Older News
Back to the main page

September 9, 2004

Jack Palevich, who wrote the Gauntlet-inspiring Dandy for the Atari 800 over twenty years ago, posted the article Why Lisp Sucks for Games to his web site. While the title may position it as a fanatical piece, it's a good retrospective on games written at least partially in Lisp-like languages. Jack has a history of involvement with programming languages, as he ported the Small C compiler to the Atari 8-bit computers under the guise of "Deep Blue C," which was sold through the Atari Program Exchange (the source code was sold as a companion product, "Deep Blue Secrets"). He currently works on the Xbox operating system at Microsoft.

August 22, 2004

Rob Patton was at Cinematronics at the same time as Tim Skelly and Scott Boden and wrote Barrier (1979) and War of the Worlds (1981). But what's most interesting is that he was responsible for Entertainment Sciences' Bouncer a few years later. Never officially released, Bouncer generated buzz in 1984 for featuring much more extensive character animation than was the norm and for real-time scaling of sprites. Here's Rob:
The field tests on Bouncer did really well, and it was the best animated game of that era. I hired an ex-Disney/HannaBarbera animator to lead that part, and we may have been one of the first companies to optically capture the animation using our own capture and anti-alias fill tools.

The reason it didnt get manufactured was the company was on limited funding and had difficulty raising several millions for a manufacturing run. Atari (Bushnell and others) flew down for licensing meetings but ended up studying the game and incorporating similar ideas in their next round of products.

Bouncer was the first of many planned games that were interchangeable on the same hardware & cabinets.

Interestingly, after Bushnell saw what we were up to, he soon left Atari and founded Sente and came out with his own line of interchangeable games called the Sente System. At that time I was then with Sega and actually had a couple business meeting with Nolan regarding Sega partnering with him on games for Sente & Sega.

July 11, 2004

Here's Bob Bishop on the tools he used to write his Apple II games:
When I got my first Apple II (on 1977 July 5) the only assembler available was the built-in mini-assembler. So that is what I used for writing the assembly language portions of my first games (Rocket Pilot, Star Wars, etc.).

In April of 1978 I wrote the Apple-Vision demo and, in looking at the source listing (which I just dug out and hadn't looked at for more than 25 years!), I see that I wrote it using the Microproducts 4-character Assembler. (I probably also used that same assembler when I created all the display software for the "Tic-Tac-Dough" gameshow on CBS television.)

As an aside, I eventually helped Paul Lamar convert his 4-character assembler into a 6-character assembler which he then marketed. We also worked together on a digital cassette operating system that I designed for the Apple II. But before we could get it into the market, Apple came out with their first floppy disk operating system. And so we scrapped the project.

Around 1980 Apple introduced their EDASM assembler, and I soon switched over to using that one. EDASM had the ability to generate relocatable code. And so now it was finally possible to create your own subroutine libraries (without having to always re-assemble their source codes). But Apple never got around to providing a linking loader to support this capability. So in 1983, I wrote one.

In 1985, Interactive Arts marketed EDASM and my linking loader (along with some of my subroutine libraries) as The Programmer's Assembly-language Construction Kit, a 2-volume book/software package for beginning to intermediate programmers. All of my subsequent Apple-II programming was done using The P.A.C.K. (In fact, the PACK's modular programming philosophy provided the basis for my creation of SiMPLE, the programming language for kids.

June 30, 2004

A meta update: I rewrote and extended the behind-the-scenes script that puts together this site. I hesitate to call it a "content management system" because it's so small. I'd like to take it further and a add page showing what changed in each new version of the list, but that will have to wait for now. If anything seems out of the ordinary, let me know.

I added the Lucky Wander Boy book review to the archive.

June 1, 2004

The April 14th entry touches upon one of the least discussed aspects of the 8-bit game era: the independent third party development company. Sure, individuals could request game submission packets from the big developers--Synapse, Broderbund, Sierra On-Line--and many well-known names on the Giant List did just that. But there were also companies that wrote and ported games for bigger, "brand name" publishers. Who ever heard of James Wickstead Design Associates, for example? Certainly, few give credit to that company for well-received games from Parker Bros. and Activision. And JWDA isn't alone. Ever hear of Manley & Associates? Lloyd Ollmann Jr., mentioned in the previous entry, worked for them for a while, though during the 16-bit era. (And so did I, but that's another story.) K-Byte, who published a handful of early Atari 800 games, did much more business behind the scenes writing games to be published by other companies. And then there's General Computer Corporation (GCC), where the Atari 7800 hardware and many of the early 7800 games were designed, along with a number of 2600 games.

May 24, 2004

Two entries that have gotten much longer recently: Lloyd Ollmann Jr. and Jimmy Huey. Coincidentally, each ported an Atarisoft game to the Commodore Vic 20: Donkey Kong for Lloyd (along with C.D. Stinnett) and Pac-Man for Jimmy.

