ANTIC Interview 70 - Jon Freeman, Freefall Associates

This is David, the Amari Bates, this podcast. That six months, I read two books in six months, and we went to one movie. And the rest of the time, we were just, you know, working on the game. That's all we did. It was very, you know, intense. You know, I could just basically flip that switch every VBI and have the computer play itself. That turned out to be one of the absolutely huge selling points of the game. stores could put it in the window, get it started, and let it run.

I'm Kay Savetz, and this is an interview episode of Antic, the Atari 8-bit podcast. John Freeman was co-founder of the computer game publisher Automated Simulations, which became EPYX. At Automated Simulations, he co-created Starfleet Orion and Gateway to AppSci. Then he and his wife, Anne Westfall, started the game development company Freefall Associates, where they created Tax Dodge, Archon, Archon 2, and Murder on the Zendernoth. This interview took place April 21, 2015. Can you tell me about the founding of EPYX?

Sure. As with many other things that actually came about in a somewhat backward way, because of taxes. That's actually what prompted me to write my first book on games. But in that particular case, my ex-partner, Jim Connolly, got a computer, a Commodore Pit, you know, very early on in the process. And this was, you know, 70, I don't know, seven or something like that. And anyway, and he got a computer to some substantial degree to help referee whatever Dungeons and Dragons. We were part of a group that meant to play Dungeons & Dragons every Saturday night and alternated every other week. We alternated between two of the people who played DM. And Jim was one of them. And so the first thing basically that he used the computer for was to set up to handle the bookkeeping involved. for D&D so he could keep track of hit points and die rolls and damage done and all that kind of stuff instead of having to scribble it on paper. And also potentially then to keep certain things hidden that might otherwise have to be exposed in terms of the workings of the game. Anyway, and after he'd had that for a while and had his D&D thing working, And he thought to himself, gee, this is kind of an expensive toy. And gee, how could I write this off? And well, if we, you know, if I developed a computer game, you know, I could write it off. So anyway, he started trying to do, started working on a space war game and then discovered that I had in. Anyway, discovered that I had some game credentials that he was unaware of. And so he said, gee, how would you like to work on a computer game? And I said, well, you know, I don't know anything about, at that point, computers really. But, sure. So, anyway, so I did, he had basically set up a system at that point. I mean, he kind of had the framework of this space war game. And I, you know, expanded it and tweaked it and developed scenarios for, anyway, this, you know, the game that became Starfleet Orion. And I think to some degree we were both kind of surprised when we actually got it done and it worked. And so then I think even he had not really thought, I mean, I was just doing it because it sounded like, you know, a fun thing to do and it was in my area. And I don't think that initially he had really thought past the, well, if I'm working on a computer game, I can say I'm trying to do this, whatnot. And then to the point of actually, oh, we have a computer game. How do we turn this into cash? And he said, well, I guess we have to start a company. And so we kind of hastily started a company and started putting things into plastic bags and selling them to hobby stores and whatnot. Because, again, at that point, the whole framework kind of for selling games and selling computer games didn't really exist. Why did you call the company Epics? We didn't initially. called it. It was originally automated simulations. Oh, I knew that. Okay. And that was basically because it sounded kind of like board game kinds of companies. It was their sort of name. And then later, a couple of years later, he decided that in order to kind of expand beyond that kind of core market and get into more games that appealed to more of a general audience and so on and so forth, that he wanted a name that, you know, sounded kind of less like hardcore, you know, pushing pieces around the board kinds of games, and more general or something or other, and he came up with EPYX, and in the most... One of the more thoroughly bizarre... There are several bizarre coincidences in our early computer game days, but one of the more bizarre coincidences was that he, having come up with this name, and it was, as far as I know, That was his idea. I don't remember having any, you know, I mean, I might have tossed in, you know, my two cents worth, but I don't really remember that. But at any rate, having decided to do this, he decided to do some research. And it turned out that that name was owned by the parents of one of our handful of employees. Anyway, a kid, you know, who was at that point still in high school, Eric Wilminder, who was still a high school kid at that point. Anyway, his parents had trademarked that name for something, you know, some project that they had done or were doing or something. Anyway, and we ended up buying the rights from them. It was thoroughly just, you know, peculiar and, you know, completely unplanned. Anyway, so that's... Anyway, change it to Epic's EPOX.

Okay, so you...

There's a lot of stumbling around into things back then.

I love those stories. I love stumbling around. I love to hear about the bizarre coincidences. You're welcome to tell me about them all. So you're... So you have this game, and you're trying to sell it to little computer stores and baggies. Right. And so then what?

Well, then, again, it's the same kind of thing, like, oh, we have a game. Well, I guess we need a company so that we can sell the games. And we started to sell the games. And then, of course, the next thing was, well, now what? And so the logical next step was, well, we should do a sequel. And so we did. And the big thing with the sequel was that it was a potentially one-player game as opposed to a two-player game. The original Starfleet Orion was a two-person game with two people playing at the same computer taking turns. And so then we decided to, you know, add an AI and allow it, you know, the much more sort of commercially potential option of, you know, single-player play. And anyway, and then made Invasion Orion. And then once that was done, the kind of next obvious step was to get into more of a D&D-ish sort of a thing. And that's how we got into the... That required developing a different engine, although these engines are pretty darn small, obviously, in the old days. But nonetheless, developing a fantasy role-playing engine that we use for Temple of Apshai and Morlock's Tower and various and sundry sequels and whatnot, which led into some space-themed games, Rescue at Rigel. and then off using the same basic engine and then off into our monster game, Pursual Mode Chomp, and an outdoor space combat game that was kind of a Starship Troopers-y, kind of inspired by Starship Troopers, and Star Warrior. Anyway, so the engine ever-evolving became kind of the foundation of most of the stuff that we did for a couple of years. Right.

Yeah, they're definitely in the dungeon crawl sort of realm one way or the other, gateway to AppSci and Crush, Crumble, and Chomp and that sort of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah. Neat. And, yeah, you spread out from PET to other machines clearly fairly fast. Invasion of Orion, what came out, looks like, for the Atari 8-bit. And, of course.

