Jamie Fenton

Jamie Fenton is a highly inventive software engineer who has been involved in the video game and multimedia computing industries since the beginning. Over the decades, I have worked in education research, numerous startups, and interesting projects of my own. These days I'm deep into open source development, music technology, and generative art.

I now live in Chicago with my partner Jennifer and my sister Kathy and her family.

As many people are interested in my past as a pioneering game designer, I am recounting the early years first and in more detail.
 

1974 - 1983 Classic Video Games Programmer with Dave Nutting Associates


I started college in 1972 at UWM in Milwaukee. I snuck into the Fortran programming course during the first semester despite having no prerequisites and was called on the carpet for developing unauthorized programs. The session ended with Dr. Northouse offering me a job as a Research Assistant in his AI lab. I built a robot, and created an animation program with a light pen and a PDP-8L. University life  was great fun and I spent 2.5 years crashing grad school classes and ignoring the credit requirements. Dr. Northouse was contacted by a former student interested in computer games. Nort sent myself and Tom McHugh over as contractors, and we became the first two employees at Dave Nutting Associates. David Nutting and his partner Jeff Frederiksen had the patent on using a microprocessor system with a video frame buffer  to generate game animation. (Before then all games were made with dedicated logic circuits).

It was fun, despite my friends thinking I joined the Mafia. (Bally had a reputation then, undeserved, that they were trying to live down, which came from making slot machines).

I was initially tasked to develop pinball machines, but yearned to work on the video games. Over a Christmas holiday, Dave and I, built a prototype Blackjack game in cocktail table format. It included a payoff chute and thus qualifies as the original computer-controlled card game gambling device - the godmother of all Video Poker and Blackjack games in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Eventually it wound up in a Midway storage area, like the Lost Arc of the Covenant.from Indiana Jones. Will it ever be found? Will it still boot up?

1976 - The Bally Fireball Home Pinball Machine

The Fireball was one of the first pinball machines ever to ship with a microprocessor inside. It used a Fairchild F8, which had 64 bytes of RAM and 2K of ROM. This unit was designed for home use. It did not sell well because the availability of microprocessor commercial pinball games created a glut of relay-controlled units on the home market.

1977 - The Bally Arcade Video Game System

My first first foray into management was to lead a group that designed and implemented a ROM based operating system for a home video game console. The Bally Arcade used a Z80 microprocessor, 4K of RAM, and 8K of ROM. It was far ahead of its time. Later, I implemented a Basic interpreter called Bally Basic that ran on the Bally Arcade system in a cartridge. Basic language statements were entered using a keypad overlay over the calculator keypad. For about 6 months, Jamie held the honor of providing the world's cheapest computer.

1978 - Digital TV Dinner

Raul Zaritsky, Dick Ainsworth (audio), and I created "Digital TV Dinner" by manipulating a Bally Astrocade console. We fed the video output back into the system in unexpected ways, producing wild abstract imagery synchronized to sound. Now recognized as one of the earliest examples of intentional glitch art, this work has gained recognition decades later in the art world, and I have presented on glitch art history at various workshops and conferences.

1980 - The GORF Coin-op Video Game

I programmed a number of arcade video games during the late 1970s - early 1980s era. The best known of these was GORF. GORF stood for "Galactic Orbital Robot Force" and was a play on my college nickname of Froggie. GORF was the first game ever to show multiple scenes. After defeating a rack of Space Invaders, one would blast into space and deal with various alien menaces, working up to mission 5, an encounter with the Gorfian Flag Ship. GORF also featured a speech chip that hurled insults at the player.

In 1981, Jamie wrote a game for Bally/Midway called Robby Roto. It is a maze/digging/rescue game. It did not do well in the marketplace. As the rights to this game have reverted to me, I have chosen to permit MAME users to duplicate and play the ROM images for Robby Roto free of charge. Unfortunately my other released titles remain in legal limbo, but I am looking into making them available too. For more information on the MAME project, please visit their homepage.

The photo to the left shows the development system I used to develop an arcade title called Ms. Gorf, circa 1982. It was finished to the level where it could undergo play-testing, just in time to be canceled during the great videogame crash. Like Robby Roto, the rights have reverted to me. As the development system was extremely exotic, it is unlikely that this game will ever be revived. I have some early videotapes of myself playing it which I will digitize someday. 


