Walter Day and Referee shirt in NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/magazine/who-made-that-referee-shirt.html?_r=0
Innovation Who Made That Referee Shirt? Jens Mortensen for The New York Times By PAGAN KENNEDY Published: November 1, 2013 DONKEY-KONG ZEBRA Walter Day pioneered the practice of officiating at video-game competitions in a referee uniform. How did you begin wearing the ref shirt? It was January 1983 when my video-game parlor, Twin Galaxies, hosted history’s first major video-game championship. This was filmed by the TV show “That’s Incredible” at the Twin Galaxies on Main Street in Ottumwa, Iowa. Why would a video-game competition need a ref? After all, the games themselves display the score. There are switches inside the game; if you throw the switches you can make the play easier or more difficult. So the referee has to verify the settings of the game and make sure that the person is not cheating. Did the ref shirt become your version of Clark Kent’s Superman outfit? Sure. Once I was at the Fun Spot video-game event in New Hampshire, and I was walking around in a sweatshirt, and then suddenly I whipped it off and changed into my referee shirt, and there was this ripple that went through the room. It was a major transformation in their psychology. Is it true that you donated your original ref shirt to the Smithsonian? In 2005, I packed up the shirt and addressed it to the Smithsonian Video Game History Collection. The spirit of the action was tongue-in-cheek because I knew that collection didn’t exist. And what happened next — I’ve never told anybody this before — is that the Smithsonian promptly sent the shirt back to me with a confused letter saying, “We don’t have any collection like this.”
