CHICAGO -- I met the Q*bert Guy in suburban Brookfield, Illinois, the other day.
That’s how my editor referred to him — the Q*bert Guy. That’s how I referred to him — the Q*bert Guy. Which is an impolite way to introduce you to Warren Davis. But that’s who he is: Warren Davis, the Q*bert Guy. He knows this. I had been planning to meet with him for so long that as we walked along Ogden Avenue to Galloping Ghost Arcade, I half-expected drivers to shout from passing cars: “Hey, Q*bert Guy!” If they were Gen X, they might. If they spent too much time in dark, seedy arcades in the ‘80s, they might. Assuming anyone knew what designers of classic video games looked like. Forty years ago, when Davis co-created the once-ubiquitous Q*bert, like many of the early architects of gaming culture, he was just an anonymous Chicago video game designer.
Forty years later, he’s still anonymous.
He doesn’t wear obscurity as a burden. Despite creating IP once splashed across T-shirts, socks, lunchboxes, Saturday morning cartoons and, more recently, Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” and Adam Sandler’s “Pixels,” Davis knows you don’t care that the dude who came up with Q*bert doesn’t get recognized by motorists in suburban Chicago. He knows that as original as the game once seemed, it’s now largely remembered for its titular character, who was orange and squat and of an indeterminate species. He had a nose like a boat horn and unintelligibly cursed whenever he died.
Warren Davis doesn’t really give a @!#?@!
What he really wanted to do was act.
Even as he was working on Q*bert with graphics designer Jeff Lee (who created the character itself) and sound designer David Thiel (who generated those garbled swears), acting was his Plan B. He was growing entranced by improv and the scope of Chicago theater. He went through the Second City-affiliated (now defunct) Players Workshop school, and indeed, he would leave Chicago and follow a theater company to Los Angeles; he still lives there, still acts in the occasional Southern California stage production. Google “Warren Davis” and you get “actor” before any mention of games.
Still, his contribution to culture is cemented otherwise, and at least in retro-gaming circles, Warren Davis is something of an unheralded pioneer, one of many who laid a blocky 8-bit path to PlayStation, Wordle and an industry now pulling in $180 billion annually. In fact, back when Davis was still designing, the coin-operated video game business (an offspring of the pinball business) was centered in the Chicago suburbs, splashed across the covers of glossy magazines, already giving Hollywood serious competition, and other than a few rare exceptions, none of its designers were heralded.
He told me he gets invited to classic gaming conventions and often the history that he hears is wrong. So he recently wrote a new memoir, “Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games.” “As the history of this stuff has become more interesting, as video games have become integrated into everyday living, I realized my own history was meaningful,” he said. “I mean, I see some of the guys I worked with then and we shake our heads. It all felt ephemeral then. None of us thought any of this would be remembered.”
Davis, a Los Angeleno now, hasn’t been in Chicago in years.
So when I heard he would be in town, I asked him to walk me through his legacy.
“OK, he said, “let’s hunt these games down.”
We waded into Galloping Ghost, which bills itself as the largest arcade in the world, with more than 850 old-school, coin-operated video game machines. On an early Friday afternoon in February, the arcade was mostly empty, but the place was also loud, a constant gale of primitive digital squawks. Gunshots, roars, crunches, booms and bleeps and bleats.
Davis saw NBA Jam.
After the guy who was camping on the cabinet all morning went outside to smoke, Davis slid into his slot, entered his initials into the game’s interface and a moment later, there was an Easter egg — the smiling face of one Warren Davis, circa 1993, when he developed a system for digitizing photographs and video that was ubiquitous in ‘90s arcades. He put himself in the game, alongside real NBA players. “I would do that trick with my initials in arcades back in the day and freak people out,” he laughed. Alongside NBA Jam were a few Mortal Kombat machines that also used his digitizing technology.
We moved on.
He nodded at Joust 2.
“I was a programmer on that one when the original programmer was fired,” he said, scanning the room for more. “Oh, and there’s Narc, our first 256 color system. I wrote the display system, Eugene (Jarvis, who made Defender) wrote the operating system.” Between bursts of digital gunfire and gore, a screen reminded you: “Say No to Drugs.”
We moved between rows of games and stopped.
