Doug Neubauer was a video game programmer in the earliest days of console based gaming. He started his career at National Semiconductor (working in their home computer division), but he quickly found a position at Atari, programming games for the Atari 2600. From 1979 on he both programmed games, and did work on the POKEY chip in Atari's hardware division.

His first game was Star Raiders (one of Atari's best titles). Doug attributes the games success to all the lunch hour playtesting that went on during the games development (many early games were barely playtested by anyone outside of the production team). The difficulty level was only finally set a few weeks before the game shipped (Doug would bump the difficulty up a notch every time someone at the company made it to "Star Commander" level).

After finishing Star Raiders (which he did not receive any extra money for), Doug left Atari and went to work at Hewlett-Packard where he became an expert in image processors for laser printers, later doing the same work over at Imagen. He later did contract work designing games for 20th Century Fox and Xante. Finally returning to Atari to do the smash hit Solaris (which was one of the last games that Atari ever made for the 2600).

Doug Neubauer Titles for the Atari 2600

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