Carol Shaw

Carol Shaw grew up in Palo Alto, the daughter of a mechanical engineer, and preferred model trains to dolls. She took a degree and then a master\'s in electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley, and in 1978 joined Atari, which was hiring programmers for its new home console. There were very few women on the technical staff. She has recalled the company\'s president being introduced to her and remarking that at last they had a woman who could do cosmetics colour matching.

Her early games, 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe and Video Checkers, ran in a machine with 128 bytes of memory, and much of the job was squeezing a whole game into a space smaller than a tweet. She left Atari for Tandem Computers in 1980, then in 1982 was persuaded to join Activision, a company set up by Atari programmers who wanted credit and royalties for their work.

River Raid, released that year, was a vertically scrolling shooter in which a plane flies up an endless river. There was no room to store the river, so she generated it as the player flew, using a simple shift register that produced the same river every time. It sold more than a million copies.

She returned to Tandem in 1984 and, thanks largely to River Raid royalties, retired in 1990. She was given the Industry Icon Award at The Game Awards in 2017.