ANTIC Interview 171 - Randy Glover, EPYX

This is an interview episode of Antic, the Atari 8-bit podcast. I'm Kay Savetz. And I'm Rob McMullen. Randy Glover is the creator of one of the best games for the Atari computers, Jumpman, which was published by EPYX. He also created the sequel,

Jumpman Jr., and programmed the swimming competition portion of summer games. Randy ported Jumpman to the Commodore 64, and created another C-64 game, Lunar Outpost.

This interview took place on May 7, 2016. I am joined on this interview with Rob McMullen, host of the Player Missile podcast, who has been working to reverse engineer Jumpman using the omnivore binary editor that he created.

For more background information on EPYX, you might enjoy Antix interviews with John Freeman, co-founder of EPYX, and Michael Katz, the CEO of EPYX. He oversaw the development of Jumpman, Pitstop, and Summer Games.

looking for some type of career, got interested in electronics. I was living in Foster City. You may know where that is down in the Bay Area. So during that time, of course, a lot of things were going on a bit south of there, but I was not aware of it. I got into electronics and did that, got into discrete circuits, played around with that, was extremely interested in discrete logic and so on and so forth. And in about 1978, I saw, I think it was, I'm sorry, I should go back. 1977, I took a trip up to the University of Berkeley. And they had a room for tourists that had these printer terminals, you know, the green and white paper coming out of a printer with a keyboard there, all integrated. And that was, I'd never seen that before. And they invited you to sit down and play a game. And it was essentially a Star Trek-type game with Klingons and the Enterprise on a 10x10 grid with 10x10 grid within that. And so it would print out a 10x10 grid on the paper. You would see U as an asterisk or a plus. And then you could put in a command like move this direction or fire a photon torpedo in this direction. And then you had to wait for the computer to process it. And then it would print out another grid, and you would see the change in movement and so on and so forth. So that was actually the very first computer I had ever seen, and I was quite fascinated by that. It turns out in my younger years, I was interested in games, but in a bit creative way. I would pretty much take any game that we were playing as kids and add some other rules or modify it or change it or do something to it. But apparently I was a restless soul and was more interested in having fun changing things than not. So when I saw that thing in 77, for a while there, I actually tried to mimic it with discrete logic because I didn't know computers at that time. And so that was my actually first computer. And it wasn't until around 1978 or so that I saw a VIC-20 and decided to buy a VIC-20. So that would have been 78-ish, 79-ish. I didn't do a lot with it at the time. but it was my first computer and what games they had at the time didn't really interest me and i didn't play it a lot um as i recall i had a cassette loading capability which at the time of course was awesome because you could put a program in it um i managed to skip the age of computers where you would punch in a code and hit write for an 8-bit instruction and you loaded your 64 bits of or bytes of instruction and hit run that was going on in 75 74 and so on so forth But so the VIC-20 would have been my very first computer that I actually played with. And again, my working life was electronics, early fax machines, and early cash registers in and around the 80s. And I decided I wanted to get a better computer because I could not stand the cassette. And so I decided to buy a TSR-80. And, of course, that was a black-and-white computer, I think 64 kilobytes of RAM. I don't remember what that was. And that was, of course, a business-type computer, not a game computer as the VIC-20 was. And from that, I wrote my first computer game in BASIC on the TRS-80. Black and white, nothing fancy, dot moving around the screen, trying to either maneuver and or hit things and or miss things. And that was my first gaming experience, really, of writing that in a computer. That would have been around 1980-ish, perhaps 1981.

Was that in BASIC or in Assembly?

Yes, and I have a little story of that because I assume you guys are perhaps more interested in software than hardware. I had heard of this thing called machine language. And since I was not into computers, this was secondary information. I really didn't know what that was, but I had heard that it would make the ability to make games run more quickly. And at the time, Microsoft had a manual that was the instruction set. I didn't know what that was at the time for, I believe, it was the 8088 processor. And I thought, well, I have no computers. I wrote a little basic program here. So I put down my $100 from the local Radio Shack and actually bought their technical manual for the 8088. It turns out what it was. And I flipped that open and went through that, and I didn't understand a damn thing that I saw. I was shocked. I was confident I would know or understand some parts of this, and the magical world of the guts of the computer would be revealed to me.

