Dona Bailey

Dona Bailey (born 1955) is an American video game programmer and educator. Bailey, along with Ed Logg, developed Atari, Inc.'s 1981 arcade video game Centipede.

Early life and education Dona Bailey was born in 1955 in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated high school early and started attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the age of 16. She accelerated her education by taking classes year-round, and by the age of 19, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Psychology with three minors in English, Math and Biology. She continued her education by earning a master's degree in Math.

Career Bailey was hired by General Motors as a programmer in 1978 and trained in 6502 assembly language programming. She worked there for two years on displays, and microprocessor-based cruise control systems. Bailey's first exposure to video games came from when she first heard the song "Space Invader" by The Pretenders. A friend told her the song was inspired by the arcade video game Space Invaders. After becoming interested in what a video game was, her friend took her to a nearby bar which had a Space Invaders arcade cabinet. Bailey noticed that the display on Space Invaders resembled the display she worked with on the Cadillac at GM. She later found out that Atari was using the same microprocessor in its games. Within a four-person team, she became the software developer and software engineer on Centipede. Centipede went on to become Atari's second best-selling coin-op game. Due to the game's popularity, Atari's production line was forced to run two shifts to keep up with demand.

Centipede was also one of the first coin-op based arcade machines to have a significant female player base. This was intentional, as Logg and Bailey designed the game to appeal to a broad audience, not just male players. The game's vibrant pastel colors and the trackball-based gameplay appealed to both male and female players. Centipede’s unique color palette is credited to Bailey. After Centipede, Bailey was working on a game titled "Weather War", but since processors at the time were so limited, she was unable to make the game include everything she wanted. Bailey left Atari before the game was finished. She later took PC contract roles for Activision, working on a two-person game with Paul Allen Newell. In 1985, after she left Activision, she decided to leave the video game industry altogether. In 2007, she was the keynote speaker at the Women in Games International Conference. where she taught until her retirement. In November 2018, Dona Bailey was an honored guest speaker alongside Bonnie Ross, Brenda Laurel, Megan Gaiser, Amy Hennig, Susan Jaekel, Jen MacLean, Sheri Graner Ray, and Victoria Van Voorhis at the "Women in Games: Inspire!" panel, as part of the first annual "Women in Games" exhibit at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. The panel was the opening event for the exhibit which celebrates the contributions of women in the video game industry.

As of 2019, Bailey has written a screenplay titled Sunnyvale based on her experiences at Atari as a programmer on Centipede, and is trying to get it picked up. She is also currently writing scripts for other narrative projects.

Awards In 2013, she was the recipient of the Women in Gaming Lifetime Achievement Award.