Talk:Robert Abbott (game designer)

Different Robert Abbotts
Someone apparently put the bit about Sneakers into the article because of a confusion with this Robert Abbott, who is not the game inventor.

The security consultant is Robert P. Abbott. If the game inventor is still checking in here, would you add your birthdate and/or middle name? That will help prevent someone else from re-introducing this error down the road. Besides, you owe me a favor after the damage that Ultima did to my undergraduate grade-point average. :) JamesMLane 02:49, 8 August 2005 (UTC


 * There is now (finally) a birthdate. :)  Hi 8 7 8   (Come shout at me!) 05:01, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Confusing language
"Though early in his life he worked as a computer programmer with the IBM 360 assembly language, in the 1950s Abbott turned to game design." That sentence implies that IBM 360 assembly language predated the 1950s. The IBM 360 series didn't emerge into daylight until the late 1960s. All it needs is a little tinkering with the wording, but it would be better for someone familiar with the subject to take care of that. All I can do is point out this confusing phraseology. Floozybackloves (talk) 14:49, 27 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Attempted to fix.  Hi 8 7 8   (Come shout at me!) 17:20, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Sent to me in an e-mail
Robert Abbott sent the following information to me in an e-mail.

"Abbott was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He began inventing games when he was fourteen and recruited his little sister, Margie, as a play tester. Abbott attended St. Louis Country Day School, went to Yale for two years, then attended the University of Colorado for another two years. According to Abbott, "being much too bright, I never graduated."[11] After dropping out of the University of Colorado, Abbott spent two more years living in Colorado. For reasons he still can’t explain, those two years were a period of intense creativity for him. During that time, he invented all of his card games, including his game Eleusis. Abbott next moved to New York City, where he worked at various clerk jobs, until he had a life-changing experience: Martin Gardner wrote about Eleusis in his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.  So—you’re probably saying—Abbott got his game in a magazine. How can that be a life-changing experience? To understand this, you have to know about the effect Gardner’s column had on the world of science and the world of games and puzzles.Wikipedia’s entry for Gardner explains some of this, but it can’t explain everything. Gardner’s effect on the game Eleusis and on Abbott is a good example of the importance of the Mathematical Games column. Abbott had written a letter to Gardner to explain the rules to Eleusis. Gardner was intrigued by the game and he even saw more in Eleusis than the inventor had seen. Abbott’s letter had mentioned that the strategy for playing Eleusis was basically inductive reasoning, but Gardner took this further. He saw that the game as a whole could be a model for the Scientific Method. Gardner’s column on Eleusis appeared in the June 1959 Scientific American, and it generated a great deal of interest. Abbott now realized that this was a good time to get more of his games published, so he put together four of his card games—Babel, Eleusis, Leopard and Construction—and made them into the book Four New Card Games, which he privately published in 1962. Abbott sold it by mail and it did fairly well, since it was mentioned in a few places. The book came to the attention of the publisher Sol Stein, who had Abbott expand his book to eight card games plus one chess variant that Abbott had invented, and which was referred to as Baroque chess. In 1963, this book was published by Stein’s firm, Stein and Day, as Abbott’s New Card Games. (In 1968 there was a paperback edition by Funk & Wagnalls.) In 1963, Abbott was having some success in publishing, but he wasn’t really making much money, so he decided to go back to his hometown of St. Louis, where his brother-in-law, Bob Ellis, got him a job as a computer programmer at the Washington University Computer Research Laboratory. In 1965, Abbott moved back to New York, and for the next 20 years he continued to work as a programmer, mostly in IBM 360 assembly language. Abbott continued his work with games, but he also became interested in a new form of puzzle that eventually became known as Logic Mazes. His first logic maze had been published in October 1962 in (where else!) Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American, but it wasn’t until later that Abbott realized a lot more could be done with this form of maze. Since then, Abbott has created various mazes, most of which appeared in the books SuperMazes and Mad Mazes.[9][10] In 2010, his Where are the Cows? maze was published by the Oxford University Press in the book Cows in the Maze.[15]"

Hi 8 7 8  (Come shout at me!) 23:48, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Video games?
Why is this article under VG project? Only connection I see is that there is a video game version of Theseus and the Minotaur. Did Abbott program that version? --Mika1h (talk) 17:59, 7 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I have wondered that quite a bit, actually. He invented the maze, which was turned into the game; that's what I came up with. He designed several of the levels, as well.  Hi 8 7 8   (Come shout at me!) 18:44, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Preserving Games Content More Visibly For Later Use
The following content about some of Mr. Abbott's games was removed from this article as it was too much for an article about the man. I'm putting it here so that should articles be created about the games themselves in the future it is more prominently available. -- Deadly&forall;ssassin 09:15, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I told you already; the articles already exist. :) However, much of this information isn't in them, so it is still useful.  Hi 8 7 8   (Come shout at me!) 22:36, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * That'll teach me to try to edit Wikipedia when I'm 1/2 asleep. :) -- Deadly&forall;ssassin 12:08, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

External links modified
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