I've written a basic program. I know things now, right?

Exactly. That was exactly my experience. So I was really shocked and dismayed. So I put the book down and every day I would pick it up and flip through it. And pretty much every day, nothing would come to me. The boxes, the A, the B, the X, the Y, each page with this weird verbiage up at the top. I just didn't know what it was. And I didn't have any resources to understand what it was. And I can't remember exactly what it was, but about three weeks after, I saw something in the beginning. And I understood it came to me that these were instructions and that I was actually making this microprocessor execute these at the most basic electronic level. And once I made that leap and understood that, then I realized that I could have total control. And it was really at that point just about finding out how to transfer my control from basic into that mysterious machine language and then starting to write programs by byte and so on and so forth. So that was really my transition from, you know, basic, easy to understand to really being a, well, I wouldn't say I was really a computer programmer. But as you can imagine, a whole magical world opened up to me when I realized I had total control of this machine if I wanted to. And I realized then why they talked about performance boosts and so on and so forth. So at that point in time, I started looking into the microprocessor or the 8080 or the TRS-80 registers and so on and so forth. And without that experience, I would have never moved on to Jumpman because everything after that would have been assembly language. I should do anything substantive after that. So that was my early getting into the computer, and that was really my one moment of transition from very casual to something to be able to do more seriously.

But this was just a hobby for you at this point?

I was working full-time in the electronics cash register industry, repairing cash registers primarily, the new electronic ones that were coming out at the time.

Okay, so you're playing with your TRS-80 and making little things move on the screen, and then what? What changed?

Well, what changed really is as I was working at work right across the parking lot was the Pizza Hut. They had this cool game called Pac-Man, obviously. And I had once played, I think, Pong a couple of times, but I saw Pac-Man. So every day at lunch, I would go and play Pac-Man at the pizza parlor right across the parking lot. And I enjoyed that. That was quite the experience as it was for millions and millions of people at that time. And at the same time, what had happened is my brother and I took on a project, a business project writing software for a company that bought some TRS-80 Model 2s. And put them on the desk, and this is another computer fun thing. The owner bought three of them, very expensive at the time, heard that they would do inventory. So he put it on his desk, he booted it up, and he typed in a part number and hit enter. And, of course, nothing happened, and he didn't understand why. And so we knew him through a common person. And my brother and I decided to write software to do the inventory for him on the TRSA Model 2 as well as to integrate them in a local area network, which was going to be RS-45 at the time because, as I said, I wasn't hardware. So that was another interesting programming experience. But here was this game stuff that I was playing and ultimately transitioned from Pac-Man. They changed the game out to Donkey Kong, which shouldn't be of any shock considering what Jumpman actually is. And I became interested on how I could make a color game as opposed to the black and white game in assembly language. And so very specifically, my brother and I had a certain amount of money. We went down to a store that sold computers, and you'll know the two models, the TI-99A and the Atari 400, and they had both of those in the store. And I made up my mind that I was going to buy one or the other, and I was going to take it home and find out what it could do now that I understood assembly language and had written some assembly programs on the TRS-80. I picked up the TI-99A, not the Atari. You made the wrong choice, sir. The good news is I had it in my mind that I would take it home that night, work with the technical manual, and see what it could do. And at the time, it had a lot of promise, right? It was very colorful, had a lot of things. But ultimately what it did, it was character set based primarily, and I did not like the physical layout. So as per my plan, I gave myself 24 hours, and the next day, I took it and turned it back in for a refund and bought the Atari 400. And that was a critical change, of course, for me, being that Jumpman came out on the Atari series first. So that's what I bought. I modeled my game after Donkey Kong, of course. I used the name, called it Jumpman. I'm told that the word Jumpman was on the Donkey Kong console, or he was called the Jumpman at one point in time. And I don't ever recall lifting that name from there, but it's very possible I did or subconsciously pulled the name Jumpman from it. And I sat down to write my version of Donkey Kong. And that's what originally I wrote. And I had 13 levels at the time and all written in assembly language using the Atari 400's sprite characteristics. I think 16-color graphics and so on and so forth.

