Richard Marks, MS '91, PhD '96

Creator of EyeToy Camera and Move Controller for PlayStation

Jude Buffum

An excerpt appeared in the print version of Stanford.

First video game experience:

“My family had a Magnavox Odyssey system. I remember pressing the overlays onto the TV screen, and the dial controls that let you put ‘English’ on the ball. I also played a lot of the electronic game Simon. A lot. I was fortunate enough to get to meet Ralph Baer a few years ago (he created both the Odyssey and Simon).”

Favorite video game:

“It is hard to pick just one, but my favorite is probably Sea Battle for Intellivision. It was a two- player-only game, as many games were back then. My father and I played hours and hours of Intellivision, but I liked Sea Battle the best because it had such a strong strategic element. Playing those games is a great memory; I’m glad there was not a single-player version.

Similarly, I love Gauntlet because of the countless quarters I spent on it with my close friends in high school. We actually didn’t play many games then, because it was right around the time of the console crash. But since Gauntlet was for four players, it was a lot of fun to do as a group. The Warrior always burned through about twice as many quarters as everyone else (sorry Chuck!) We played it most often in a 7-Eleven, which seems pretty strange now.”

Stanford video game memory:

“When I was in my second year of grad school, in 1991, I rented an action-RPG for my Sega Genesis. It was a three-day rental I think, and I really liked the game, so I wanted to finish it before I returned it. So I pretty much played nonstop for three days. I’d been playing for about a six-hour stretch when my wife came in and put her toe over the power button as a joke. Well, sure enough, she slipped and. . . . We are, amazingly, still married.

It isn’t really a moment, but my graduate research at Stanford was using computer vision for controlling an underwater robot. All the work I did at Stanford is relevant to what I do now for PlayStation. Even working in robotics is highly related to working in video games. (Video games just don’t have quite as many real-world constraints!) The lab I was a part of, the Aerospace Robotics Lab, really focused on making things that truly worked, not just ivory-tower research. That same mentality has worked well for me in the R&D group at PlayStation.”