Carla Meninski

Carla Meninski is a former video game designer, and was one of two female engineers at Atari to develop video game cartridges in the early 1980s. Carla learned programming in high school, encouraged by her mother who was a programmer. Initially interested in mathematics, she attended Stanford University, but her interests in neuropsychology and brain modelling led her to graduate in Psychology in 1977. Interested in vision, and in creating, she presented animation ideas to Atari, and was hired in 1980, but was soon directed toward videogame programming instead. At Atari, she headed the production of Warlords (Atari 2600), and coded Dodge ‘Em, Star Raiders, and Tempest. She also worked for Electronic Arts and other game publishers before starting her own programming company. When she and a colleague had a bad experience with another programmer stealing their code, she then became interested in intellectual property rights. She went back to school, graduated from George Washington University Law School, and began practicing law in 2004. She teaches courses on international financial law at the London School of Economics, and specializes in contract disputes, trade secrets, fraud, and financial law and regulation.