IEEE Spectrum: Game Design: Sometimes It Is Rocket Science
Blakely credits his gaming acumen to his space career, which included a five-year stint building payloads and embedded systems as a computer programmer and research scientist, first at the University of Alabama’s Consortium for Materials Development in Space, and then at Teledyne Brown Engineering, both in Huntsville, Ala. Blakely helped to build the 3-D microgravity accelerometer, a data acquisition system used on the cargo-carrying Spacehab, Spacelab, and rocket missions. He designed software and motherboards, and helped flight-qualify the first Macintosh computer in space.
Blakely first combined his interests in space and gaming during a college engineering co-op year at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, a homecoming of sorts. As a child he would visit his engineer father at work there and crawl around the centrifugal force machine the astronauts used for G-force training. He won Co-Op of the Year for designing a space station solar-array simulator. “I used my experience writing gaming code for fun on the side, to dress up the graphics, which didn’t exist back then,” he says.
Blakely says that both a payload and a gaming console involve embedded systems with limited resources, such as memory. “You have to get everything working perfectly,” he says. “You don’t want the console game to crash. And in space, you can’t reach up there to pull the plug or press the reset button.”