Comments on: Comments on 8842

Post number 8842

moz — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:11:02 -0800

The giant list of classic computer programmers takes you back to a time when one person could realistically author a computer game and have it published. Of course most of the people on this list will have worked on small teams to produce games, but the diversity of the games on these people's resumes is awesome. In particular, I notice Michael Cranford (responsible for The Bard's Tale I and II, the Centauri Alliance, and ports of Donkey Kong and Super Zaxxon) and Robert Woodhead (Wizardry 1-5). As an interesting sidenote, Robert Woodhead went on to Animeigo, a japanese animation publishing company in the US. What memories of these old sk00l games do you have?

By: moz

moz — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:15:54 -0800

i, for one, remember i didn't start playing wizardry 1 till i was four. you could generate characters to run around a dungeon with, and give them names that belong to heigh fantasie and what not, which my brother and dad did. when you played, you had to go to a "tavern" to add characters to your party of stalwart adventurers. in order to do so, you had to type their names. i particularly remember my dad going away on an 8th grade class trip and asking him to write down the names of the people so that i could play with them :)

By: kindall

kindall — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:25:00 -0800

Robert Woodhead also wrote Virex for the Mac and operates SelfPromotion.com. He's got a couple Mac OS X utilities too.

By: dithered

dithered — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:42:05 -0800

Jorn Barger wrote the Apple II port of Berzerk?

By: fooljay

fooljay — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:46:50 -0800

Man. It was fun just looking over that list. Talk about nostalgia.... Waxpancake and I were talking about classic games the other day. Favorites: (Coin) Robotron, defender, stargate, tempest, galaga, qix, joust, star wars, asteroids, battle zone, centipede, Zork (all), Blue Max, Zaxxon, boulderdash, Lode runner, Ultima, Frogger, raid over moscow, fort apocalypse, miner 2049er, spelunker, shamus, 7 cities of gold, Pitfall, chopper command, dawn patrol, castle wolfenstein I can't go on... This, my friends, is why I refuse to but any video games or a playstation 2. They would find me with a long beard and unkempt hair, lying dead in front of the monitor.

By: moz

moz — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:52:20 -0800

dithered: looks like it. and also wizard of wor.

By: girlhacker

girlhacker — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:56:11 -0800

Whew... my fiance and his best man are on that list. What oldtimers they are. :-) The best man is now working on xbox, but my fiance has left the gaming world behind (though he is still a consumer; in fact he just bought a Gameboy Advance, why? "because it's got an ARM processor, isn't that cool?"). My arcade memories are of Pacman and Frogger and my Commodore 64 memories are of Zork.

By: hijinx

hijinx — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:16:07 -0800

Scott Adams all the way. The Count was one of the very first games I ever played: a fine, spooky text adventure.

By: a3matrix

a3matrix — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:19:17 -0800

fooljay! You have an excellent list there my friend. I have always counted Robotron as my favorite coin-op game ever. To that end I bought one a few years ago and it is one of my most prized possessions. This was a great post. Thank you moz

By: gen

gen — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:23:03 -0800

I remember playing 100 yen coin op games in Japan as a kid (Galaga); I remember my Intellivision fondly (Bombs Away!); I fondly remember spending a LOT of time on Ultima III and Ultima IV on the Apple IIc; I remember a lot of time playing Marathon and Bolo (authored by Stuart Cheshire) on the Mac in college. Now, I'm too afraid to pick up any of the new consoles or PC games for fear that I'll lose whatever spare time I do have.

By: bradth27

bradth27 — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:26:09 -0800

I played all of these games, and still play. It really is so sad.... (anyone got the invincibility on Golden Eye 64 yet? I have yet to beat the clock on that one..) ...My first game? Pong. That should tell you how old I am...anyway, my absolute favorite was Zaxxon on ColecoVision. (3D!)

By: moz

moz — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:34:47 -0800

robotron was a fave of mine as well. i think seeing a computer game on the apple II that used the word "fucked" was really cool back then. a3: your welcome. i actually found the site while searching for another old fave just out of curiousity -- anyone remember the old game "gumball"? gumballs would drop down through this elaborate system of pipes and contraptions, and you had to catch them in carts; the colors of the carts and the gumballs had to match as well. if you beat a level, you get to see a guy walk from the factory to his house -- the harder the level, the nicer the house (and the better the job title you get).

By: fooljay

fooljay — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:44:13 -0800

Oh my GAWD. How could I forget Breakout and SuperBreakout. Yes, indeed. Robotron rawks. I must have spent a fortune in arcades and in front of the computer... Kill me now...

By: dr. zoidberg

dr. zoidberg — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 16:16:23 -0800

You can still get published if you come up with a good Flash based game, like the mini golf sim, which seems to be a big hit with webloggers. As far as nostalga goes, I remember playing Haunted House on my TRaSh 80 Model 1 (Would you believe that there are emulators for this sucker?). I remember drooling when I saw Wizardry on an Apple II (look, graphics!).

Yes, I'm old.

By: kindall

kindall — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 17:32:32 -0800

Bruce Artwick's Night Mission Pinball rawked. I wasted hours on that in my tender teenage years. The reason: it had a screen you could go into and tweak nearly every imaginable aspect of the simulation. Everything from number of ball trails to flipper actuation speed to gravity itself. Playing with that was more fun than the actual pinball game. Other favorites: David Snider's Serpentine and Benny Ngo's Drol.

By: davehat

davehat — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 20:16:03 -0800

I used to live to play Elite, Sentinal, Paradroid and Wizball. Douglas Adams wrote my favourite text based game. There are some great memories on that page.