Did you do it using the standard 400 keyboard?

Yeah, the flat keyboard, yes. That's why I didn't buy it initially. I didn't like the keyboard. The TI-99 had actual buttons. This one did not. And I don't think the 800 was available at that time. but yep that's what i did and i should say i wrote most of the software on an apple 2e i had one of those off to the side and that was using the same microprocessor and i could compile the software and transfer it over and run it and so i was doing everything with a disk-based system at that time and um so that took me about four or five months to put my 13 levels together to to understand that I could master the graphics and the sound and so on and so forth. And then what I thought is, well, you know, maybe I can make some money at this. There's a lot of people playing computer games. And I really didn't know anything about the computer industry at the time. So I grabbed a computer game magazine because games were quite popular at that moment, even though I didn't purchase very many of them. And I looked in the back, you know, like you look in the back of magazines for business opportunities and so on and so forth. And there were a couple of different advertisements for basically Asterisk will buy your game.

So did you see the automated simulations or EPYX ad in one of those magazines?

There was an automated simulations EPYX ad at the time. Good. You know your homework. Automation simulations before EPYX. And there was also a Brutterbund ad as well. And the first company I went to was Brutterbund because they were up north in the Santa Rosa area. And I didn't know one of those guys from the other. I didn't know anything about gaming companies or the gaming industry. So I went to them and met a gentleman who I got to fire up and show my game. And he goes, oh, well, that's kind of cool. He told me that they'd had a couple of game programmers that made lots of money. One bought a Maserati with his money and so on and so forth. And that this looked like a decent game. They'd be interested in taking it on, and he went to describe how they would want to add the polish and do this to it and have their programmers look it over and make some enhancement to it and so on and so forth. So, okay. I didn't know anything about the gaming industry, but he had promises of riches and fame and all that good stuff. The next day, I'd gone down to automated simulation, which was at that time called EPYX, and met a gentleman there. His role was the same thing, evaluate new games. And he looked at it and go, oh, this is awesome. He hopped out. He went and had someone else come look at it and says, oh, this is great. We've got to have this game. And the only difference between the two companies, from my perspective, was this guy was excited. And the other guy was going to have other people look at it and work with it and change it. And it's not that I was – I just didn't know anything about – I wasn't a programmer. I didn't know anything about working with programmers. And so Brother Bun didn't feel as friendly as this guy who wanted it and wanted to get it now. And so I chose EPYX. Wow. And that's the reason why.

So is this the version that's floating around in the net called Jumpman No. 1?

I have not seen that. I doubt it. I would be surprised if anybody got their hands on it. But I'd certainly be interested in seeing Jumpman number one to see if it actually was the initial levels of the game that I did create. It was bootable at the time on a disc. Only EPYX, as far as I know, got it.

Oh, that's interesting.

I'm going to have to look that up. If it is, that would be a surprisingly pleasant shock.

Well, I'll get the link and send it to you right here.

Okay, that's awesome.

Nice. Cool.

All right, so EPYX was excited by your game. So did they say, okay, we want more levels? Did they want changes? How did that process go to turning it into a finished game?

Gotcha. They said, we'd like you to come to work for us. We'll give you 15%. You do whatever you want. I said, well, heck, okay, I'll do that. Didn't know anything, but they gave me, they let me do whatever I wanted to. I got down there. The company itself was in transition from their tactical strategy games. Automated Simulations was known for that. I guess Dragonriders of Pern and so on and so forth. And they were just trying to make the transition to the exciting world of action games. And so I happened to come in at just the moment they were trying to find something that they could put their hooks into that would be an action game. And, of course, Jumpman qualified for that. I was excited. I went ahead and said, I left my job. I went down to work at EPYX. And I'm the one that decided to go for what could I do with an Atari 800 now with 64K of RAM, 48K cartridges. I'm sorry. I forget what the kilobytes of RAM were, but the cartridges was 48K, as I recall, that it could run. And so I'm the one that picked the 32 levels, structured it with the three sections, added the randomizer. That was all me. I did everything sound, the whole nine yards. They didn't have anybody to do anything, didn't want to touch it. They just said, here you go. They were excited to get it. They did all the packaging and such like that, and, of course, the promotion. And that's all I had to do.