“Terminator 2, T2 — huge hit! At one point I left video games and wanted to be in improv, but then I came back as a replacement on this and programmed enemies and a bunch of other stuff, helped with digitizing and compression algorithms, those movie clips you see.” He grabbed the machine gun attached to the cabinet, and rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-tat-tat — then abruptly stopped. “This is not working well. The thing about these games is they are hard to maintain, and like any history, you do what you can, but it never lasts.”
He spotted a game named Argus. He studied the cabinet and stepped back, admiring. This game was never formally released, but the people at Galloping Ghost are collectors, preservationists. They found one.
“I started out learning to make video games on this — I did supplemental work.”
Supplemental?
“See that rubble? I made that rubble.”
He’s 65 now, but 40 years ago, he was a Brooklyn native and electrical engineer who moved to Chicago to work at Bell Labs. He developed systems for phone operators. He was also young and restless. “I was going to be an improviser! I didn’t want to do engineering,” he said.
But curious about games, he answered a help-wanted ad in the Tribune. Gottlieb, a longtime Chicago maker of pinball machines, was hiring designers. “They were really late to the industry, and they hadn’t even made a single video game. And I didn’t know anything about designing games. So I was stunned to get an interview. Turns out, most of the guys I met there, they were all self-taught. There were West Coast companies like Atari, but many of the others — Bally, Midway, Williams, Stern — came from the Chicago area, and had ridden the pinball boom and crash, boom and crash. The video game arcade industry would do the same thing. When home gaming consoles began outperforming arcade games, I saw the writing on the wall, which is partly why I left. But for a time, there was freedom and imagination all around.”
Q*bert — Gottlieb’s solitary arcade industry blockbuster — was Davis’ first success. We found three Q*berts along a back wall of Galloping Ghost, sitting beneath framed fan art of the game. The landscape is a floating tiled pyramid, and the goal is to hop on each square before you run into pogoing snakes and cascading balls. That’s the whole game. Though at the dawn of video games, it was enough. After debuting in 1982, more than 25,000 Q*bert machines were sold to arcade and pizza parlors and convenience stores.
But it started casually, more as a learning exercise than a game.
“I wanted to explore randomness in arcade games,” Davis said. “And I wanted real-world physics, so I programmed balls bouncing down this pyramid. I also wanted whimsy.” Jeff Lee had created an orange sad sack of a monster but did not yet have a game to insert him/her/it into. Lee, who wrote his own 2019 memoir (“Q*bert and We”), told me later the character was sort of influenced by the underground comix of R. Crumb; Q*bert’s nose was there to fire mucus, “but Warren didn’t implement that idea.”
In the end, despite having a hit, they got bonuses from Gottlieb (which folded in 1996), but no royalties, or any chunk of the game’s profits — or even clear credit for making it.
Which was pretty standard.
“Really the appeal then,” Davis said, “was the lack of rules. You could propose any concept at all.” Indeed, as we left Q*bert and continued on, we found another Davis experiment, Exterminator. Its cabinet resembled a decrepit home with a peaked roof.
I pressed the player one button.
A pair of disembodied hands reached out into a digital kitchen crawling with bugs. “Alright now grab those flies,” Davis said. “Pound the ground! Grab the flies! Don’t grab that wasp! Shake your hand! Oh, no. Think you got stung.”
What a strange game, I said.
“Yeah. People would say, what have you guys been smoking?”
At the far back of the arcade, past Death Race and Tempest and Jungle King and Battlezone, we found one of the last successes that Davis was involved with, a shooting game from 1994 titled Revolution X. It featured digitized cameos by Aerosmith.
“My contribution here was the display system. I was at Williams. We had Aerosmith come to our studio in California for three days. It’s about a dystopia takeover. Music is outlawed. Guards take away Aerosmith, and you have to shoot your way through everything and find them. Really, you’re just shooting all the time. I don’t think there’s strategy to this.”
I began shooting.
“No, wait, but don’t shoot Steven Tyler,” Davis sighed.
I released the gun.
“Look, I know what we have here,” he said. “Modern games have stories. A beginning, a middle, an end. But there will always be the need for this, too. Games that are endless. Like Wordle now. You devote a little time, then you’re out. That’s more realistic for some. And that’s the beauty of technology. It gives us state of the art, and it gives us Q*bert.”
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