Jamie's gameography is displayed in the Giant List of Classic Game Programmers

Fenton, Jamie Faye [formerly Jay Fenton]
   [U] Computer Blackjack (1975, COIN, Bally)
   Fireball (1976, PIN, Bally) home pinball game
   Checkmate (1976, COIN, Dave Nutting Associates)
   [N] Bally Astrocade home game system (1977, ASTR, Bally) led the development team
      and wrote most of the operating system
   [N] Bally BASIC (1977, ASTR, Bally)
   280 ZZZap (1977, COIN, Dave Nutting Associates)
   Gorf (1980, COIN, Bally/Midway)
   Adventures of Robby Roto, with Dave Nutting (1981, COIN, Bally/Midway)
   [U] Ms. Gorf (1982, COIN, Bally/Midway)
   [U] Gorfian Pinball (PIN, Bally/Midway)
   [P] Beamrider (1983, C64, ACT) port from INT
   [P] Pitstop (1983, C64, Epyx) port from 800
   [N] VideoWorks (1985, MAC, MacroMind) precursor to MacroMedia Director

1985 - MacroMind VideoWorks/MacroMedia Director

Jamie formed a corporation with Marc Canter and Mark Pierce called MacroMind. Our early products include MusicWorks and VideoWorks. I did most of the coding on these projects. VideoWorks has been available for many years, and is now being sold as MacroMedia Director. Here is a screen dump showing the basic features of VideoWorks/Director:





Both MusicWorks and VideoWorks were the first programs in their respective categories to ship on the original Apple Macintosh. The interface ideas have been widely copied and the resulting acceptance by the creative artistic community enabled Apple to survive until their resurgence in the iPod era.

1989 - Playground

In 1987, Jamie left MacroMind to work with Alan Kay's Vivarium Project. Here she developed a number of prototype programming environments for children called Playground. In these experiments, children constructed simulation worlds like the one shown here:

Programs consist of English-like statements which execute in parallel. These statements were situated within each animated character and interact in order to generate behavior. This example directs the clownfish to seek food and avoid sharks:


Frustrated  with the poor performance of  Smalltalk on 16 Mhz Macintosh computers of the era,  I  returned to private industry, joining Reese Jone's Farallon Computing Company of Emeryville, CA. Years later, Smalltalk finally came into its own with the Squeak project, which performs as well as Java, sometimes better, and is far more elegant.

1990 - 1994 Farallon - ScriptX

Leaving Apple in 1989, I worked for a while at Farallon Computing. We developed a HI-8 video editing program, a streaming network multimedia presentation system called Fairground, an early "web cam" device, and a phone dialer utility. Eventually Farrallon passed on the Fairground idea, seeing no future for user-constructed multimedia presentations shared across the network.

I wound up working with Kaleida Labs and its ScriptX project. (Kaleida was one of the results of the IBM/Apple collaboration of the early 1990s). I was one of the primary architects and helped implement this system, working on the persistence engine, networking, and on creating hybrid control structures for executing scripts over time. 

1991 - Digital Photo Album

During her spare time in the early 1990's, I developed an electronic photo album program for the Macintosh called the MegaloMedia Photo Album. Rights to this program were assigned to Michael Robertson's MediaMinds company, Michael went on found mp3.com. Here is a simple screen display. I also developed programs for editing and presenting PhotoCD images.

 

1995 - 1998 Global Cyberspace

My last project at Kaleida was to create a Distributed ScriptX demonstration of a social virtual world. Helped by Arturo Bejar, our efforts brought the attention of Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, we became two of the lead architects at Electric Communities.

At E/C, I developed an animation engine, a persistent object database, the distributed object communications system, and several demonstration programs. Frustrated by the reluctance of net users to download plug-ins, Doug Crockford and I kicked-around the idea of  using Javascript and HTML to generate rich-client interfaces. Doug later ran with the idea, starting State Software and becoming the father of AJAX..

E/C was a company of superstar engineers. In other words, a spectacular exercise in cat-herding, The E/C project shut down in 1999, a dot.com failure.

3D Communications and the Transgender Community

During this era, I founded 3D Communications, an early transgender information site featuring a newsletter, a commercial directory called "the Mall," and MEOW, a real-time chat server. Through this work and my involvement with Transgender Forum, I became known in the trans community and presented at conferences including IFGE and Southern Comfort. More about this part of my life can be found at www.jamiefaye.com.