Well, yeah, first we, I think with Invasion Orion, we started developing for the TRS-80. Pretty much, I mean, I think pretty much as soon as we got the first game done, and as I said, all of a sudden we had that, and then we thought, oh, well, we need to do other things, and, well, here's this other machine that's out there. And then shortly after that, you know, we decided we should also be developing for the Apple II. And so we had somebody that Jim knew, Mike Perrin. I don't remember how he knew him, but anyway, he had an Apple and was a programmer. So he started doing the Apple versions of things that we did. And by the time that we got to Temple of Apshai, which was our third game after the Starfleet Orion invasion, we were doing... Our initial platform was the TRS-80. And then basically our converting, you know, doing a pet version just behind that and with Mike then going off and doing an Apple version once we got the TRS-80 version done. And then, in fact, going back to Eric Willmender, the reason for hiring him in the first place, which came, you know, a year and a half or two years or whatever later, hiring him in the first place actually was because of the Atari. Because we thought, okay, we should add the Atari and we didn't have any Atari expertise at that point. And not that very many people did. I mean, we're doing all this stuff when these machines were all basically brand new. But anyway, I'm not sure how... I have totally forgotten how we connected with Eric in the first place, but he had an Atari and he was playing around. I think this could be wrong, but now that I think of it, we ran into him, we encountered him at some kind of a game convention or conference or show or something rather when we were, you know, giving a talk or just giving demonstrations or something. And, you know, and he asked something on the order of, you know, are you going to do this for the Atari or when are you going to do this for the Atari or something or other. And anyway, so we said, well, you know, how would you like to do this for the Atari? So anyway, so we hired him to start doing Atari versions of what we were doing at the time. I think that was basically at the time of Crush, Gumbel, and Chomp. I think that was our first Atari product.

Do you remember the first time you interacted with an Atari machine?

Probably then. Probably after we had, you know, when he was, you know, bringing in versions of First Amendment Trump. I suspect, I don't, again, I won't swear to that. I know that Anne went to a thing, I don't know, some kind of a conference, whatever, basically a sort of an evangelism event, a training seminar thing that Atari was doing to push the Atari as a development platform and so on and so forth. And she went to learn about that. That's when Chris Crawford was working for Atari as an evangelist. And she got thoroughly fired up about the Atari and what could be done on the Atari and what could be done in a assembler, which I thought was completely bizarre. anyway that she got into because we'd been programming at basic from the beginning and then she started she decided she wanted to learn assembler and she wanted to learn to program on the Atari and whatever and that's a big that ended up being a big reason that we left automated was because she wanted to do assembler programs. He wanted to do games that do things that required

assembler. And your partner there at EPYX didn't want to go in that direction?

No. Basically, he... Jim didn't know assembler and he didn't really want people... He didn't want people doing things that he couldn't control closely supervise and monitor and all that kind of stuff. He took that as kind of a... He found that threatening. Anyway, he got to be something of a control freak as we went along.

So was Gateway to AppSci about the last project that you were involved with before you hopped out and started Freefall?

Perhaps. Gateway to Abshi and something else. There were two expansions that were partly worked on by other people who did some of the level design. That sounds about right, actually, but that's one of the things that I really don't have as firm a grasp. as I used to with his timeline. Yeah, it's timeline time.

Jumpman was after you left, though, correct?

I think so.

So do I. Okay, so did you... I'm dredging up old problems. Did you leave on good terms, or was it not?

Not. I mean, there were a couple of reasons that we left. One of them was the sort of positive, in a way, was that Ian wanted to do some stuff that we couldn't really do into the old framework that if she wanted to do machine language games on the Atari. But the other thing was that I, by that time, Now, again, you know, by modern standards, we were still a very small company, but we had 20 people or something by the time that Ann and I left. And I was, as this again is from my perspective, of course, but as Jim became kind of less and less reasonable and got more and more carried away with the notion of himself as Mr. Entrepreneur and whatever. he started driving everybody else crazy. And so I ended up spending an increasing amount of my time, which is somewhat ironic, but on many levels, but basically holding people's hand and soothing, you know, hurt feelings and this, that, and the other thing. And that's not, that was, especially at the time, I mean, at this point I have a lot more experience with that. But at the time, that was just an extremely un-me sort of a thing to be doing. And it was not, you know, that was not running the company, per se. Not how you wanted to be spending your day. Was not, that was not, you know, not what I wanted to do. That's not what I get in. I mean, that's not granted that we didn't really, neither one of us got into the thing to start with, with that kind of objective or something rather. But Jim really liked, even though he didn't have a particular talent for it, but he really liked the notion of running the company. And that involved just a bunch of things that I didn't really, personnel kinds of things that I didn't really want to do. And especially because basically the alternative was spending time designing and developing games, which I happen to love. And so I kind of begrudged anything that took me away from that. So that was kind of the other half. And then, you know, Jim took very poorly that we wanted to leave, partly because I was the one who was designing all the games. And so, you know, we had some legal hassles going back and forth and ended up in a somewhat mutually unsatisfactory state. He was so determined to sort of keep me from having or retaining or whatnot any part of the company that he ended up losing it all himself. Wow. So anyway, because he ended up having to borrow money to borrow legal expenses and whatnot, and ended up ceding control of the company to some other people, outside investors, whatever. And the first thing, basically, that they did as soon as he had sort of gotten rid of me was get rid of him. Yeah.

And then it seems like the next thing they did, ironically, was start developing machine language games for the Atari, like Jumpman and Pitstop and things.

Yeah, but that, I mean, that could be, but I wasn't, I mean, I sort of stopped paying attention to them pretty much as soon as we left because we had, you know, things to do on our own. But yes, it's certainly the case that they ended up doing things that were more along the lines of the kinds of things that we had been talking about doing, you know.

Okay, but we're following your timeline. So you and Ann started Free Fall?

Yes.

And where were you based at the time?

Let's see. Well, we were always in the Bay Area, in the San Francisco Bay Area. But initially, let's see, we were trying to think at the point at which we left to do that. I think we had consolidated in Palo Alto. See, for a while, I was living in Mountain View, and she moved to Los Altos. And then when we ended up moving in together, we ended up moving into a rented house in Palo Alto. And I think that's where we were when we started Freefall. Okay. And we moved down to Oregon Hill for a year and a half or something, and then various other places, Portola Valley and whatever, later.

But that was later. All right. So I'm curious about your decision to make the company as a developer only and not a publisher. and a lot of your stuff was published through Electronic Arts. Can you talk a little bit about the decision? Sure.

