Jane Terjung Interview

Jane Terjung was a designer and programmer at Mattel Electronics’s Atari 2600 division M-Network, where she is known for co-designing the Atari 2600 cartridge Kool-Aid Man with Steve Tatsumi who programmed the game. The bulk of Mrs. Terjung’s work at Mattel was done on designing and programming an unreleased Dungeons and Dragons branded game for the Atari 2600, which would later be known as Tower of Mystery.

The game, described in detail below, fell victim to Mattel Electronics failures in the game marketplace laying off its employees following the Video Game market crash in 1983. Mrs. Terjung was a part of Mattel Electronics second wave of layoffs which would see the entire Mattel Electronics division closure in early 1984.

Mrs. Terjung recounts below her valued memories of working at Mattel as the sole female programmer where she described developers were given “100% freedom” on projects they were working on. The workplace she described was one where everyone was “so motivated to make a great game that it was like you got to work and the next thing you knew it was time to go home - time just FLEW.”

The interview took place over email, from a starting date of September 26, 2020 with subsequent emails, leading to a completed interview on February 15, 2021. The Interview has been edited for readability, but special care was done to keep the original tone and formatting Mrs. Terjung used for emphasis.

NF: What were the hours like at Mattel, did these ever change or were they strictly set? Did you find these hours to ever become too much? If overtime occurred, were you compensated for your time and was there an expectation to work late?

JT: My understanding was that it was your basic 40/week, but nobody paid attention or checked and I worked about 40 except when a deadline was coming and then I worked more. After a deadline, I slacked off a few days and worked like a 4-5 hour day. We were salaried, so no overtime. We were expected to meet our deadlines however many hours that took. I never felt oppressed. We were all so motivated to make a great game that it was like you got to work and the next thing you knew it was time to go home - time just FLEW.

NF: What was the work environment like, the layout of your work space, and was there comradery between co-workers?

JT: We had individual cubicles with 3 walls that we could talk over to our neighbors. Side cloth-covered type walls (orange, maybe?) and the back wall was a long slab-desk spot where our equipment was. Can’t recall where my phone was - maybe the side walls had a shelf too? Cannot recall.

YES: there was camaraderie! I was in an off-shoot wing with the other Atari programmers (M-Network). I think there were like 5 or so of us...We would talk over the walls. Sometimes I would hear Tatsumi losing it as he worked on his sword game. It was very free and easy. We were the “mature” older programmers (actual college degrees and/or programming experience) and so we felt connected since the Intellivision Programmers were all SOOOOO YOUNG. At 23(?), I might have been one of the youngest of the Atari programmers. I was the only woman, but it was very comfortable. We were all pals and shared trials and tribulations with coding bugs etc.

One exception was our manager: Ron. He was WAY older than us (haha: like 30-something) and he was sorta ex-hippy and none of us really clicked with him, as I recall.

The Intellivision programmers were across the lobby in a bunch of aisles of cubicles as there were A LOT more of them. There were a few that would wander over to our area, but mostly they were pretty much like young guys playing video games. I also had a good friend in the “systems” programming area where I think they created the platforms for the Intellivision Game Dev. So they were also older and had college degrees and previous experience.

NF: Do you have the names of all the Atari programmers?

Steve Tatsumi, Steve Crandall, Jeff Ratcliff, Mike Sanders - he took over finishing my D&D game after I was laid off, Jossef Wagner, Dave Akers (he also did Intellivision - now I’m wondering if he did Atari, memory fades… I just know he was part of our “gang”), Patty Du Long was our music person.

NF: Was there a "crunch" culture at Mattel as is present today in the contemporary games industry? If these experiences were comparable, how did you and your peers feel about this "crunch" culture?

JT: I think it was friendlier than the current crunch I read about. I never felt like I had to deliver no matter what. I don’t recall anyone pulling an all-nighter. At least not in our group. In our day we were more considered to be the “talent” and not “coders”. Similar to what I experienced when I left gaming for grownup programming jobs - we were Software Designers, Developers, and Engineers back in the day.

And we had creative control. We dreamt up the game features, etc. and marketing just gave feedback - but not too much. I don’t even recall marketing having anything to say about my D&D game. When I was laid off it was ready to be tested for bugs - we had some INSANE Game testers - and then go into Production. *sigh*.

