Steve Cartwright

American video game designer
the football player

Steve Cartwright is an American video game designer. He is best known as one of the original Activision game designers, credited with such games as Barnstorming, Megamania, Seaquest and Hacker.

Prior to working at the company, Cartwright had gone to college with David Crane at the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix. When Crane and Alan Miller created their own company Activision, they quickly found success in the video game business, leading them to hire new employees, which included Crane's friend Cartwright. At Activision, Cartwright designed games for the Atari 2600. These included Barnstorming (1982), Megamania (1982), Seaquest (1983), and Frostbite (1983). In their book Racing the Beam, Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort stated that Cartwright's game design philosophy focused on iteration and refinement. The authors described this style as This sort of technique would later come to be known as skinning. which they noted had negative connotations, "suggesting commercial exploitation without fundamental innovation." while also stating that the design style "was not without its positive qualities. It involved the slow refinement of basic ideas toward perfection." He later developed games for the Commodore 64 with Hacker (1985), Hacker II (1986), Aliens (1986), and Gee Bee Air Rally (1987).

Cartwright joined Accolade as their Senior Designer in 1988. He was in charge of developing new concepts in game design and organizing teams of designers and coordinating the creation and development of new games. Among his products were the Sierra style graphic adventures Les Manley in: Search for the King and Les Manley in: Lost in L. A.—the first game to use live actors captured in front of a blue screen.

In 1993, Cartwright joined Electronic Arts. He soon took over producer responsibility on the fledgling PGA Tour line and helped redesign the NBA Live product line. Among the many innovations to the golf line were the first use

More recently, Cartwright lead the design of Bluescape's real time cloud based collaboration system. The Bluescape "wall" is currently being used by Lucasfilm to plan and storyboard future Star Wars films.