Meet Carol Shaw, the First Female Video Game Developer! Growing up Carol Shaw excelled in math at school, saying she had little interest in dolls and preferred to instead tinker with her brothers’ model railroad layout. In 1978 she graduated from UC Berkeley with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Master’s Degree in Computer Science. Though she had several job offers she decided to accept the one from Atari, since it looked fun and she would get paid to play games. Under the formal title of Microprocessor Software Engineer, programming games for Atari’s then new 2600 VCS console. Thus, unbeknownst to her, making her the world’s first female professional video game designer. She created video games such as Atari 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Polo, and Video Checkers. She would eventually go on to work between two groundbreaking companies: Atari, which essentially founded the video game industry and Activision, a firm most notable as the very first third-party ...