Interview with Susan Lammers
On June 2, 2026, I interviewed Susan Lammers, author of Programmers at Work, a referential collection of interviews with early software creators conducted in 1985 and published in 1986.
The conversation is especially relevant to my PhD research because Lammers approached programmers as creative practitioners, not only as technical specialists. Her reflections offer an important historical perspective on how early software creators thought about invention, constraint, structure, and authorship.
We discussed her interview with Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man, and the broader question of how creative identity emerged in the early years of personal computing and video games. One of the central themes was dealing with technical limitations.
Lammers said: “In a lot of ways, programming is like architecture.”
She also described how early programmers had to reduce their ideas to their clearest possible form: “They had to distil their ideas to such a degree that there is a purity to them.”
This idea connects directly to my research on early video game authorship. In games like Pac-Man, artistic identity did not simply appear once technology became more powerful. It emerged through limitation, simplification, and careful design choices.
Lammers also recalled that Iwatani and his team considered making Pac-Man more visually detailed, including adding a face, but rejected the idea because it would be distracting. For my project, this is a crucial insight: simplicity was not only a technical condition, but also an aesthetic decision.
The interview also moved toward present-day questions about artificial intelligence, procedural generation, and the future of authorship. If early computing was defined by scarcity and hardware limits, today’s creative systems may be defined by abundance, speed, and the need for new boundaries.
This conversation will contribute the first publication of my PhD, which focuses on early video games, creative constraint, and proto-artistic authorship.
Susan Lammers’ Programmers at Work, the 40th Anniversary Edition, will be released this July 2026 by 8080 Books/Simon and Schuster. It contains a new introduction and all the classic interviews. > > > More information here
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