Canada's First Video Game
A French-Canadian spin on Pac-Man.
Back in 1982, the video game industry was in its infancy but there were already a few major players like Atari. At the time, Pac-Man was the biggest game on the planet and millions of teenagers were putting quarters into machines at arcades to play it.
In Canada, two Quebec teenagers named Marc-Antoine Parent and Vincent Côté decided they wanted to create a video game as well.
Thus was born Les Têtards, or The Tadpoles. They called it a take on Pac-Man.
Not only was it the first video game created in Quebec, but many believe it was the first video game ever created in Canada.
Designed for the Apple II, the players used the keyboard to control two tadpoles.
When the tadpoles met, it created a heart and an egg was laid. The goal was to go back into the maze and eat the egg before the other player did.
The two friends had created the game in their summer break between fourth and fifth grade. Even when they travelled with family that summer, the friends worked on the game and debugged using printouts.
Eventually the game was finished and that was when Louis-Philippe Hébert, who owned Logidisque, came into the picture. His company was the first French-language publishing house in Quebec.
He rented a small space in Montreal and he knew the two teenagers through their parents, who both worked at Radio-Canada.
The company made the game into something that could be sold to consumers. The game was popular enough that the two young men even appeared on CBC in a news segment about it.
Despite their skillset in making Canada’s first video game, neither one went into creating video games later in life.
Côté studied computer science and worked for the Paris Stock Exchange before becoming a financial analyst in Montreal. He developed various pieces of software including Mega-Text, a word processor for children.
Parent went on to study biomathematics and systems sciences. He later worked as a software architect specializing in knowledge representation.