You said you started with 13 levels, and you ended up with 30. Can you talk about the process of coming up with level ideas, and how many did you throw away, and how many did you leave on the cutting room floor? Because there was no room. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I took my basic 13 that I had originally. There were some that I liked and some that I didn't. I didn't push the envelope too much. I did structure it. I wanted to have – I knew it might be difficult for people to play, so I wanted to give the ability to start off early and go to the medium and hard. That was pretty obvious. But I didn't want to limit that. One thing I didn't care for about Donkey Kong is you went over and over and over again at the first level You made the second level. And I wanted to have people see more of the game before they were able to get up through it. So I did think about having the random feature that would give you the ability to pop in at some random level. See it. You might not be skilled enough to deal with it, but it would excite you and make you think, oh, I saw that. I want to see that again. I want to actually live through and play it. So I structured it that way. The memory limitation pretty much limited me to that. a lot of the levels were designed around what I could do with the sprite system that was available. I wasn't sophisticated enough to push it beyond the basic sprite stuff. The only technical thing that I thought was interesting that I see in other games or saw later in other games that were similar to mine was I had, I won't call it a physical nature of the Jumpman, but he has little feet underneath his body. You've probably noticed that if you've ever played it. You'll see these little dots. And the gravity of my game is simply if there's a collision between a background character and the body and the feet, then I'm going to move him up one. If there's not, and just the feet have one, I'm going to keep him still. And if there's nothing, he's going to fall. And so his navigation through the entire game is purely based on that rule with some exceptions for the ladders and the ropes and things of this nature for snapping purposes to make it look good he falls and dangles and hangs and rises up or goes down purely based on that rule there's no pathing for him it's all based on the physical nature of the ladders and the girders and the ropes around him wow and i so we've been calling

the the feet i'm sorry i didn't interrupt we've been calling the feet the shadow yes and i was I've been wondering this whole time why you dedicated an entire one out of basically five players to the shadow. Why was it so important that he had a shadow, it seemed? But now it makes more sense if you're measuring that separately from the jump man to figure whether he should be falling or not.

Correct, yes. The Atari had collision detection on all the sprites, and you could tell what color it was colliding with at the moment. So I would use the complete second sprite, if you will, which seemed to be a waste of energy for his feet to detect a separate collision from his body, what he was touching versus what the body was touching.

Wow. Cool.

And so I think that lent – in seeing some of the other games at the same time or later, they were more path-based. It appeared like Donkey Kong, you know, traveled at this angle of these things. My guy ran around in this environment purely based on his collision with the environment that he was at. So I like to think that that made him more interesting, more spontaneous. He wasn't pretty. He was just a little stick man. But he ran around with a certain flair and he reacted to the environment. And many of the levels I put things that would challenge him in terms of his ability to jump and grab and catch or fall or trip around his environment based on those simple rules.

awesome I'm asking the same question again did you having ideas that you couldn't implement because you couldn't do them technically or were there ideas that you put together and then went this isn't so fun and threw them away

that's pretty much in terms of design I can't recall exact inspiration there were some things I wanted to add to that I would say I pushed the limit in terms of using the sprites when I would develop the puzzle levels. I wanted to have something that was consistent across each that when a person saw the intermediate or advanced section would go, oh, I've seen one like this. I'm giving you specifics now. The robot levels, there was one for each one. Each of the pathing characteristics of the robots became more intense and they were smarter at the higher levels. There were the puzzles. There was also a set of levels where there were other things moving around in there, such as dragons on one. I can't recall the other two. Bats, I think, was one of them. And then most of them were the physical challenges of navigating, getting to the targets and capturing them. The most innovative, I thought, that I thought were the funnest, the one called Hailstones, where they fell from the top and you had to climb up because those were just bouncing units that dropped right above your head and so obviously it was easy to avoid them if you were standing on the ground away from the tower structure that you had to climb but as you were climbing the structure they would bounce left and right and i don't know if you if anybody playing it got a good sense of what exactly was going on but they finally kind of figured out that they could pull them one way or pull them the other and then make progress just as they went by another fun one was the um can't recall the name of it but where the uh the targets actually moved and that was also a technological challenge for me because i would replace the static background target with a sprite that looked exactly like it as you approached it and then send it running away so it looked like the static targets were all alive when in actuality only one sprite would be moving at any one time and of course that was a fun one because it was a bit random they were at the corners you were weren't always successful but it was kind of fun chasing or anticipating chasing them down yeah runaway that's that there's the name that's a fun level yeah yeah um every one of them um were designed about what i would like to see in it i didn't think of anything too grand like you know what would other people if it felt good to me um i wanted to keep it did you get feedback from people who bought the game uh not not really i mean we had a couple play testers that played it a lot they were a lot better at it than i was but virtually nobody said oh i like this or i don't like this and that whole game was rolled out um as i built it with no other input from anybody else there was no creative input no technical input at all when i was at