NF: From my research, I understand before your time at Mattel you worked as a programmer at Lockheed, I was wondering if you could speak to the different work experiences you had comparatively between the two?

JT: Lockheed was Scientific Programming for aircraft stability and I was the only one there who was still in college. I had a woman supervisor (Diane Slattery) who was a software geekoid ahead of her time and I really liked her. She was smart software-wise but also knew how to tactfully interact with our aircraft engineers. I shared a cubicle with another woman programmer (Sharon). Very similar setup as Mattel, except a tad bigger since there were 2 of us in the cubicle. Because I was an undergrad, I literally punched a mechanical time clock: KER-CHUNK.

At work I felt treated equally and was given quite a bit of freedom, now that I look back: besides my Scientific Programming work for an Engineer, I also created a program that automatically created documentation - with the code as input. I did this because documentation was the part we all hated to do. Now that I look back on it, that Documentation Project was completely my idea and I was given the freedom to work on it in between Engineer tasks with nobody breathing down my neck. Lockheed was where I learned to like alcohol for the first time: Margaritas at lunch for special occasions - they were a very social bunch.

I do recall one funny story. And I think it might have helped me get the Mattel job, since I shared it at my Mattel interview, so I would not look like a boring aerospace programmer. April Fool’s Day was coming up and we had a pain-in-the-butt co-worker (Howie) over in Software Admin who was always acting officious, etc. He was maybe 2 years older than me and Sharon and he was always sending out updated seating charts as if they were the Holy Bible...So, I don’t recall how, but I phished his password and got into the seating chart file, rewrote it, and published it as if it was from him...I screwed around with people’s names, etc. I forget the details but hilarity definitely ensued. Howie NEVER knew it was me, but my friends - and my supervisor did - and I never felt like I would get in trouble. Something that would NEVER be safe in today’s work environment, I’m sure…

NF: Do you feel as though you were given creative freedom for your work, say for example on your design of Kool Aid Man? Or your unreleased projects like Advanced DND and Computer Revenge? What was the process of making a game start to finish, the timeline on the average project, how much input was given from above?

JT: 100% freedom. I even got to ask for the music of my D&D and I requested “In The Hall of Mountain King” and it was approved. I do not recall there being any strict timelines except once your game was nearing development completion and then Marketing and Game-Testing became issues.

For Kool-Aid man it was an internal contest, so whatever that deadline was, Tatsumi made sure he made it. He did all the software for that one. I only helped him design the game. The tricky part game-wise was that we had to have a conflict, so I came up with the Kool-aid-drinking meanies that dropped straws down into the pool of Kool-Aid that Kool-Aid man had to defend. Had to be simple since Atari game parts were so primitive. Then Steve coded and tested. And we won the contest! I have a broken Kool-Aid Man piggy bank somewhere in a box that was the prize…

For Computer Revenge, that was Ron’s Pet Project and I was tasked with the graphics of Planets being approached and then landed on. So, all I did was create some large colorful orbs and then some algorithms that made it look like you were zooming in on them with bigger and bigger versions. It was my first assignment and I believe was just a way to get me used to programming the Atari 2600.

For my D&D game, I had 100% creative control. I had played D&D in college - still have the cool dice - plus I’ve always been an Adventure/Puzzle Video Game kinda person. I had a lot of fun creating flickering candles and other special effects via pushing the Atari 2600 to its limits: if you purposely used more machine cycles than was allowed to draw a TV scan-line, then the pixels would do fun things. One of the rooms had a lightning strike hazard that was created by positioning a white “bullet” and going over the scan-line cycle limit: it looked like a snow blizzard of electricity and could only be survived by wearing the Cloak of SomethingOrOther - or maybe the Boots of Speed? - wish I could remember.

But the BEST part was I could make my monsters talk to you as you played. There was a ticker-tape kind of display at the bottom that allowed me to write sentences. This ticker-tape feature was not created by me, but maybe by Ron? Maybe Dave Akers? Nobody had figured out the best way to use it yet, but I thought it would be way fun to have the monsters insult you. Anyway, can’t recall who created it, just know that it was there for M-Network to use. At the beginning of the game I asked the player to enter their name and then throughout gameplay, I would personally address them - usually from the monsters. At the outset, I welcomed them: “Welcome to the Dungeon of AGA AGA TITI, <name>. Prepare to meet thy doom!”