1998 - 2001 SRI Center for Technology in Learning

Jamie joined CTL in June of 1998, working under Dr. Roy Pea. My first job was to suggest further directions for the LEGO Mindstorms project. I also worked with the Tapped-In virtual learning community and designed the software architecture(for streaming media and on-line discussion) for the TeachScape initiative. My largest project was a Tapped-In MOO replacement called MEOW.  While written to support rooms, regions, doorways, and the like, MEOW was mostly used as a Chat Server. The MEOW code base was extended experimentally to become a  prototype knowledge management application called Smurgle, and at another time for collaborative media analysis. My last project was a contract job for Sun Microsystems, where I developed a Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) XML Zone Integration Server called JaZ.

2004 - 2006 Modulo Systems, Inc.

Early in 2004, I was approached by Lee Silverman and invited to join Modulo Systems, a startup company in Massachusetts, which focused on developing New Media technologies for the Print Publishing Industry. I helped solve numerous techincal problems with their Concerto work-flow engine and then developed Music, which was a web-based AJAX application for planning and editing page layouts. Music was able to open Adobe InDesign documents, rearrange the elements therein, and save them back, working from the Adobe INX (XML) format. This complex task required reverse-engineering their document format and machine-generating classes to represent the elements of InDesign.

Music evolved into a generalized collaborative AJAX-based XML document editor. Music managed a bidirectional  transformation process converting InDesign and at a future time, Quark DOM representations into a generalized, vendor-neutral logical form and back.

Eventually, I  was called back to help fix Concerto, which suffered from severe performance problems. I turned out that Concerto was based on the "Single Threaded Apartment Model", and notifications didn't flow to the next workstation until after the previous one completed its update cycle. Too late - Modulo failed in 2006.

2006 - 2010 Seductive Logic

MEOW

After SRI, I continued development of  MEOW. The last version uses AJAX to enable dynamic editing and grouping of chat messages, in effect combining a bulletin board system, real time chat, and a Wiki with topic refinement and correction. Time became just another variable and ontology a user option. The people who got it, got it. Most didn't.

I also developed two prototypes that never shipped but were fun to create: The Camera Gun, a webcam-based augmented reality shooting game that tracked targets in real-time and overlaid virtual bullet damage, and TopCat, a live video production switcher for webcams with effects and compositing.

Haywire - Windows

Haywire is a program that displays a computer's internal memory as a real-time bitmap - a form of found digital art. Using various visualization modes, you can watch memory patterns flow and discover hidden images buried in running processes. It's like having X-ray vision into your computer's soul.

2014 - 2015 Cola

Marc Canter recruited me back for another startup adventure. Cola began as an IoT company called Interface, then pivoted to a messaging platform with embedded "card" applets - mini-applications living inside messages. Full circle from the early multimedia days.

2015 - 2016 MyLikes - Mobile Video

At MyLikes, I developed video transcoding pipelines for the FriendLife social network using RTMP and HLS streaming. I prototyped 360-degree live video features and built video capture with special effects for both FriendLife and the Candid anonymous messaging app.

2018 - 2019 Marco Polo

I helped troubleshoot bugs, improve video quality, and performance-optimize Joya Communications' flagship video messaging platform Marco Polo on both Android and iOS.

2019 - 2024 Akai Professional - MPC and Force

I joined Akai Pro to work on their flagship MPC and Force music production hardware. I created an Ableton Live to MPC project converter and reworked the MPC internals to accept legacy file formats, ensuring backwards compatibility for longtime users.

2017 - 2025 Synthstrom Deluge

The Synthstrom Deluge is a remarkable portable synthesizer/sequencer from New Zealand. I created Downrush, a WiFi-based management utility using the Toshiba FlashAir SD card and React, allowing users to explore and modify synth patches, drum kits, and songs from a web browser. This led to organizing the DelugeFirmware open source project on GitHub, which has been a rousing success with an active global community of contributors.

Recent Projects

I have embraced open source development and what the kids call "vibe coding." Current projects include a digital audio recorder application for Raspberry Pi, a new version of Haywire that works with QEMU virtual machines to visualize both Windows and Linux memory in real-time, and contributions to Olivia Jack's Hydra live-coding visuals tool, adding vertex shader support and 3D graphics capabilities.

Jamie's Email address is: jamie@fentonia.com