That was a direct result of kind of what had prompted our departure from automated slash epics because I thought, I don't want to I would rather not run a company. I would rather develop games. And the way to sort of concentrate on that from my perspective was be a developer, not a publisher, basically. And it... I don't know that we would... we were less sort of completely excluding that possibility than just concentrating on the development part. And we, you know, happened to... Our network of friends included people who were, you know, trying to start companies left and right. And, you know, that included people that were developing games and that were published or both developing and publishing or that were mostly at that point developing and publishing. And so our first published game was for Island Graphics, which was run by people we knew which had been started and was intended initially to be basically a publishing venue for a product that Steve Dampier, who's one of the co-founders, I mean, the other co-founder at that point was a Diane Asher, who had been our marketing director for a while at Automated. And anyway, she and Steve started Island Graphics basically as a place to publish a graphics program for the Apple that he'd been working on for ages. But he was a perfectionist along with other people. But he was so obsessive about it that he kind of refused to let things out of his hands until they were completely perfect to his satisfaction, which meant that they just said, you know, he just developed it for years. And so we ended up with the first product that Island Graphics published was, in fact, our, you know, a game called Tax Dodge. And because he wouldn't let go of his program. So I don't know that they ever did publish that. They went on to do other things, but as far as I know, again, I mean, obviously I used to know, but at this point I've forgotten. So either that never happened or it didn't happen until much later, just because he was constantly tweaking it.

It's like that aphorism that perfect is the enemy of done,

right? Yes, exactly. Which was a point I made in a talk that I gave to an EA development conference with specific reference to that. Fortunately or unfortunately, especially in those days, you're surrounded by good and bad examples of all sorts of stuff. ah, this is a thing that, you know, this is a thing you don't want to do because if you do that, this is what happens. And, you know, and we all learned by stumbling around and making mistakes. And if you're lucky, you could learn by watching other people stumble around and make mistakes. And so, you know, stumble around and make your own mistakes. Right. But not to those. so I think it helped for me that there was I mean what helped part of what helped with that particular lesson of getting things done and letting them go was that I had that once we got going there were just so many things to do you know there were so many game possibilities and so it wasn't like, oh, well, gee, we don't have any idea what we'll do next or something. And when that was the case, it was basically just because, well, all right, well, gee, we could do this or this or this.

The problem of which project rather than what?

Exactly. Yeah. But that meant that finishing something meant that you could get on to something else. which was helpful. And exciting,

right.

Yeah. We'll find the next thing.

All right, so now it's, finally we have a machine language program for the Atari. We have TaxDodge. And how do you feel about TaxDodge now?

I mean, it was never intended to be anything but, you know, kind of a small fun game that did, I mean, there were a couple of things. I mean, one, again, note the theme. Again, we're back at taxes. And that's just one of those things that as a young adult, that's one of the things that kind of hits you in the nose is all of a sudden, oh, taxes. And it becomes a part of your life that as a kid, whatever it isn't. But anyway, so, you know, it was partly that that's just kind of one of those topics that just kept recurring. And partly it was because it was, it kind of, you know, I instantly connected that with a notion that I wanted to try to avoid, which was of lives and the learning by dying, which I didn't like. I never like, I have never liked that. It's just that, anyway, I don't like that as a paradigm. And so kind of from the beginning, I've worked to avoid that. And that was, anyway, that particular game embodied that notion that you didn't have, you weren't dying and having to restart. you were running around collecting money, and if you got caught by the other people, by the tax men who were chasing you, they took some of your money. And the more often they hit you, the less money you had, and so on. And you could lose that way, but nobody was dying. Nobody was killing. Nobody was dying. And I don't... I'm not a pacifist. I'm not completely opposed to the notion of killing things or whatever. We've certainly done that, but I didn't like the idea, particularly, of having the player always be dying. Anyway, it seemed to me that there were other things that could be done and in that particular case, using a maze, the sort of notion of a maze game, which obviously was around and popular and doing various different things. But instead of being killed by ghosts running around in Pac-Man or something or whatever, anyway, they just came in and, as I say, took your money. I like that. And, I mean, it's a very, you know, it's a simple game, but I thought it was fun. It is fun. We did a follow-up on that that never got published, that we called Packrat, that was a somewhat similar in theme in the sense of collecting. Again, nobody is dying. You know, you're collecting things and accumulating things and, you know, taking them back to the center. You're running around a maze, collecting objects worth different amounts of points and storing them back at your home base. But then you have little hostile gremlins running around, and if they ran over your home base, they would steal something, whatever was on top. And so it was kind of a constant. Because there's several of them and only one of you, it was always a, you know, you have the natural tension of you're running around trying to accumulate things, but you're also having to try to keep them from stealing all these things back. And it was both a one and a two-player game, and the two-player game was potentially both a competitive and a cooperative game. And you couldn't steal directly from each other. So if you got something safely to your home base, then the other player couldn't steal anything from it. On the other hand, you could conceivably sabotage the other player by letting the gremlin steal back from the other player and letting the gremlin steal something from the other player and then nabbing the gremlin which allowed you to capture whatever the gremlin was holding. And in that way, in effect, steal from the other person, kind of. And the idea basically was to encourage cooperation and the way you could both sort of prosper was running around, knocking on the gremlins and collecting stuff and not worrying too much about who had more. And the game was set up so that basically it was a, although you could, there were different options, but the basic notion was that the game looked at the total collected, and if you collected enough between the two of you, then you could move on to the next round. And if you didn't, then you'd have to go back and start over again, start the game anew. And so if you paid too much attention to trying to beat the other player, you would lose the game. And this was called Pack Rat? Yeah.

Why was it never published?

I don't know, really. It was partly a question of time and timing and whatever. Partly Island Graphics, for instance, didn't want to kind of get into the business exactly of becoming a game publisher. Because that's not really why they started the thing. started the company and they ended up getting some of the things and wanting to go in a direction away from gaming which wasn't really why they didn't really want to do that in the first place in a way. And we went to Ken and Roberta Williams Sierra Online. And they were really enthusiastic in many respects, except that what they really wanted to do was hire Anna away. And so we got so much nifted them and didn't do it there. And then while we were basically, I mean, part of the problem was simply that at that point, there weren't a lot of game publishers. You know, there wasn't a lot of alternatives around Atari itself. was doing its own thing, and Activision, whatever. But the stuff that they were doing was developed by employees, not by outside people. So there wasn't really a ton of markets. And then about the time that we were trying to, you know, I mean, the people that we had playing in, playtesting, really liked it. And that's dead high. But anyway, about that time, when we were still trying to find a home for it, Kirk Hawkins came along with EA and that too. That's another one of those kind of bizarre coincidences. But anyway, he called us out of the blue, especially from our perspective. And, you know, when he said that he had this new company and might we be interested in developing some games for them or something. And he was willing to pay for development and wanted to do something a little more sophisticated in a way. I can go into that bizarre coincidence.