As an example of creative freedom, I came up with the name AGA AGA TITI: it was a coding error for some other name I can’t recall now and I liked it so much it stayed in my final version. I also created a matrix of insults for my monsters: I would randomly choose from a list of 8 insulting adjectives and 8 disgusting nouns and then pair them up dynamically during gameplay. Also for fun, the room layout of each level was one of the initials of me and my friends' names, as depicted on the map: JT, ST, etc.

I also shamelessly took advantage of dividing the screen up into horizontal bands so that I could reuse the limited number of objects that an Atari allowed me to manipulate. For example, when you solved a level and were moving to the next one, the transition screen depicted a dark stairway (horizontal bands were steps) and a footprint would “stomp” down: left, right, etc. as you descended - accompanied by flickering candles on the side walls.

To exploit all the colors that were available on an Atari 2600 (and not on an Intellivision), I created a full-screen curly-edged parchment scroll that was [the] background for the map of each dungeon level. And the Game-Winning Reward Screen was a huge full-screen Rainbow Castle - which I think the Intellivision artist Connie Goldman (?) may have designed.

NF: Was the pay sufficient for the work you were doing? What was the process for ascertaining a higher wage amount?

JT: Pay was fine. I had a BS degree in Math/Computer Science from UCLA when I interviewed, so they were competitive with what other jobs would’ve paid for that. As much as I was excited about creating video games, I wouldn’t have sold myself too short just for the job. But to be honest, I never looked the gift horse of that fun job in the mouth!

NF: If you're comfortable, what was your starting salary and what was your salary when you eventually left Mattel? Were you aware of what your co-workers salaries were? Was this a taboo subject? Were you paid equally with your co-workers in the coin op department? For example with [your] co-game programmer on Kool Aid Man, Steve Tatsumi?

JT: I had no idea what my co-worker’s salaries were. It was considered taboo to discuss it and it was discouraged by companies in those days. I’d have to dig around to find my Salary info for those days, but I do recall in general that we always joked that if you were making more than your age you were doing OK. And I know at some point I realized I was making the same as my dad who was a UCLA Professor - academia does not pay well. So for Mattel, I was probably making something North of 30K/yr…But that’s just a guess.

NF: Was your gender a factor in your treatment at Mattel? Were there any specific situations where your gender affected your experience or of other female co-workers in that workplace?

JT: with my co-workers it was not a factor at all. I was living with my fiancée & eventually married - so no dating with co-worker issues. Tatsumi and Crandall were married also. Maybe Sanders too. So there was just non-sexual camaraderie as far as I could tell.

The only issue was my supervisor, Ron. He was married too, and it was not a #MeToo thing sexually, but it WAS a weird relationship in that he never seemed comfortable around me. Looking back, I guess it was a #MeToo power thing, but who knows.

He second-guessed all my work and treated me differently than the others. I had been respected at Lockheed and was naïve and did not realize that I should keep my mouth shut about his treatment of me. He kept me on a short development leash for way longer than the others: tasking me with creating planet “zooming” graphics for his Pet Project of a space program that he never made any progress on.

I made the mistake of speaking openly and honestly at meetings and when it came time for layoffs, I was in the second general wave, but one of the first two to leave M-Network even though my D&D game was ready to leave development for testing. Jossef was the other layoff and he was relatively new and hadn’t created anything yet at Mattel.

On Layoff Day - that truly shocked all of us in M-Network - Ron did not deliver the news. He sent his boss, Mike Minkoff, to tell me that I had to leave - apologizing and asking me to pack up my personal items as I cried and was watched by a security guard. Which was normal protocol since Mattel was very careful about letting its secrets or its phone-lists out.

Later, someone smuggled out the chips for my D&D game and they too are in a box somewhere…The person who was given my code to wrap up, Mike Sanders, had ZERO other work to his name that I recall. He was a nice guy - so not his fault. But clearly Ron did not appreciate a strong woman with opinions. It was my first rude awakening to Men With Issues at Work…

—At my next job, Transaction Technology Incorporated (TTI) - where we worked on the first Home Banking software for Citibank, I was to go on and have a bonafide #MeToo moment, WAY before enlightenment…

—Fortunately, my boss was ahead of her time and it worked out OK for me.

