Dave Nutting

David Judd Nutting (December 26, 1930 – September 23, 2020) was an industrial design engineer who played a role in the early video game industry. He also designed the exterior of the Jeep Wagoneer.

Career David Judd Nutting was born in 1930 to parents Harold Judd Nutting and Margaret P. Peet in River Forest, Illinois. He was the youngest of four brothers, including the second oldest brother William Gilbert "Bill" Nutting. David came to be interested in engineering, disassembling and reassembling household items to understand how they worked. Despite pressure from his father to become a department store salesman, David joined the Army Corps of Engineers and intended to follow a career path in engineering.

After a year studying at Denison University, Nutting learned about the discipline of industrial design. He switched colleges to the Pratt Institute in their industrial design program, then rejoined the Army Corps of Engineers. Thereafter, he joined prestigious industrial design firm Brook Stevens Associates in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He worked to design the physical shape of many different items for clients including 3M, Studebaker, cookware for Mirro, tractors for Bolens, and Evinrude Outboard Motors. He also designed one of the first computer-controlled interfaces for milling machines. They launched their machine I.Q. Computer (1967) to the coin-op industry in 1967, competing with Nutting Associates’ Computer Quiz (1966).

David continued to design the games produced by Nutting Industries, initially different styles of quiz games. Nutting Industries opened a subsidiary called Modec to expand into the teaching machine market outside of the coin-op industry, which wound up as a financial disappointment. Nutting and Montgomery convened to create a traditional electro-mechanical shooting game called Red Baron (1971), which was the final game released by Nutting Industries.

Nutting Industries entered receivership, but David purchased the company’s assets with his personal finances. He formed a new company in 1971 called Milwaukee Coin Industries Inc. (MCI) with partner David Winter, dedicated to producing electro-mechanical games starting with Red Baron. The company did well in the business of arcade games and recruited engineers from the Milwaukee area to help implement David’s game ideas.

In 1972, former Air Force engineer Jeffery Frederiksen began working with MCI as a contractor. Trained in solid-state electronics and computer engineering, Frederiksen was recognized by David Nutting for his technical skill. Nutting increasingly wanted to explore the benefits of solid-state electronics and the two of them collaborated on a game called The Safe (1974) which utilized integrated circuits for the game logic.

Shortly thereafter, David heard about the potential of the Intel microprocessor. Both he and Frederiksen wanted to pursue creating games using the microprocessor, but the executive board of MCI was not interested. In 1972, they had opened their Red Baron Amusement Center arcade locations and increasingly wanted to exit game manufacturing. David was removed from the company, though he allowed them use of the building under his lease as they wound down manufacturing. He and Frederiksen jointly established a new research and development company dedicated to coin-op games located in the back of the building, Dave Nutting Associates. David mentored a number of arcade game designers at his company. These included Alan McNeil, creator of Berzerk (1980), and Jamie Fenton, creator of Gorf (1981). Another employee, Bob Ogdon, later took over development of home games for the Bally Professional Arcade with his company Action Graphics with Nutting’s support. David continued to design arcade games including Wizard of Wor (1981) and quiz game Professor Pac-Man (1983).

Eventually, Dave Nutting Associates was sidelined in favor of Midway’s internal development. David Nutting worked on several unreleased games, including a proposal for the game that eventually became Tron (1982). With home games being developed by Action Graphics and arcade games handled by the Midway team, Bally closed Dave Nutting Associates in 1984. Nutting left the industry and Jeff Frederiksen moved on to work in graphical display technology, which he had worked on as part of his work with the GRASS programming language on the Bally Professional Arcade.

In the following years, Nutting moved to Colorado spent time pursuing interests in aviation. He built an experimental helicopter called Tiger Shark.

David returned to the coin-op industry in 1993, designing a video-based baseball pitching game. He later wrote two books, the quantum mechanics primer Language of Nature: Quantum World Revealed (2005) and the creative motivational book Secrets of a Creative Mind (2012).

David married Phyllis Mason on August 8, 1953. They had a daughter named Elizabeth. He died at his home in Green Valley, Arizona, on September 23, 2020.