I would love that. Before we get there, is there any chance that TACRAT still exists on a floppy disk somewhere?

Yes, it probably does, but I can't tell you where. Okay. I mean, it's probably in our file somewhere. I'm not sure that we... I mean, I don't know whether... I don't know whether one could read the disk anymore or anything.

One can try. Yeah. One here has an Atari machine and magic equipment that moves data to modern machines. Oh, cool. Yeah. Open it at offer. Anything you've come across that you want archived, I'd love to see that program. But anything, any old data, source code, whatever you find, send it to me, and I will archive it and send it back.

Okay.

Yeah.

That would be potentially useful.

Okay, so Trip Hawkins, I've read the story about Trip calling you, and it's out there, but it's a good story. If you feel like telling it again, please.

It was just, you know, we had months, and again, this goes back to comments that I have said before, that back in the early days, essentially, there weren't, There wasn't a network, a kind of an established network of stores and magazines and distribution channels in place to sell computer games because it was all brand new. And that was when we started Freefall. It was Freefall Associates, not Freefall Games, which is what we call it now. But the reason for that basically was that to get banks and lawyers and whatnot to take us seriously, because at that point, the notion of making a living, developing games and so on, was so completely bizarre a notion that nobody would take it seriously. And so we had to come up with something that sounded more, you know, like an accounting firm or something or other, that sounded kind of more substantial and businesslike than something with, you know, games and new titles. Anyway, back around the time that we had done Tax Dodge, we had been contacted by somebody that we knew through the games and so on who worked at a magazine. I don't even remember the name of the magazine at this point, but it was not a game magazine. But they thought, gee, maybe we should have a classified section that's kind of oriented with a hobbyist magazine, basically. Maybe we should have a little section of classifieds or something or other for this new stuff. And so what they envisioned was, you know, a combination of, you know, want ads and ads for, you know, looking for people and people looking for companies and companies looking for products and, you know, products looking for customers and whatever. It was kind of a, you know, mishmash of things. but they wanted us to kind of help them get started by putting an ad in there. And because the point of this was to sort of help them get started, they were not charging us for it. That was something that they wanted us to do as a favor to them, and they were not going to charge us for it. And so we said, okay, fine. So we put something in there. I mean, we sent something off to them. And because in those days, the magazine lag was much more extreme than it is currently. So magazines were prepared months and months and months in advance, or put differently, appeared many, many months later than you sort of associated with the stuff that you were doing. They would cover like CES or something or other in the July issue. I mean, you know, because it just took so long. And so by the time that the magazine came out, that particular magazine that had this special classified section in it, we had completely forgotten that we had ever done anything about it or ever agreed to do anything about it. I mean, it was six months later. And it was nothing that we had taken very seriously in the first place. I mean, we were just, you know, okay, fine. It's just, you know, indulge this person. He wants it. We'll send him something. But we didn't really, you know, take it seriously. And so as it turned out, Trip had picked up this magazine and had seen this thing. And the day that EA incorporated.

What did your ad say?

He called it and said, you know, he saw our ad and wanted to talk to us about blah, blah, blah. And we're thinking, we don't have an ad. We don't advertise, you know. And so we were really suspicious, and we thought that he was probably, and, you know, we didn't know, and we'd never heard of Trip Hawkins. And we certainly had, I mean, along with everybody else, had never heard of Electronic Arts, which actually for a few, briefly, was not called Electronic Arts anyway. it was amazing software or something like that I think in his very first iteration which got junked very quickly but this was as I say literally the day that they incorporated and there were only two people and EA was two people Trip Hawkins and Rich Millen but anyway so we were really suspicious about this And we went and we said, what ad? And, you know, ad in this magazine. So we dug out the magazine and there was no ad there. And so, but we agreed to meet with him anyway. Well, it turned out that, in fact, our copy of the magazine was defective. It was missing the page that our ad was on. Again, just a completely bizarre, you know, coincidence. But anyway, we ended up meeting him, and he was really enthusiastic, and we gave him what we thought, after much discussion, was kind of two of our best ideas. And he said, you know, expecting him to pick one, because we couldn't settle on one. And he said, well, why not do both? Okay. We thought about doing both, and we said, okay. Okay. And so, I mean, at that point, he was the only person actually offering actual cash money to develop a game. It was a trivial advance by, again, later standards, but at the time, it was money. And so we thought, wow, this is cool.

So were those two Archon and Murder on the Zendron Death?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah. And that was Contract 1 and 2, Electronic Arts. Wow.

So did you have any inkling that Archon was going to be such a hit?

