You can view the confirmed legends who will be speaking, meeting, greeting, and signing autographs at this year's Classic Gaming Expo at the Classic Gaming Expo site, but in this forum I'm going to provide some detais aboutl them. Take note of games and items that you might want to bring along for signatures!

Steve Woita

Woita: "After getting out of college I went to work at Apple & worked there from 1980-82. It is there were I learned how to move graphics around from the following people: Bill Budge, Andy Hertzfeld & Keithen. While at Apple, Bill Budge asked me if it were possible to hook two Atari style controllers to the Apple II (for Crazy Climber)....I said "well let me give it a try"... After a while I got something going & then I found out that another guy that was currently working in the lab not too far away had a four paddle thing going. To make a long story short, we mixed the two together & got a device that supposedly Steve Jobs gave the OK to allow. Sirius Software acquired the rights to produce and ship this product, and the company even sent Keithen and myself royalty checks! I was very ecstatic as it was my first experience in the royalty thing. The device ended up with a weird name... JOYPORT The Joyport, introduced in 1981 for Apple II, (I co-designed the hardware) allowed you to have 4 game paddles and 2 Atari style controllers hooked up to the Apple II.

I then moved on to Atari where I created three games for the Atari 2600:

Quadrun (1983). I was the programmer, designer and artist, and jointly created the sounds and voice effects... supposedly the first home videogame with voice without the need for a hardware attachment.

Taz (1984). I was the programmer, designer and artist for this game.

Asterix (1984, for Europe). I was the programmer and designer.

The video game market soon crashed, so I stayed home and goof around with the Macintosh and the Commodore 64. During this time, I co-designed a piece of hardware that allowed an Atari-style joystick to hook up to the Mac. At this time, I am now living off of the royalty checks from this device (called the MouseStick, which I co-designed in 1985, and playing the stock market. The MouseStick for the Mac allowed a mouse and joystick to live together, enabling one to use whichever one you liked.

I did some more contract work for Apple but then I felt the urge to get back into designing games. I then go back to Atari where I was going to develop coin-op games but they found out that I worked in the consumer division years ago and said "how about you do the coin-op thing later and focus on our new group called Tengen?" I guess I must have said ok, because I worked on a few things that got canned and about the only thing I worked on that made it to market was Super Sprint for the Nintendo Entertainment System, which I helped with the layout and also entered the tedious track data.

Some of my buddies then left Tengen and formed Bitmasters, where I helped out on the design for Krazy Kreatures for the NES.

At this time I leave Tengen & go to a place called MediaGenic.... No, it's not a medical company. I worked with some cool people there & our team was the first in the USA to "get to work on" the Super Nintendo.

I soon left MediaGenic and went to work for Sega. I had a great time there. I got to meet and work with some of the best people in the biz. While at Sega, I worked on three Genesis games, Kid Chameleon (1992), where I was the co-producer, designer and programmer, Sonic 2 (1992), in which I helped out on the last two weeks of the project doing level design, and Sonic Spinball (1993) which I co-programmed with Dennis Koble, Lee Actor, Jason Plumb, Scott Chandler, Dave Sanner, Ken Rose and Earl Stratin.

Jason Plumb and I were made too good of an offer from Ocean Of America. We were both promised that we would be able to do coin-op stuff there. Not so. When all was said and done, we had to turn Water World the movie into games on new platforms. I was co-producer, designer and programmer for the Virtual Boy version, co-producer and was designer and programmer for the never released Saturn version.

I then worked on some games with some friends of mine at a cool company called Actual Entertainment, where I was co-level designer of both Gubble and Gubble II (both for PC). I was the co-level designer of Gubble, along with Joe Cain, Eric Ginner, Franz Lanzinger, Eugene Polonsky and Mark Robichek. On Gubble II, I was the co-level designer along with Joe Cain, Eric Ginner, Franz Lanzinger and Mark Robichek.

Now I'm back to working with small games... Java games... It's like playing on the Atari 2600 but with more colors! The three games I'm currently working on are TerraDacktel, DunkIt and Antenna. The site is located at http://www.adtoit.com/. "