NF: Was there a difference in the various departments in how women were treated, say for example the difference between the marketing department versus your own department of M Network?

JT: I really don’t know. We were an island. And security between us and the rest of Mattel was tight. I did notice that the marketing ladies looked pretty polished when they visited…And the few women in our building - we had a woman artist for Intellivision (Connie Goldman), Patty DuLong (music), and I had a friend in our Operating Systems Dept. (Lynne Redderson) and we all felt like One of the Gang and dressed however we wanted.

NF: Did you ever feel limited by your identity of being a woman in the male dominated industry? Was there a uniform way in which your male co-workers treated female co-workers?

JT: Nope. Just the thing with Ron at Mattel and then later at TTI my supervisor there (Tom) didn’t like being second-guessed computer-knowledge-wise, but his reaction (unfortunately) was to get too close physically and then finally come on to me one night when we were both working late. All others were fine with my being outspoken. The computer industry was too nerdy to be caught up in normal social things when I was there. Or I was lucky with where I landed. It could also be that it felt like Mattel was pretty woman-friendly. I think we might have had a woman president at the time...?

Authors Note: The president of Mattel during Mrs. Terjung’s time was Raymond P. Wagner with his then Mattel CEO Thomas J. Kalinske, taking over from him in 1984

NF: What kind of personality traits were valued in your department? Were any of these traits seen as gendered?

JT: Creativity was #1. And curiosity and independence. Sense of humor was everywhere. I know that when I interviewed with Keith Robinson & (Mark Urbaniec?), it was one big joke fest and later they would joke about how hard I tried to look like a flake at the interview so they would hire me despite my aerospace background. I recall telling them the Howie Seat Chart Prank Story so they would want me… Also, when I interviewed for TTI, they knew I didn’t have the exact knowledge for the immediate task, but they told me they had confidence that I would figure it out.

NF: What is your recollection of Mattel specifically Mattel Electronics crash in late 1983? Was there transparency about the financial situation Mattel's gaming division was experiencing?

JT: It shocked us all. We were all-consumed with our work on video games, so totally blind-sided. I was laid off in the second general wave, so by then we knew things were dicey, but it was all very hush-hush.

While in contact with Mrs. Terjung, it came to her attention which she thankfully brought to the attention of the archive that the unreleased Atari 2600 cartridge, Advanced DND, (not to be confused with the unreleased Intellivision cartridge using the DND moniker code named at the time of development, “Arcade D&D which was programmed by Daniel Bass) had been credited online to Connie Goldman and Mike Sanders leaving out any mention of her contributions.

Jane recounted above her role in the creation of this work, I am supplementing this with a forwarded email Jane had sent to me, that she had sent in the past regarding this dispute of accreditation which goes into more detail. The recipient has been removed as well as any other personal information. Only the information directly related to her role in the creation of the game remains.

(IMPORTANT: Currently there is very little published about the development of this cartridge and as such Grand Bear will be reaching out to Connie Goldman and Mike Sanders with the hope to get further context regarding this matter).

“I designed and coded all of it, except for using code already written by someone else for the ticker tape crawl of words at the bottom. I asked for the music to be "In The Hall of Mountain King" and I think it was granted.

GRAPHICS:

I don't recall any graphics help from Connie, but am not 100% sure - it's possible she worked on the final "you win" screen since I remember having a hard time with that one since I wanted it to be special. I think it was a big castle, pulsing with rainbow colors...? And maybe she also designed the "objects" since that would have been challenging with our crude bit-map. I guess I was so proud of the stairs and the big parchment scroll map I forgot what she contributed.

GAMEPLAY:

Every game was unique in that the dungeon floors were randomly generated. Each floor could be one of a set of preformed square configurations that were in the form of alphabet letters - the letters being chosen from the initials of my fellow programmers - formed from a 4x4 grid (as I recall). Once you explored a room, it became visible on a huge map that filled the entire screen and looked like a parchment scroll. The Atari 2600 had SO MANY colors that I was able to make the parchment look really parchmenty. You could refer to this map screen any time you wanted.