epics creating this wow so a few play testers and that was it yeah yeah so everything you see there

came from me um in just working with the environment you know i was learning how to write the software as well what i could do and um of course i built the foundation which is if you've looked at the code and it sounds like you probably have how to build a level fairly efficiently make it be able to be varied but there's a lot of standard stuff behind it um hooks into having every level be able to have its own custom actions um during the process and so on and so forth the foundation kind of both gave me the ability to do things and it did limit me as well i didn't really think outside the box in terms of the design foundation um i knew i was going to build levels once i picked my pattern of such um there was one level i'll always remember i wanted to do but technically it what is too difficult for me or too much horsepower. And that was where there was a pool of water at the bottom and there would be a shark swimming around in it. And then, of course, at the end, there would be a couple of targets down there that you had to jump from above. And that would be one of the exceptions where you actually fell and dove into the water as opposed to fell and died. And then toward the end of the level, that was the last thing you wanted to do. And I never could quite get that to work the way I wanted to. So that concept I always remember, but never made it into the game.

nice so how did you create the levels did you have a did you create a level editor for yourself or

were you just coding it by hand by hand i would graph paper yeah graph paper i would lay it out generally of course then i would uh put it in the pattern generator have it come up fix it um and i pretty much knew how high he would jump and how far he could jump so i could design the terrain around those characteristics. Initially, I'm not sure I had the ropes. I think I had just ladders and platforms on the very first version. The ropes were added later to add a little more dynamic element to it. Hand done, put it in, run it. It ran. Okay. Fix it if it was broken. Move through, get that one done, move on to the next one. No level editors or tools to go off of.

Wow. So you said you developed this primarily on an Apple II?

Yeah, an Apple IIe. Compiled it there. Wrote the code and did the compiling and then shot it into the target on disk and then ran it by basically booting up in BASIC and doing a SIS to the address where the code would reside in the Atari.

So with like a serial cable or something, was there a transmission that you get over there?

not that i recall i think i was doing it on the disc i was being able to write the disc and

put it over onto the other one were able to write a Atari format disc on the apple

i wrote and stored all my code on the apple you're testing my memory how did i get that over um i don't recall because you're right i know the disc format wasn't the same i wasn't working with cartridges at that time and i don't recall using a serial connection so that's a mystery at this point in time. I don't recall how I got the code over, but I never wrote any of the code itself except for possibly the very first version on the Atari 400 itself. Once I had to write it at home before I worked for EPYX, I was writing on the Apple IIe because it was more conducive for code writing.

I just was going to say for our Apple II friends, do you remember what compilers and stuff you used on the Apple?

No, I'm afraid I don't. I know I did have a very expensive battery-backed-up RAM disk on it that saved my bacon a few times. I would write it in there and save it in there and back it up to the actual floppy from time to time. And that's how I kept that alive. I like the idea of just being able to keep it running and running and running. There was one time where the power went out just as I was saving to my backup disk. And that was the end of the RAM disk and scrambled up the disk. I lost about a week's worth of work. but that was pretty typical for the time.

How did you learn the Atari-specific stuff? Do you remember what your references were for the hardware documentation?

