Carla Meninsky is a pioneering engineer, software developer, and lawyer.
“I was a bit of an artist, and somewhere along the way had gotten the idea that computers could be used for animation and artists.”
Carla Meninsky
While entering university to major in Math, she ended up with a degree in psychology specializing in visual perception from Stanford University in 1977. With her equally excellent math and art skills and a interest in computerized animation, she became a game developer working for Atari in 1979, where she designed, programmed, and created Warlords (1982) and Dodge’em (1980) (she also later did a specialized version of Dodge’em for Mercedes Benz). She was part of the team who created Star Raiders for the Atari 2600 (1983?). Following Atari, she continued her work in gaming by creating the early tools for high-end computer graphics dealing with lighting, textures, surfaces, 3D rendering, and 3D effects. In this period she worked for e.g. Activision, Cadlink, Wei Tek, and Sun Microsystems. Later she moved on to hardware architecture design, and in 1995 she started her own company as a contractor, this allowed her more freedom in choosing interesting and challenging assignments and her skills and expertise were in high demand, e.g. EA, 3Dfx, Sony/Cirrus Logic. In 2004 she graduated Law school and has since then worked as an attorney.
