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July 24, 1998

Dane Bigham, the lead designer and sole programmer of the original Apple II version of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, also did two ports of other Broderbund games: the C64 versions of Lode Runner and Choplifter. The concept for Carmen, by the way, came from Broderbund co-founder Doug Carlston. Dane later was a founder of Presage Software Development, which is best known for Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. Still paging Peter Ward: if anyone has run across Mr. Ward (formerly with Sculptured Software) in his or her travels, drop me a line.

July 21, 1998

Earlier this year I was asked to be the guest editor for a game-oriented issue of SIGGRAPH's Computer Graphics, and the end result includes some articles in a classic vein: "Memories of a Vector World" by Owen Rubin (Major Havoc), "Game Graphics During the 8-bit Computer Era" by Steven Collins (Herobotix), and "Portrait of the Artists in a Young Industry" by Noah Falstein (Sinistar). Also of note is Maurice Molyneaux's "Graphics on the Wayback Machine," which includes screenshots of an upcoming ColecoVision game by Kevin Horton. Though it's credited to programmer Manfred Trenz in the current version of the List, Turrican was co-designed by Manfred, Julian Eggebrecht, and Holger Schmidt. In recent times, Manfred Trenz gets credit for programming Rendering Ranger for the SNES (1995) and Julian produced and co-designed BallBlazer Champions for the PlayStation (1996). Look for an overhaul of the Trenz entry in the next List update.

July 15, 1998

Believe it or not, David Schroeder says that Crisis Mountain, originally published by Synergistic for the Apple II, was the first game he ever wrote! Synergistic, by the way, is still kicking, even though many people seem to think it went under in the 1980s. In their long history they've created everything from Wilderness Campaign for the Apple II to Front Page Sports Football 98 for the PC (published by Sierra). Mr. Castle Wolfenstein himself, the great Silas Warner, designed the 3D graphics subsystem for Sega's 32X. More recently he created a prototype of a 3D racing game for the Playstation.

July 13, 1998

Ex ANALOG Computing and Antic author Greg Knauss has coughed up an oversized furball of "pathetic generation X nostalgia," reminsicing about the Atari 8-bit games he wrote for those magazines. One game a week will be added, until he's worked through his entire library. This is great stuff. Here's the only web site dedicated to the Apple II classic Robot Odyssey. Based on the Rocky's Boots engine created by Warren Robinett, that game was co-authored by Mike Walace and Leslie Grim. Warren R. is given credit in an easter egg--how appropriate, considering the very first easter egg was hidden in his own Adventure a few years earlier.

July 11, 1998

I heard about this earlier this week, but as it seemed almost a rumor I held off until I received confirmation: possibly the greatest computer game designer of all time, Danielle Bunten Berry, passed away just over a week ago. She was best known for Ozark Softscape's legendary M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold, but those are just two highlights of an astounding career. Cartels & Cutthroats is an Apple II classic. Robot Rascals is an experimental software and board game combo designed for family play. And Modem Wars beat the network craze by a full five years. Dani's hallmark was the multi-player game, as anyone who's ever sat down with three friends for a game of M.U.L.E. can attest to. When jaded, hotshot 3D coders get together for an afternoon party in 1998, and drag out an Atari 800 to play M.U.L.E., now there's a design for the ages. A memorial page has been set up at Mpath which goes into her amazing life and career much better than I possibly could.

July 6, 1998

Ever wonder (or even know about) the amazing "second level" in Pitfall II: Lost Caverns for the Atari 800? Here's the story from an insider, revealed for the first time. "Mike" is Mike Lorenzen, who also wrote Activision's Oink for the 2600. David Crane had finished Pitfall II for the 2600, and had gone on to other things. The success of the program demanded that we take it to the next level: the C64 and the Atari 5200/800/400. Now, all of a sudden we had 64K on the Commodore and, I believe, 48K on the 5200 and 400. Whatever could we do with all of this memory? Mike (I think this is right) was doing the Atari version, and he wanted to add to the game, make it more challenging, even better than it was, while the C64 programmer wanted to improve the graphics, make it more beautiful. We discussed it a few times, and I decided to do both. The Atari would have additional gameplay, and the C64 would have better looking graphics. When we finished, the C64 version was one of the best looking games on the market, while the Atari version had over 300 extra rooms, new monsters in the new rooms, and a terrific variety of new challenges in the new rooms, plus a puzzle that, if solved, took the person back to the surface where they were, hopefully, waiting to be picked up by a helicopter (we never saw the helicopter, but we had faith that after we shut down the computer, the helicopter would come). Marketing went crazy. They wanted to market the games together, but how could they say that one of the games had more gameplay, more monsters, etc? I was told to take out the new game, that we wanted the Atari version to have no more than the C64 had. I couldn't do it. So, what I did instead was have Mike fix it so the new game was an Easter Egg. The way it would work, was like this: if the player completed the game perfectly, without a single mistake, when they finished they would be transported into the new game automatically. Once there, they could finish it. So that's the way it went out. In actuality, the Easter Egg in the Atrari computer version of Pitfall II is bigger and more challenging than the game itself.

June 30, 1998

Long ago he wrote Deep Space for the Apple II, but Ned Lerner is now the president of Multitude, the company best known for the Internet game FireTeam. Ned also wrote the first PC game to sell 500,000 copies (remember those days?), Chuck Yeager's Flight Trainer. Give him credit for F-22 Interceptor for the Sega Genesis too (how the heck do you write a flight sim with tiled graphics?), plus a heap of other titles.