At the start of the game, you entered your name via joystick and the game personally welcomed you to "...the Dungeon of Aga Aga Titi - prepare to meet thy doom!" via a ticker tape scrawl along the bottom of the screen. The name "Aga Aga Titi" came from one day's programming error: I had intended to code a different name, and somehow was off in the wrong part of memory and "Aga Aga Titi" came out. I have no idea if marketing would have let it stand later. Doubtful.

There were goodies and traps and monsters also randomly generated throughout: Boots of Speed I remember for sure since they had cute curled toes and made you run super fast; there was also some kind of goodie that made you invisible, another one that let you see in the dark, a rope, I think a key (for unlocking the stairway door down to the next level maybe? - things get fuzzy over time), and after that I don't remember - seems like there were 6 or 8 of them....

There was a pit of spears you could fall into - I think the rope saved you from that one; there was a room full of lightning that I think was invisible unless you had the special seeing goodie. I recall that I made the lightning by positioning a white "bullet" and purposely writing code that ran one too many cycles for the TV scan line - resulting in what looked like lightning. Seems like there was a hat that might have protected you from the lightning too...

Monsters would insult you by name, via the text crawl: the insults were adjective-noun pairs randomly paired and generated from 2 lists. Every time you went down a level in the dungeon, a "video" was played of your footprints stepping down gloomy gray stairs, flanked by flickering torches on the wall. Whilst this was playing the next level was being randomly set up.

I was still coding - not into testing yet - when I was unexpectedly laid off, I was told that Mike Sanders would try and finish it. That was the last I ever heard of it and then Mattel Electronics was no more.”

Jane also provided a previous interview of hers that was conducted for the podcast, Atari 2600 Game by Game by person with the online handle Atari Ferg. The show was never transcribed, so she graciously provided her written answers for publication here. Here is the original podcast episode’s blog post with links to the show itself.

Atari Podcast.rtf

Download RTF • 13KB

NF: What did you do after your departure from Mattel in 1983?

JT: Some of this must be in Linkedin, but here goes…

Got a headhunter. I had married and bought a house, so I had a mortgage. I interviewed for one Video Game job: some kind of robot that was going to interact with the user via a TV. It was machine-language programming again, like Mattel, and I was intrigued, but leery of layoff since I was wanting to start a family in the next 5 years. I ended up accepting a job from Transaction Technology Inc. (TTI) in Santa Monica (R&D division of Citibank embarking on computerized banking). They created the first ATMs and were expanding into home-banking via small home computers of the time: IBM, Commodore 64, TRS-80.

I really liked the woman who interviewed & hired me (Carol Medine then, now Moss). Turned out she had assembled a great team - many of us from UCLA - and we all went on to have a shit-ton of fun creating the world of home-banking. The work itself was not as exciting as creating a video game - and morally I hated that I worked for a bank - but the R&D atmosphere and the people were heaven. Unlike my experience at Mattel, I was one of the youngest software developers and there was a better mix of men and women. Plus a lot of smart people that I learned from.

I was able to have some fun there too in the Prankster Dept: my Commodore-64 disk for home-banking had Easter Eggs: if you did the right combination of things a screen with flashing edges would come up and say “Jerry Commisar Eats Worms!” Jerry was my first boss there and he drove me effing crazy! Luckily he did not last long - TTI was somewhat of a sweatshop and it was hard on him. I only told ONE person at the time - a senior co-worker who kept my secret.

Later I also had some more fun with phishing and got a co-worker-friend’s password and when he logged on the next morning I had redefined all his system commands to make it look like his files were being deleted (they were just being safely copied to my folders). Unbeknownst to me, he thought it was for real and went to Carol - who was amazed and thought I’d perhaps gone “rogue”. When I got in that morning I was surprised to find them all worried about my state of mind, but once I explained all was OK. I remember she said that clearly they were not giving me enough challenges to keep me busy and out of trouble…*THOSE* were the days…;-)

I made lifelong friends at TTI. Carol included. We all still get together for Halloween and Super Bowl weekends.