No. I mean, we actually thought initially. I mean, we didn't until late in the development process. And initially, both we and they, that is, you know, we at Freefall and they at EA, kind of thought, if push had come to shove, kind of thought that Murder on the Zenderniff was going to be the bigger hit. And, I mean, this, back just in the, you know, back in the, this is kind of what we're trying to, you know, in a couple of pages of, you know, text to say, all right, this is what the game looks like. I mean, this is what the game is going to be like, and so on. And I think that was sort of more relatable in a way, in a repeatable murder mystery or something like that. And Clue, if Clue had been developed when computers existed, which was my kind of, that's the way I thought about it, that sort of tagline. And that's how it got, I mean, that's how we came up with it in the first place, basically, was just thinking like, okay, because I loved Clue. It was one of my, it had always been one of my favorite games. And I thought, well, you know, if you were starting to develop Clue right now with a PC or something or other, what would it look like? You know, the notion of a repeatable murder mystery, what would it look like? And obviously we went in a, you know, murder on this internet is quite different from Clue, but that's kind of how, that's because of, well, you know, I mean, because of course, different people developing it, but also, as I say, I had this notion of, you know, if you were going to do something on a computer, what would you do? But anyway, so initially we were kind of thinking that Zeneriff was more likely to be, you know, the hit or something, until we actually got the games running, or prototypes of the games running initially or something or other, and people were able to start playing it. And that, once people could start actually playing it, one of the things that we have discovered, that we discovered over time, and as far as I can tell has not changed at all, is that people, even people who are in the game biz, But certainly at that point, a lot of people in the game biz were new to the game biz necessarily because the whole thing was new. And so people in general, even people that you would expect to be better about it, People are very bad about picturing, envisioning a game and how it will feel, how it will play, what it will be like, what the experience will be. You can describe it, write it up, and then program a game that's exactly what you said, but people won't understand it until they actually can play it. You know, and then, oh, you know, I see. And once people could actually start playing, you know, the game, then they got wildly enthusiastic. And so then we started thinking, oh, well, maybe, you know, Archon will be. I mean, but, you know, that's... We didn't even then think necessarily that it was going to be as successful as it was or that we would get as much attention as we got out of it and so on. I mean, partly because that's not... We weren't doing it to become kind of rich and famous enough, and we were doing it because, you know, it was fun. And this was, you know, just really cool things to do, So, I mean, developing computer games just seemed like the most fun possible. And, I mean, it was a lot of work, especially, I mean, those two things, because we developed those. We started with just ideas. You know, here's what we want to do. We made, you know, a little presentation. But we didn't really have them designed exactly. We just had concepts, you know. And when we, you know, had our meeting with Trip and then basically we had, we ended up in having six months, you know, to develop both games and from scratch to finished product. And so we worked really hard. As I say, we went to, I mean, for six months, and Ann and I both are big readers. And I had gone especially way back at that point. Until that point, much of my life is from kind of teenage on, teen years on, I tended to read about a book a day. And when we were working on Arkhan and Zendernoth for that six months, and we went to movies a lot. We used to go to movies a lot. Anyway, that six months, I read two books in six months, and we went to one movie. And the rest of the time, we were just working on the games. I mean, we occasionally managed a TV episode. You know, that was our big break. But that's all we did. It was very, you know, intense. So we were really focused on that and not like, how is this going to be received or whatever. And the thing that, you know, arguably the thing that made it most successful on a couple of levels was kind of a last minute addition. You know, we had envisioned it from the beginning. This is how, I mean, this is how we thought of it. This is what we're assuming when we presented it. This is what, you know, Tripp had bought, basically, and whatever, it was a two-person game, a two-player game. And, you know, with the Atari, with, you know, multiple joysticks, you could have two people sitting down with joysticks and playing the game, you know, on the same computer. And that's what we were envisioning. And like a month before our final was due, that is, we had to turn in what was supposed to be a final product for testing and whatnot before it didn't get into duplication and so on. But what was supposed to be our final delivery, anyway, about a month before then, Trip or our producer or something, I don't remember who gave us the word officially at that point. But anyway, EA came back and said, have you thought about doing a one-player game so that one player could play against a computer? You wouldn't have to have two people at the computer. And I threw up my hands in horror at that because it was late in the process, obviously. And it was something that we had given absolutely no thought to.

All of a sudden, developing an AI just seemed impossible.

Yeah, it seemed like a completely outlandish request. And so my initial reaction was, no, no, no, no, no, no. But my, you know, second reaction, as usual, this is, you know, whenever people propose radical changes or something or other, you know, of course, just like everybody else, don't want to do it, don't want to think about it. But then I start thinking of, you know, presented with an insurmountable problem or, you know, something. I immediately start thinking, well, you know, maybe it could be done, you know, whatever. And you start thinking about it. And so a couple of days later, okay, we'll give it a try. You know, but all that then was done, I mean, the entire AI. I mean, the way to do an AI for a computer game, ideally, is to build a computer game around the AI, you know, to start with. design things so that some of the rules and some of the way things work are built with an AI in mind. So that you know that you're not presenting the AI with really hard problems or something. You set up the map and set up the this and all that kind of stuff with that in mind. And that was not what we, you know, had to do. So, but, you know, but fortunately we, and again, we weren't doing anything else. And, you know, so we were able to come up with some, you know, notions. You know, I started working on the sort of strategy part, you know, the AI for that initially. and started working on the action screen kind of AI, and then we met in the middle.

It seems like there's kind of, I was going to say, two levels going on. There's the board game strategy part, and then the action strategy part, with all the different characters that kind of have different ways.

That's right, which had a separate AI, and so she did part of that, and I did part of that. And then the thing that once we had to do that, I mean, once we committed to doing that, and again, at the very end of development, and all of a sudden then, and in order to test, can the AI do this? And, of course, we needed to, because all the pieces are different, so we have to test all the pieces, and we have to test both the dark side and the light side. And so in order to basically be able to check that, Ann was having to develop the thing so that she could play either side against either side. And then that just necessarily involved, in fact, flipping a switch. And it suddenly occurred to her that once she got to that point, she said, well, you know, I could just basically flip that switch every VBI and have the computer play itself. And that was just an entirely happy accident or something. Well, that turned out to be one of the absolutely huge selling points of the game because stores could put it in the window, get it started, and let it run. And then people would stop because, look, there is a game going on here. And, you know, there's stuff. There's pieces moving around and so on. And basically, the concept of the game was sufficiently easy to understand when you're seeing it. Not necessarily the same as envisioning it from a piece of paper, but looking at it, oh, okay, this kind of looks like a chess-like thing. People could get that just by looking at the board. And then you've got two pieces running around, shooting each other or doing whatever it was that they're doing, chasing each other around back and forth. And that was pretty easy to get, you know, to sort of understand, even if you didn't understand all the, you know, the differences in their armament and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, you could see kind of what was going on. And it was interesting. And it pulled people into stores. And that but that was just, you know, kind of a happy accident. At the very end, I mean, because that came late in the process of developing the AI, which itself was coming in just under the wire of the final thing. So that was...

So you had this beautiful demo mode that can just run itself. Yep. Yeah. And do you know how many it sold? Do you have any numbers? I'm sure they're out there. I couldn't find them in my research.

Yeah. I think, well, I certainly don't remember the exact breakdown anymore of like Atari versus Commodore 64 and, you know, Apple and whatnot. But we, and again, by more recent standards, kind of drop in the bucket, but at the time it was kind of a big deal. We sold over 100,000 copies. Back when EA was giving various kinds of awards and this is and that's and whatnot. In industry, people were, you know, we had gold discs for generating a million dollars in, you know, sales. Back when that was a big deal. and obviously later on you'd have individual products selling millions of units. Yeah, yeah. These days you sell millions of units in a day, but this was a long time ago and the market was a whole lot smaller and newer. Sure,

yeah. And the people I've talked to, it seems like 100,000 units is like the number people were excited about then, even if it was software or books or whatever it is. It was like, that was, you made it at that point. So were you, were you, it sounded like Zendrinov was the one that, like, you felt like was going to make it. Were you disappointed when it was like kind of, the perception was more lukewarm or did it not matter?

