Noelie Alito, Atari Game Developer – rare interview

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“In 1980, when Computer Science was a young discipline, my MIT software class was about 1/3 female, which might have been Peak Female for that department. After that, women tended to infiltrate the traditional white-shirt-and-pocket-protector ranks of the long-established engineering disciplines… and men went into software” (Noelie Alito, Atari game developer).

Interview quote from written interview with Noelie Alito conducted by Rob Wanenchak, AtariSpot


Rob Wanenchak discovered a ‘personalised’ Moon Patrol Atari Game Cartridge: Zorfon signed by Atari Woman Noelie Alito. These personalised games was a ‘christmas gifts’ from developers to their families. In this rare interview Noelie Alito answers a few questions about her education from MIT and her work on Atari Games.

Atari Women Wikipedia edit-a-thon

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History is what makes it into wikipedia – thus to celebrate and establish the important work and contribution of underrepresented minorities for Atari games in the 70s and 80s, Atari Women are organising an asynchronous wikipedia edit-a-thon to re-establish the important work into history. For this work, Atari Women are collaborating with Wikipedia Women in Red – which is a Wiki project dedicated to turn ‘redlinks‘ into blue links focusing on women biographies, works and contributions. Everybody is welcome to join, and if you need help to get started editing wikipedia, please do not hesitate to contact us!

AtariWomen @ Google

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Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion (SDDI2019) workshop at Google

AtariWomen was presented at the ‘Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion’ (SDDI) workshop organized by Emerson Murphy-Hill (Google) and Margaret-Anne Storey (University of Victoria) at Google in San Francisco, June 4th-June 6th 2019.

Atari Women Heroine Costume to be on exhibit at Hypnotica 2019

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Atari Women Heroine Costume,’Living Computers Museum and Lab, AtariWomen 2019

The Atari Women 8-bit Heroine Costume, a project created by HCDE students in the Atari Women research group, will be on exhibit at Hypnotica 2019: a DXARTS technological wearables fashion show. The Atari Women 8-bit Heroine Costume was among the critical design artifacts created in a Winter 2019 HCDE Directed Research Group, co-led by visiting Professor Pernille Bjørn and Assistant Professor Daniela Rosner. Students in the class used collaborative design processes to develop interactive artifacts that highlight the stories of Atari women, or the women who made crucial engineering contributions to early video games. Students Kellie Dunn, Carina Dempsey, and Melody Xu chose the language of cosplay to draw people into the story of Atari women – read more in the AtariWomen gallery.

Makerspace methodologies to highlight hidden stories of women in early games design

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Students and workshop facilitators: Brock Craft. Walter Jensen, and Pernille Bjørn for HCDE directed research group on Atari Women, Spring break 2019

AtariWomen research served as the underlying design challenge, when 18 students from University of Washington participated in a Spring break makerspace directed research group. The results includes the AtariWomen artefacts which will be displayed at Living Computers on May 16th 2013 in Seattle.