June 25, 1998

What was the first game in the illustrious career of Synapse Software? 1981's Dodge Racer for the Atari 800 by Rob Re. (Their first actual product wasn't a game at all, but a database.) In other Synapse trivia, William Mataga's brilliant Shamus started life as a clone of Berzerk, until the design was enhanced by Synapse co-founder and master designer Ihor Wolosenko. The Bally/Midway coin-op Xenophobe didn't have scrolling hardware, yet author Howard Shere managed to coax three layers of scrolling out if its 68000 processor. It isn't quite as bad as PC programmers might think, because there was at least some display list hardware and not just a raw frame buffer. These days Howard is the president of Green Dragon Creations, the makers of Gridz for the Macintosh.

June 22, 1998

Dave Needle, co-creator of the 3DO and Atari Lynx, wrote an old Midway coin-op called Space Encounters. (More commonly known is that the other co-creator, RJ Mical, did special effects programming for Williams' Sinistar.) Don Daglow, author of Utopia, possibly the best game written for the Intellivision, was later promoted to the Director of Intellivision Game Design at Mattel. That explains his short career as a programmer (his List entry contains only one game). He later acted as producer for a number of games from Electronic Arts, including Mail Order Monsters and Racing Destruction Set.

June 16, 1998

Rob Fulop of Atari 2600 Missile Command and Cosmic Ark fame surfaced in rec.games.video.classic, incredulous that ROMs of his unreleased Cubicolor were selling for $1000 or more. Here's a particularly tasty bit: I still have my "Merry Christmas from Atari" bonus proudly displayed on my office wall ... it was right after Missile Command shipped like about one million copies and right after my 23rd birthday .... my bonus that year was a certificate for a complimentary holiday Turkey from Safeway. I think it's great that I'll make more money someday from selling off a one-and-only EPROM of Actionauts (trust me, you don't want to know) than I did from Missile Command. It's a perfect statement about how the world works. He also talked about his involvement with the infamous Night Trap: I certainly hope nobody on this board ever saw the infamous Night Trap and Sewer Shark; they have caused me no end of embarrasment ... (Captain Kangaroo actually poohpoohed Night Trap on Nightline ... c'mon Captain, did I rag on you for carrying on with a guy named Mr. Green Jeans!). Night Trap was on the evening news every two hours for awhile ... my girlfriend at the time left me in a heartbeat ...it was a dark time in the life of Rob Fulop .... I couldn't get laid to save my life, I had become the prince of everything dark and evil... the person responsible for causing children everywhere to drink the blood of their parents and torture Barney. I took a long pause in my career after Night Trap. Were there really three sixes tattoed on my arm? Was I as bad as Captain Kangaroo said I was? Interestingly, Rob went on to create the ultra-popular Petz, which was (and is) a big hit with kids.

June 9, 1998

In terribly sad and unexpected news, 6502 guru James Nitchals died this past Friday. In the glory days of the Apple II Jim co-founded Cavalier Computer with Barry Printz and Richard Moore; wrote Bug Attack, Asteroid Field, Star Thief, and Ring Raiders; and co-authored Teleport and Microwave. This last title was the first Apple II game to feature in-game music, something considered impossible at the time. Later he worked for Electronic Arts and had a substantial hand in games his name isn't usually associated with, including Hard Hat Mack and Music Construction Set. I've talked to a number of people who worked with and learned from Jim over the years, and they consistently regarded him as brilliant. In recent years, Jim was the technical lead for the Cyperpunks' Supercharger CD, a deluxe compilation of games and development tools for the Starpath Supercharger (a hardware add-on for the Atari 2600). He spent considerable time, right up through this past April, helping teach 6502 and 2600 programming to a new generation of programmers. People would bring him code snippets, asking if any improvements were possible, and Jim would whittle and optimize them in astounding ways; he was credited for doing just this for Oystron, a new hobbyist 2600 game released earlier this year. In the last few months Jim unexpectedly gained wide exposure as the "leader" of the anti-spam movement. A recent interview with him on the subject is available. In the words of Doug Ansell, who learned the ins and outs of Apple II programming from Jim when they worked together at Cavalier, "The industry has truly lost a legend. Time and time again he made the impossible possible." Jim Nitchals' web page is still online, and is well worth a heartfelt visit.

June 8, 1998

The latest version of the Giant List, all 4500+ lines of it, has been posted. Because of the tremendous size of the list, I've started being a stickler for relevancy. I used to list non-game software written by game authors, just because it was interesting, but I've stripped most of those entries. Additionally, modern games with [P] notation are also getting the axe. The point is, after all, to document 8-bit games, right? I'll gladly listen to comments or suggestions about these decisions. There's heaps of fun new stuff in this version of the list. Of note are lots of Vic-20 authors which I received from Vic historian Ward Shrake. Roger Merritt gets credit for some of the well-known titles for that classic machine, like Meteor Run and Satellites and Meteorites.

June 2, 1998

Steve Dunn did the Windows 95 "Arabian Themes" for the Microsoft PLUS! Pack. A little digging into his 8-bit past turns up some C64 games, including Space Relief (1986), Call Me Psycho (1987) and Better Dead than Alien (1988). Steve Coleman, author of Rainbow Walker and Pharaoh's Curse for the Atari 8-bit computers, also wrote the cheesy but fun Ninja released by Mastertronic for the Atari 800 in 1986. Steve was with Sculptured Software at the time, a company that made it big in the early to mid 1990s with Super Star Wars for the SNES, and a zillion ports of Mortal Kombat II. Two other people on the list who used to work for Sculptured are Peter Ward (Black Magic) and Bill Williams (Necromancer).

May 26, 1998

David Schroeder has three games on the latest version of the Giant List: the classics Crisis Mountain and Dino Eggs, plus Short Circuit. But he also did a fourth and much lesser known title: 5 Family Christmas Games, a collection of games with a Santa Claus theme for the Apple II. Scott Spanburg, author of Goonies for the Atari 800, is currently at Microprose, where he's been for quite some time.

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