Yeah, and the Atari manual, there was an Atari hardware manual that you could purchase, and so it showed you everything about the registers, the sprite system, the music system, had all the technical data that way. And since I was into electronics and was building my own digital circuits, And later on, microprocessor-based circuits, I understood how to read that one as opposed to the initial way back in the assembly language. So it was easy for me to understand the hardware. And so that next day after I got it, I read through its manual and understood that it had sprites and music and sound system and pretty much how all that worked.

And when you coded the stuff, how did you proceed in your development process? I mean, did you write out code like by hand on paper or did you plan out the whole structure, the order, the subroutines and stuff on paper? Or did it develop organically as you started writing?

Organically, yeah, organically. I was never programmed, wasn't a programmer. Still, I do write software, but I don't consider myself a hardcore programmer. I just did it organically. I went in, I started to write this. I did a lot of subroutines. The TRS-80 actually taught me a lot about that. In writing the business software, I got a sense of modularity and functions and things of that nature. So a lot of the design of the software, I did have a function for this and a function for that. And if I could break it into a function, then that could be used standard throughout the product. So, for example, pattern level generation and so on and so forth, that was all standard functions that I would do. But never really documented it. The most I ever did was rough out some things on paper. And it was just organic.

Do you happen to have the source code available still?

I doubt it. And over the years, no, I'm sure I do not. Yeah, no, I've never seen anything. Once I got PCs like in 1988 or 89, and I can't recall ever seeing the code be transferred onto the personal computer. So no, I'm sure I don't.

Kay and I have been exploring the code quite a bit. We're starting to get more familiar with – but Kay's really been going to – he's been creating new levels using the construction system that you laid out. And I've been trying to get into the code and kind of – Cool. I'm sort of trying to figure out, you know, it's a very nice modular system, you know, the way you can swap out levels. And you've got the, you know, a few like 40 bytes or so in the first, in the beginning part that has the structure, describes what the level is going to be like, and then sets up pointers and things. It's a very modular approach, which is, you know, this is what, 1983? Is that when you started writing or was it 82? Somewhere around there?

82, yeah, right around in 81, 82-ish. And you're right. I think that was possibly born from the TRS-80 level 2 experience in the business application because on that particular microprocessor, most of the stuff that we did or myself and my brother that we had done was intercept these functions or these routines that the RadioShack would call. I think in the first 256 byte, there was 128 functions, and you would do an interrupt by address, and it would go down to byte number 64 and execute whatever was at that address. So when you work with that down deep, that was kind of a modular approach. That was where you differentiated the functions for the operating system. And so I would guess I probably mirrored myself in some ways after that. You're right. It was modular, and to that extent, when I could, I did. And I did foresee being able to want to write custom parts to the level but still maintain a structure or core that it was around. So you just spoke to a lot of the modularity that you did see. I don't remember the details of it, but I'll take your word for it. I had a 40-byte header at this and a pointer to the level data and so on and so forth. Also, music system that would play songs. That's in there as well. Same thing. I would compose the music with pitches and durations for each of the voices, and then that was played through the sound system.

So you wrote all those little songs too? Yep. Those are all my creations. You wrote all the little music? Nice. Yep. All the music, yeah.

Did you have musical training? Not really, no. I did play violin and the trumpet when I was very young. I continue to be interested in music. I've played with synthesizers and stuff like that post-Jumpman. But no, nothing in my experience really made me musical in any way, shape, or form.

It's my ringtone on my cell phone, the Jumpman theme.

Yeah, well, in retrospect, of course, you hear it a thousand times, and back in the day, hearing the same thing a thousand times was okay. Now, you don't want to do that so much, do you? Everything wants to be new, but I appreciate that. Yeah, I thought it was kind of cool music for its day. It was lively, cute.

Yeah, and one of the things we're finding, too, is that as we go through the code, multiple things can be played at the same time as well. You've got a system that all plays in the vertical blank, so you can play while other things are going on. But it seems like as I've been hacking, I've made a mistake. But two sounds can play over top of each other, and they don't conflict.