By: jjg

jjg — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 20:25:09 -0800

As mentioned here a while back, there's a remarkably comprehensive history of video games over at emuunlim. Did you know that the company we now know and love as AOL got its start as a manufacturer of Atari 2600 peripherals?

By: Satapher

Satapher — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 20:36:48 -0800

JOHN CARMACK

By: Grum

Grum — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 21:06:49 -0800

One of my favourite gaming experiences was the classic M.U.L.E. It taught me about commerce, strategy and the fact that great games didn't need great graphics. It was the last game I ever played with my dad. Nothing tragic, just the fact that my dad didn't like any of the other games I started playing after that.

By: twitch

twitch — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 22:19:09 -0800

Jeez, how much of my preteen life was spent on Bard's Tale and Wasteland... Home of the Underdogs is a great site for classic PC games. TRS-80 emulators? How can you forget the multicolored cursor? Thanks, zoidberg. That was my first computer - casette tape drive and all. Didn't Greg Knauss write games for that machine?

By: kindall

kindall — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 23:08:00 -0800

One of the authors of M.U.L.E. apparently changed their gender, then passed away a couple years ago, according to the list: Berry, Danielle [formerly Dan Bunten; founder of Ozark Softscape; RIP 1998]

By: sad_otter

sad_otter — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 23:09:54 -0800

mmmm... Wizardy (remember the "identify 9" cheat? Tiltowait!), Lode Runner, Miner 2049er, Drol, Night Mission Pinball, Serpentine. Hours in front of the Apple ][e. Raster Blaster, anyone? Downloading Pinball Construction Set levels?

By: moz

moz — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 23:32:05 -0800

oh yah, i remember the ID9 cheat. heh, it was a great way to pick up members of a party who'd died in the maze... i used to love raster blaster as a kid. anyone remember swashbuckler? i couldn't quite sound the word right then, so it was more like spawkbawk. and karateka too. done by jordan mechner, who also authored prince of persia.

By: moz

moz — Fri, 06 Jul 2001 23:47:14 -0800

kindall: here's another sex change. Fenton, Jamie Faye [formerly Jay Fenton] [U] Computer Blackjack (1975, COIN, Bally) Fireball (1976, PIN, Bally) home pinball game ... although, i think that these instances of sex changes are just representitive of the US population in general.

By: kindall

kindall — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 00:16:31 -0800

Yeah, I didn't mean that writing a computer game was likely to predispose you to undergo sex reassignment surgery or vice versa; in a listing that size, you're bound have one or two people switching. Although I think in general that computer people are somewhat more tolerant of that sort of thing than society at large, even today, so geeks might feel more comfortable switching than some other kinds of people. Just thought it was interesting. Maybe someone will see that and go, "Hey, the guy who created one of my favorite games felt like he was born in the wrong kind of body" and, because they already respect his work, be a little more open-minded toward the whole idea than they might be if it was someone they didn't already know. I've met a couple male-to-females at programming conferences like MacHack and the attitude toward them was always predicated on: can they hack? (One of these very people happens to be a very talented network programmer and now works for the same company I work for, although not in the same office.)

By: D.C.

D.C. — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 00:39:58 -0800

Dadgum's Bumbler Bee-Luxe (written by the man who maintains this list) is very very good. I've wasted many hours splatting insects in the last few years. Superb design.

By: dong_resin

dong_resin — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 00:53:55 -0800

How'z `bout Man-Eating Rabbit for the `ole TRS-80? I miss that. Yes it sucked. I was only 6, for fuck's sake.

By: plinth

plinth — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 05:28:46 -0800

I'm on the list. When I was 14, I wrote Suicide! for the Apple II. The most distinguishing characteristic of it was that it was the first video game with punctuation in the title. I still have the master disks for Suicide! and Invasion of Everything, but nothing that can read them.

By: sad_otter

sad_otter — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 07:48:27 -0800

how about the EAMON text adventures?

By: dong_resin

dong_resin — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 08:01:07 -0800

Heh....Invasion of Everything sounds like an Onion he- (ow!)

By: Satapher

Satapher — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 15:08:02 -0800

JOHN ROMERO

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Sat, 07 Jul 2001 18:26:19 -0800

Oh man, dong_resin, thanks for that blast from the past! I remember Man Eating Rabbit now - in glorious green and black, 147x47 resolution! 1979 maybe? Damn, I'm old...

By: ubique

ubique — Sun, 08 Jul 2001 07:38:23 -0800

what scares me about this link: ten years from now there will probably be a list of people and the websites they built. there will be a link posted to a mefi pendant of that time and it will say: "the giant list of classic web designers takes you back to a time when one person could realistically author and maintain a successfull website." and so on. and we'll all be rambling. "oh! remember that guy josh davis. i loved dreamless.org."

By: salmacis

salmacis — Mon, 09 Jul 2001 06:11:07 -0800

Am I right in thinking the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was never sold in America? It brings a tear to my eye to think about the good times I had with my beloved Speccy. Games like Manic Miner, Lunar Jetman, Trashman, Skooldaze, etc etc. All these games are now available for download..and strangely enough, they don't seem half as compelling as they were in the mid eighties. Chequered Flag pales in comparison to Grand Prox 3!

By: johnny novak

johnny novak — Mon, 09 Jul 2001 08:39:00 -0800

Manic Miner author, Matt Smith, made a lot of money and then lost it a bit by all accounts - MM and JSW were great, still in my top ten.