Well, I mean, yes, I was disappointed. I mean, part of the problem with Zunruf and part of the reception that wasn't as early as good as Archon was simply that it didn't quite make the initial deadline. And so it was not part of the first six games that EA released as their kind of official debut, which got covered by every magazine known to man. And then there were two more games, InternoF and another game, that had been aimed for the initial release, EA's official public debut and all that, but just didn't get it done quite in time. And those two games just kind of got ignored by the press and whatnot because they had just, because everybody made a big, you know, cover stories and whatnot on the new company and all these new games and so on. And, you know, a month after that, well, they're, you know, they have to give coverage to other things. And so it was very much kind of an afterthought in, you know, in the coverage and whatever. And as it turned out, I mean, the audience and whatever was kind of different from what we had expected. And the audience for the biggest, seemingly the biggest players of Generneth were teenage girls. And which was, I mean, kind of a nice surprise. It was, you know, I thought it was rather neat. But anyway, but I mean, I was disappointed because we didn't get it done in time, you know, because it wasn't part of the original thing. We didn't realize, I mean, that was just disappointing because I, you know, we hated to miss deadlines. And because we knew we were going to miss, I mean, it became obvious immediately that we were going to miss some of the attention. We didn't realize, you know, it took months before we realized how big an impact, you know, how much difference it would have made to be done a month earlier, you know, to be done kind of on time instead of a month later. and partly because we didn't envision how big a splash EA was going to make. I mean, it was a big deal. I mean, partly that was by design and partly it's just because it was a hot new thing and all these new magazines that covered computer games, how either specifically or partly or whatever, everybody kind of, oh, here's this new thing. This is a new company. Here's a bunch of new games that are really good. I mean, you know, that initial crop has some good stuff in it, and people really were enthusiastic about it, And it made a big splash. And as I say, it took months for us to realize how much we had missed. That is how much Zinterniff had missed by being a few weeks late. But by that time, we were knee-deep on doing conversions of Archon and thinking fairly quickly, you know, Trip 1 and a sequel. That was another one of those things that my initial reaction was, you know, wasn't done with a sequel in mind. Here's this thing, there was no kind of obvious direction to go for a sequel that wasn't just really, really, really the same thing. And obviously Adapt is very similar. and it didn't work quite as well as I had wanted to work on some levels, but the sort of strategy board didn't work as well as I had hoped. But the game part, the action part, was really successful. We were able to, you know, we learned, and we were able to do some cute and clever things, and, you know, I was really happy with the way that turned out, but initially, as I said, I was not... My initial reaction was somewhat negative, but once we started thinking about, okay, what can we do with this, and started thinking, oh, well, you know, we can do some fun things.

So what did you find cute and clever that you were pleased with at the time?

Like the wraith, for instance. The notion of having an invisible piece. and that worked I thought that was really kind of outlandish both to play to use and to play against that was neat and the notion of different kinds of backgrounds that therefore affected play and that certain pieces were a lot better on some backgrounds than others And, you know, like playing the race on a black square on a PowerPoint was really, really challenging. And so, anyway, but just, you know, just some of the pieces and doing different kinds of things, variations of, obviously, in many cases, some variations of things that we had done with Archon. But, you know, like the juggernaut, just, you know, things like that. Just being able to come up with kinds of new and different pieces that were fun. You know, they were fun to play. You know, things worked and the AI was, you know, worked. It was really tough, again, especially for certain matchups. There were certain kinds of things that people said, gee, you just can't beat them. But in fact, you could. And, of course, you could, you know, tweaking how hard it was, you know, by being able to sort of select degrees of difficulty. But, you know, it was neat to be able to, you know, have an AI that made a really good challenge. And anyway, even if some of the maneuvering on the board didn't really happen the way I had kind of initially hoped, that just, anyway, there was a whole element of strategic maneuver that just ended up getting tossed aside. But picking your battles, picking who you were fighting and where and so on, that was a nice, significant set of choices.

But Archon 2 Adepts wasn't as big a hit, as far as I know.

Right. It was pretty successful, but it was not as successful as Archon. I mean, again, it was not. At the time, I mean, it's really hard to, you know, it's like cell phones or microwave ovens or something or other. It's really hard to go back to a point, back to before those things existed and realize how much of it, you know, how much they changed the landscape. Yeah. And at the time that Archon arrived, that was another one of those things that people had, I mean, as with Tax Dodge or something or other, people had this notion of this is how games work. You know, you die because we have to get people to spend their quarter, you know, to put more quarters in or something or other. And so you have to make things really hard so that you're dying almost all the time and you're basically losing, losing, losing, losing in order to learn how to play the game better. And I didn't like that as a paradigm. And so I wanted to do text dodge as something that didn't use. No, you don't have to do that. Here's something else that you can do using the same kind of basic, the same kind of format that you're using here, but here's a different game that doesn't, you know, that says, no, you don't have to die. You can do something else here. Right. And you don't have to lose, you know, if, oh, you get touched or whatever, you don't have to lose, okay? You just lost a little teeny bit. You suffered a setback, but that's not the same as losing. Because people don't like to lose. People don't want to lose. And with Archon, what we were doing, part of, again, the thing that we were telling you, was the sort of notion that there were intellectual games, like chess or hardcore war games or something, And then there were Twitch games, like most of the kinds of things that were popular. And Never the Twain Shall Meet. And we thought, well, why not? Why can't they? Just because you have a brain and are capable of thinking and planning and so on, that doesn't mean that you are necessarily a klutz. just because you have good reflexes or like to play something that has fast moving or has, you know, some, some, you know, good action or whatever going on doesn't mean that you don't have a brain, you know, and you can't think. And the, you know, part of the trick there was, and it was, we attempted to make that so that you could balance one versus the other. You could have somebody that was good at one and not as good at the other and somebody that was, you know, better at the strategy and not as good at whatever. And you could still, the idea was that you could still play on comparatively even terms. But besides that, just I wanted to do something that said, no, you can be smart and still have fun. that smart and having a strategic challenge or having some depth, that was partly what EA was trying to do in their, you know, the simple, hot, and deep. And that was their slogan, as you presumably remember. Their initial, what they were pushing was simple, hot, and deep. And that really spoke to me. I really liked that. that I liked the notion that you could think, but that didn't mean that you had to sit around for 20 minutes staring at a board while nothing whatsoever happened while you were cogitating. And as Paul said in his famous little thing that we used to repeat all the time, you know, that Paul in an interview or something, he said he wanted to move, move, move, and be done. and that's what we wanted to do we wanted to make sort of a fast moving chess game that had some of that strategy, some of the thinking but that also had action and that moved faster and didn't take forever in a day to play all that kind of stuff

Were there other games that were on the drawing board never saw the light of day?