April 14, 2004

Todd Marshall is best known for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle for the Atari 2600, but he also wrote games for a variety of 8-bit computers, such as the port of Frogger for the TI-99/4A. Most interestingly, he worked on a Commodore 64 game for James Wickstead Design Associates which eventually ended up being published as Little Computer People from Activision, with credit given to David Crane. Here's Todd:
We worked on it extensively, and developed the concept, art and programming for a year before Activision bought it.... As I recall we called it "Pet Person" since the original idea was for it to be a pet you bought just like buying one in the pet store. This is why the person gets sick without food and attention. All of the gameplay in the original version dealt with interaction and none with playing games. There were no card games in the original version. The card games were added by David Crane and co. I programmed the piano playing so in my mind the improvisation was a major concept, and we added little things like him tapping on the glass monitor to get your attention, etc. I think we originally thought of it as promoting social skills and was disappointed when Activision turned it into a card playing gimmick. However I understand now that there was some psychology behind the card playing idea. Our idea as I recall, was you learned to help him with house chores, maybe he himself got a pet dog, etc., perhaps be like a doll for boys and girls. We were very sad that our work would not be acknowledged and some interesting code removed. I would love to hear comments from co-workers Henry Will, Roger Booth, Wes Trager on what programming for this game was like or other events around it.

This was 20 years ago and I was just a programmer and musician. This was as I recall it but I could be wrong about anything...

Henry wrote Word Zapper for the 2600. Roger did several ports of Q*bert's Qubes, the little known sequel to Q*bert. Wes wrote Commando Raid for the 2600. And Wes, Henry, and Todd together wrote Eggomania for the 2600.

April 3, 2004

Read about the 8-bit games written by some guy who maintains a Giant List of game programmers. Interesting or vain? You decide.

March 28, 2004

Bob Andrews wrote two Apple II games: Sea Wolf in 1979 and Death Race in 1980. The latter was written with Bob Flanagan, who was later involved with both Marble Madness and Gauntlet at Atari Games. Curiously, both of Bob Andrews's games bear the names of late 70s arcade games. I asked him about it:
We wrote those games in 1978-80 when we were both in high school. While they were in the style of the arcade games you mentioned, we tried to add some originality to the design and to the features. In my case, it was more of a process of seeing if we could actually write games on this new thing called a personal computer. Programming Apple II "Hi-Res" graphics games in 6502 assembler from scratch was something new and we were really focused on coming up with programming routines that would run on the Apple II quickly and cleanly. You can argue both sides of the coin with regard to whether or not we were actually successful :-). At least in my case, the actual resulting games were secondary to the accomplishment of learning a new technology.
Most sadly, Castle Wolfenstein and Robotwar author Silas Warner died on February 26. It never occurred to me until recently, but Castle Wolfenstein may have been the first stealth-oriented game. In any case, it was an early blurring between action and strategy that was at least a decade ahead of its time. Silas's website is still online.

February 29, 2004

One of the more interesting holes in the Giant List is the absence of pinball designers. There are a couple of exceptions. Jamie Fenton worked on a home pinball game in 1976. George Gomez and Eugene Jarvis had a hand in several pins from Williams. This is mostly because I only included pinball designers and programmers if they also worked on at least one true video game. If I loosened up this rule, then the Giant List would grow quite a bit, and maybe it should, considering how little known most pinball designers are. The pinball equivalent of Sid Meier has to be Pat Lawlor, now running his own company. In addition to classics like Fun House and Whirlwind, Pat designed the biggest selling pinball of all time: The Addams Family. The programmer on that early 90s game was Larry DeMar, co-creator of Defender, Stargate, and Robotron. You can read about the development of The Addams Family here.

Okay, in reality the Giant List is not about pinball primarily because the classic eras of pinball and video games don't coincide. There isn't the "pre-NES" line in the sand, as there is for video games.

February 16, 2004

Commonly, entries on the Giant List start with games for 8-bit systems and then progress--if the author kept writing games--to the PC. There's at least one entry that goes the other way. Greg Johnson was on the development team for the much loved Starflight (1985), released only for the PC, and its sequel Starflight II, before working on Caveman Ugh-Lympics three years later for the the C64.

Thanks to an email conversation with former Parker Brothers programmers Steve Kranish and Dawn Stockbridge, there are some more game authors from that company on the list. Steve wrote Parker Brothers' version of Frogger for the Atari 800 and 5200, which is separate from the famous John Harris version. Dawn assisted Steve on Frogger and also wrote Strawberry Shortcake Musical Matchups for the 2600.

January 30, 2004

Dan Boris went through his collection of Softside magazines, and the result is that the Giant List is now over 400 lines longer. Softside peaked before the Commodore 64 was released, with most of the type-in games being for the Apple II and Atari 800. Perhaps the most interesting additions from this flurry of new information are the nineteen games added to David Bohlke's entry. Previously I listed David's four type-in Atari games from ANALOG Computing, plus his PC game Engineer from 1986. But I didn't know about the dozen TRS-80 games and seven Atari 800 games he wrote for Softside between 1979 and 1981.

I also did some much needed housecleaning. I found several parts of the list that were in the wrong order, plus a number of duplicate entries. I wrote a Perl script to re-alphabetize the list and fix some formatting inconsistencies.


Back to the main page