And I even met my current husband there: Bill Naylor. He was an internet pioneer in his days at UCLA, working with Len Kleinrock. He has a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA, his dissertation was on messaging traffic & the queuing theory math behind it. We got together when each of our respective spouses left us for less geeky partners. They then went on to get divorced AGAIN, but Bill and I are soul-mates. We live in Topanga & he helped me raise my daughter, Becky, who was 3 years old when husband #1 left.

My career at TTI was interrupted by Becky’s birth - I took 5 years off to raise her since I had been raised by a working Mom and swore I would be a Stay-At-Home for mine. When she started Kindergarten and I started looking for a job, Carol (TTI) told me that she could take me in, but they were on hard times and all she could offer me initially was in Quality Assurance (testing) - UGH - so I declined and found a job at Jeffries: writing code with a small team that supported Stock Brokers on the floor in New York.

I had been out of the workforce for 5 years and A LOT had happened that I had not kept up with at all, but they took me in and I learned on the job what I needed. After the mondo earthquake hit California in 1994(?), Jeffries - based in New Jersey - freaked and closed the California site, but Good News: by then Carol was able to offer me a REAL Job in programming back at TTI… YAY!

I stayed there until they decided to off-shore our work. It was 2 years of hell while they lied to us and we had to train our replacements. I met a really nice bunch of guys from India - who I still correspond with for birthdays and New Years - who replaced me: 5 of them to replace 1 of me. So in 2007, both Bill and I walked out of the building for the last time. We got 1 year’s worth of full pay & medical. And we’ve been retired in Topanga ever since.

I do have to say that as a woman - and only 50 years old then - it took me about 2 years to be OK with my career ending. I hated that I was no longer officially useful, plus the idea that I had had a career and now it was just Home Life?

—Bill is 14 years older, and it didn’t bother him one iota, since he was ready. I think for men, it’s different: as an accomplished woman, I hated to squander what I had…

After retiring I had to [find] Adventures: blogging for T-Ching and working with Steve Tatsumi on a Baby Guide. The blog was a tea drinker’s site that my friend needed to get free writing for, so I wrote a bunch of silly pieces. Links are on my website: http://janeterjung.org

The Baby Guide (“Baby’s First Year: A RoadMap”) was a smashing (UN)success, that made me realize that writing with a serious editor was No Fun. Who knew some of my jokes were “offensive”? The Editor, Steve, of course. It is a testimonial to Steve’s easy-going personality that we are still friends after that collaboration: http://janeterjung.org/bfy.html

Also in retirement, Bill & I joined a local volunteer group for emergencies: Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness (TCEP) and geekilly revamped their website’s Emergency Status Page and added a bunch of inner-communication bells and whistles for the team:

tcep.org/EmergencyStatus.

Unfortunately, even though this was my SECOND time to run into men with Strong & Opinionated Women issues, I had not really figured out how to best deal with [it] all. After 5 years and a number of skirmishes, we resigned in protest: citing issues with Leadership. We are still friends with most of the organization. We went on to do our own thing for the stuff that TCEP was not focusing on in the community, creating a website that we have been adding to as we go.

The first webpage was JaneTerjung.org/StayConnected for when wildfires and electrical blackouts became a threat. This year we added JaneTerjung.org/PeoplePower that is an umbrella page for info that addresses how to keep communications up during a blackout in Topanga (we have ZERO cell-towers & must rely on WiFi).

Also as community advocates, Bill and I are involved in utility communication issues with the CPUC and SCE. We’re Emergency Neighborhood Leaders and I have an ad-hoc Newsletter that started with 20 readers and has grown to over 250 via word of mouth. In it I share useful local safety info and also during wildfires up to the moment status on the ground via my various connections in Topanga who text me with info. Bill mans the ham radio frequencies (we got licensed). I also have a “presence” on Nextdoor.com, where I do more of the same…

With Covid-19, we’ve also been helping feed Topanga’s Neediest: homebound seniors and the homeless.

To scratch my Gotta Have Fun Itch, I write & share for the community: topical song parodies and a bogus Advice Column (Just Ask Jane) where I make up the questions and the answers.

—And Bill and I throw an Annual Halloween Costume Party for our old TTI pals and our Topanga Peeps. This year’s (#24) had to be a Zoom Party, though. *sigh*

—Here’s a link to the Silly Invitations: http://www.janeterjung.com/naylor-terjung/HalloweenInvitesweb/index.html