TDE EP24 - Death Race creator Howell Ivy

The Ted Dabney Experience

Howell Ivy is the creator of Exidy’s infamous Death Race. Released in 1976, this was the first arcade game to stir a moral panic over videogame violence in America, leading the company to hire round-the-clock security in response to many green-ink letters and phoned-in death threats. Exidy followed Death Race with the relatively innocuous but very successful Circus; Venture, arguably the spiritual forerunner to Atari’s Gauntlet, and then back to controversy with the genuinely gruesome light gun game, Chiller (1986). Howell departed Exidy under somewhat difficult circumstances and joined Sega of America where he oversaw the development of the company’s early Virtua series of games, and his long tenure at the company saw him bear witness to one of the most revolutionary periods of videogame design.