Oh, for us? Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I mean, there... I... I mean... Two things... Two kind of obvious things. There are lots of others, but... I mean, two early games that kind of fell into that category. One was a game that I started to develop with another programmer. I don't remember what. Ann was doing something. I don't remember what. It was buried in something. Anyway, it was a pirate game. And it was essentially, I mean, loosely speaking, because we didn't get far enough to get all the details. But essentially, it was what Sid Meier ended up doing with Privateer. Privateer? I think that was the name of the game. Anyway, whatever the... Anyway, his pirate game, whatever that was called. Anyway, that was the kind of thing that we're trying to do, basically, again, with a combination action and strategy sort of a game. action and strategy and role-playing and whatnot kind of all, you know, combined so that you would have all the fun parts of all of that kind of thing. But we got bogged down, and the programmer didn't make sufficient progress in EA. Forget that. Here, go do something else. And then another game that we called Time Tracks that we developed. Time Tracks? Time Tracks that we developed, actually, that I developed, actually, initially for the Amiga. When Ann was, again, doing some programming for something else, and I had this notion. And so I learned an obscure language called Amos and developed a prototype of this game and whatever. And we shot that around. And we almost sold it several times. But people talked themselves out of it. What kind of game was it? It's a... I still would like to get that, do that, you know, a newer version or something or other at some point. It was an action-oriented game with a sort of a... It's an action-strategy hybrid. I mean, again, it didn't involve fighting. involved. The kind of the basic notion was kind of a board game but that was dynamic rather than static because things were constantly moving but it was a sort of a territorial capture game but that makes it sound like something completely different from what it actually was. You have pieces you start with pieces in motion and what you as a player and it's a one or two player game there are two sides but it can be two players or a computer one player versus a computer and you have pieces running around on the board and a board and they leave a trail behind so to speak wherever they go they convert to your side or the other side as the case may be depending on whose pieces they were And what you as, but the pieces were completely done. And so what you as the player were doing was essentially guiding them by putting things on the board that affected where they went. Okay. Basically by dropping obstacles on there. And the pieces just, you know, followed certain, you know, rules like go straight until you run into a barrier. And at that point, you know, like turn right or turn left or whatever. And anyway, the initial prototype was in some respects kind of more, a little trickier than what I ended up envisioning. And that is, that's their thought after playing around with the prototype that I was probably making some things more, introducing some changes that just serve to confuse people and not actually play any more fun or interesting or something. And like in the prototype, you know, like in the first round, basically when a piece ran and hit a barrier, they would turn right. And in the second round when they hit a barrier, they would turn left. And in the third round, when they hit a barrier, they would turn around. You know, that kind of thing. And anyway, I concluded that that wasn't really enough of a... All I did was sort of confuse the player. But anyways, it was a simple but kind of aesthetically interesting game because the board was constantly changing colors and you could set things up so that, depending on how, again, was a mixture, potentially a mixture of competitive and cooperative. And you could pick basically how competitive or cooperative you wanted to make it. And depending on what you were picking, then you could have... If one of my guys ran over a square and turned it my color, and one of your pieces ran over the same square, potentially either we could turn it into a joint color in which we both got credit, or if you were wanting a more cutthroat version, then you could simply steal it back. That is, make it your color, not my color, and make it more of a zero-sum game. But that was a choice that you could make.

So as far as I know, Archon 2 was the last game that you guys developed that was actually published. Is that correct?

No.

No? No. I mean, okay, I'm looking at the Atari list.

Oh, okay, sorry. Okay, sure. That was... Yeah, I think Archon 2 Edip was the last game that we did for the Atari.

So I guess my question is why you moved away from the Atari to other platforms. Archon 2 Adept was 1984. Atari, as far as I know, wasn't really super declining then. So I don't know. Right.

EA presented, I mean, we did, at the time that we were doing all, you know, Archon and Zinderduff and Adept, we ended up doing a lot of conversions ourselves. So, you know, we did, for instance, we did the Commodore 64 versions of all those things. And then basically the Amiga was under development, and the Amiga people went to EA and proposed having EA develop some games. so that would be available when the Amiga itself debuted. And we were among the people that were, you know, EA went then in turn, because at that point they were still mostly, in fact I think at that point they were still entirely oriented toward publishing only and, you know, having outside people do the development. Anyway, and they, you know, asked a bunch of developers if you're interested in doing something. And, you know, it looked, you know, even more, you know, the Amiga was basically a fancier, better improved whatever Atari. That was how it was presented to us, and by and large, that was largely true. They took the things that the Atari did better than Apple and Pierre Thady and any other machine around, and expanded it. I mean, it was a bigger machine. It had more memory. It had a fancier processor, and it had fancier... It used sprites the way the Atari did, but it had fancier sprites, and it had fancier sound channels and a separate sound processor and whatever. It was a computer that was designed for gaming. And like the Atari, but it was just newer, and especially back in those days when computers were leaping ahead by just taking huge strides in very short periods of time, it looked really cool. It sounded really cool, and we thought, okay, we'll do that. And so we developed Arcana NetApp for the media. as we developed versions of those that were fancier and sort of pseudo-3D and with stereo sound effects and whatnot. That made playing the Wraith, for instance, back to the Wraith, that made playing the Wraith more interesting, more doable, and whatever in an odd, in an unusual way that people hadn't thought about before. You could track the movement of the race with sound, because it made a little noise. It was visible, it made a little noise, and you could therefore, at least to some degree, figure out where it was, follow its movements, by how the sound traveled. That was cool. Anyway, we did those for the Amiga and then did a follow-up. That is, did another Amiga project towards Twilight, which, unfortunately, bogged us down for several years. Partly it just took a lot longer than we wanted it to take. Because it was a ridiculously large project, as it turned out. Again, what we were doing long before World of Warcraft existed, what we were doing was developing World of Warcraft as a not massively multiplayer game, but as a multiplayer game. But in the sense of, again, combining action in a role-playing game, and a role-playing game with the kinds of action elements that we used in Archon. But with fancy AI and with various different kinds of magic, and with an AI that allowed you to have the computer play, not only the hostile guys you might run into or the other things you might run into, but also people in your own party. If you didn't have enough people, if you didn't have enough human players, you know, around. But that took, it was a huge project, and it took a really long time, somewhat complicated by the fact that we were in a car accident in the middle, and I had surgery on my leg and rehabbed and all that kind of stuff while some of that was going on, which didn't help anything. No. Anyway, and, you know, by the time that we, that ended up just sort of taking us away from everything else for, you know, several years. And at that point, everything had shifted kind of to the IBM. I mean, a month after we, after Sgt. Violet got released, EA abandoned the Amiga. And all sorts of things changed. And we ended up doing a newer version of Archon for a different company on the IBM. anyway so we just you know got away from it and initially because we were sort of working on what seemed like you know an improved Atari or something and we just were gone for so long that by the time that we got out of got out of that project you know it wasn't really a big Atari market yeah the IBM then by that time all of a sudden, by the end of the late 80s or something, was kind of taking over the world. Right,

