coin-op, though that particular feature never made it out of the lab. Following ‘Theurer’s Law’ – named after Missile Command and Tempest creator, Dave Theurer, which states that any coder’s first game will not be a hit – Baseball failed to score a home run, but Rotberg was still having a ball. “It was like I’d died and gone to heaven,” he smiles. “I’d always goofed around on the computers at my old jobs, making little games, and now I was being paid to do it.”
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