right. So at what point did you get out of developing computer games and start moving to, I guess, card games? Well,

yes. I mean, even the card games were... The card games are still computer games, or at least potentially they're still computer games. That is, the card games, my card games, and the card deck that underlies all the card games, that was a project that I had started playing around with before I got into computers. And I set it aside while doing all these other things. And then started thinking, well, gee, we could do this on computer. And so we started doing that. You know, we did some for, we did computer versions for a web-based, I don't know what to call it, game channel. Anyway, Game TV for a while, and then they, that didn't, that didn't become as successful as any of us had hoped. Anyway, it's just one of those on-again, off-again things that I have never entirely stopped working on.

Is there anything I haven't asked you regarding the Atari stuff that I should have? Any stories there that are relevant to my interests?

Probably, but not that immediately come to mind. I mean, there's some quirky things that I've probably mentioned to other people. I don't know whether they've showed up in interviews or something. But things like playing. When we were developing on the Atari, we had extremely lengthy waits and had lengthy compile times. She was working in Assembler, and it took a long time for her code to compile. And so what she was in the habit of doing was playing games while her code compiled, playing games on a different machine. So she really, really, really got into Mule. And to a lesser degree, so did I. But she played a lot more than I. I mean, I liked it. We ended up playing a lot together because she would regularly do that every time she compiled. So she played multiple games of Mule every single day for a very long time. And one of the things that happened because we played so much Mule was that we... certain advantages as a developer as a developer of a product you know certain things about you know about the product and so on it's like Swords of Twilight I could get my NPCs to do things that other people couldn't because I knew all the tricks I built them and you could I mean it was quite rewarding actually you know be able to like have seemingly have your lead, but go where you wanted them to go. Which one could do? But if you knew it were possible. But sometimes coming from outside, you can detect things that as a developer you might overlook because you already know, theoretically, the answers. And so one of those, I mean, all that's kind of cryptic, but in a particular example, for instance, we ended up playing at some point, Ann and I played Dan and Bill Bunton in a four-player game of Mule. And we beat them. And that was the first time that anybody had ever beaten them, you know, at their own game, which was kind of a big deal, and provided a good deal of humor and amusement and so on all around, because we got along well. But we had noticed something that we just assumed was a feature, or was in fact a bug that they didn't know about. And that was basically that you could actually, if you could remember, anyway, that you could actually tell by looking at the board, by looking at the geography, at the patterns, you could tell where the hidden stuff was hidden. Really? And that was not supposed to be the case. It was all random. So they knew that it was random, so they never bothered looking for a pattern. We did not know it was so random, and so we were looking for patterns, and we found one. And not that we could remember all the time or remember where everything was or something, but that occasionally we would recognize a formation and think, oh, okay, well, the whatever kind of order it was. The Christite or Snethor. Crystite, right. Where the crystite, in fact, where there would be heavy crystite, was under this space. And when we said that, when we were playing, their jaws dropped. And then when we found it, and indeed it was there, they were stupefied. Because how can you do that? It's random. It's random. It's random. You know. Well, what happened was, basically, they were using the same random seed for both the visuals and for the crustide deposits. But because it was the same random seed, then they were tied together.

Right. So you knew if you saw this mountain in this place, that meant that this other thing was going to be...

And again, we didn't know by even a fraction of the things, but there were certain things that we just happened to notice that would recur. And sometimes, and if you play enough, I mean, we played hundreds of games of mule. And so, you know, oh, you know, I organized that mountain formation or something or other, and I think that means the Christite's over here, you know, and it was. And because they knew that was impossible, that there was no connection, it didn't occur to them to even look or check or anything. And when we pointed it out, as I say, they were completely surprised. And then they had to think about it for a while. How is that possible? They thought, oh, they used the same random seed. And that is, having picked a random number to start with, then everything depended on that initial thing. And so, in fact, there was a correlation, even though they had not designed one in or anything.

That's really interesting. Wow. All right, well, since I can't interview him, tell me any other stories about Dan that the world needs to know.

Gee, you know, nothing that, I mean, there are lots of little personal things, but, you know, I, anyway, I, when he was early in the process of, you know, when he was undergoing a sex changing, I didn't know about it. and so at some point I called you know and he got his answering machine or something or other and anyway and that was the you know and he said this is Danny Bunton and and not not knowing not knowing anything you know whatever I just you know thought he was kind of playing around or something I said, well, this is Johnny Freeman here. And then it wasn't until after that that I discovered that. Anyway, he was going through this gender transformation process. Right.

All right. Let's see. If you could send a message to the Atari computer users that still exist, and you can right now, What would you tell them?

Oh, gee. Nothing immediately comes to mind, I'm sorry to say. That's not really something I've thought about for a long time. I mean, we love that machine. And I still have an Atari computer. Oh, excellent. I don't mean it's, you know, in a box at the moment. Sure. I used to have one out for a long time, but I don't. And in fact, actually, we have my best friend still has an Atari set up in her basement so that her parents, when they can visit, can play. occasionally on Thanksgiving we play Mule or Archon on the original Atari version. I love that. That's awesome.

I think that's all I have. Thank you so much.

Well, you're certainly welcome. Yeah, I could add something, but I can't. What do you mean? There's just something I could add, but I'm contractually prevented from doing so. Okay.

Can you say it and then I'll release it in 20 years? What was that? Okay. Contractually. That means you... Okay. I think I know what that means. I think that means we might be able to look forward to something exciting in the future.

Perhaps.

Okay. I'll leave it at that. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Okay. Thank you. history, including hosting thousands of programs in an in-browser Atari emulator, creating the Wayback Machine, and offering full-page scans of countless Atari computer books and magazines. Make your tax-deductible contribution at archive.org slash donate. .