Oh, in terms of, yeah, I think it's a two-tone. I don't remember. Two-note, possibly more than that. Each of the sounds, I think each of the songs is composed of two voices. I use the word voices. I didn't use it at the time. At least two. So there's a harmony or a bass or whatever. I just remember two of them created, yeah.

anyway when we screwed something up and caused it to play two songs at the same time it was just like okay fine and and seemed to like find available channels and just do it so yeah

i don't remember how many voice channels there were that maybe there were four and i designed it that but i don't recall ever doing more than two myself and perhaps i left a couple over for the sound effects um if it was playing during the level which i actually don't think i did ever play any music for that. It's possible, again, back to the modular approach or making things general purpose. That is one of the things I still continue to like to do in terms of software.

I read somewhere that Jumpman sold about 40,000 units. Does that sound about right? That's

possibly right. I would estimate that I made around $250,000 off that game. so at about 15 percent 50 60 dollars per you know that that could be about right yeah yeah well um it was quite popular never as popular as i wanted it to be um back at that time they had the billboard game charts and such and i think the highest that that game ever got was um six on the chart number six possibly number three once but i was just a few months away of making a whole ton of money and I didn't know that until much later. That's your segue to ask me why was that?

Yes, well, we're going in a different direction than I was planning to, but yes,

what happened? Miner 2049er. You've probably heard of that one. Sure. That was released about three months before mine was. And in many ways they were similar. It was a platform game that you walk through levels. It was quite different in terms of its play. I didn't really care for it, but that one did make the number one while I was sitting down between three and six and had somehow I had moved this along four months earlier, I might have been the first guy out of the gate with that type of game. And so we could have flawed positions. But anyway, I'm not sour grapes about it. It was just an interesting observation.

Right. Several people had similar ideas around the same time, I think. There was people were writing games left and right. Yeah. So you said something about something happened that you brought a lot of money in later? Did I misunderstand?

Yeah, you must have misunderstood. No. That could have been, I was saying, had my game released earlier than 49er, I think I would have been in the number one spot. So I might have made twice the money that I did make. Not that I'm complaining. But it was just a matter of timing of games and game genres. Sure.

So on a personal note, Jumpman was one of the very few games that my dad and I actually purchased, and the only Atari game that I ever purchased with my own hard-earned kid money. So I was not a dirty pirate for this one game, but I'd like to know about the effect of... There was copy protection on the game. Did you do that yourself? And do you feel that there was an effect of piracy on your game?

That's an interesting point. Yes, you're right. Now that you bring that up. And I had to come up with a scenario. And as I recall, what I had done is on the disc read. We're talking about the Atari version. I had taken a disc and created a bad sector on it. And so I knew where that bad sector was going to be. And then they would generate that on the production disc. And I would look for that. So when I would read that sector, it would actually come up bad, and I would expect that to come up bad. And that's how I knew it was a legitimate copy, because it was a bit difficult to create a bad sector for the non-technically aware to get around that copy protection. It wasn't perfect, but I think for its day, it was probably fairly effective to keep the casual guy from just duping the disc, because it had a bad sector on it, and they couldn't duplicate the bad spot.

Right. But pirates pirated it anyway. Did you, I don't know, were you annoyed at the time? Did you feel like they were stealing money out of your pocket? No. Were you aware?

I wasn't even aware. I mean, it could have been going on. I had no knowledge of it. I know later on I saw knockoffs of the game on other platforms that were from around that time. But I wasn't aware that they were going on. I didn't travel in any other circle but the Atari. Did a little bit with, and then later on the Commodore 64, but those would have been the two worlds that I was in. And even then, I wasn't really plugged into the community per se. As I mentioned, I didn't know Steve Jobs and didn't know all that was going on. And even when I was writing games, I didn't know really what the game community was doing in terms of evolution and such, other than to see what products next my company was trying to make and so on and so forth.

So were there other Atari users that you were developing with? Maybe not users, but developers and stuff. Were you in contact with other developers?

I was. Not at the time I wrote Jumpman, the first version, the disc version with the 48 levels. EPYX had bought another company, and they brought in over about eight programmers that had worked on the Atari 2600. I don't recall the name of the company. that they bought out but yeah they brought these eight guys over um and they were hardcore programmers they could squeeze a lot out of a poor old Atari 2600 um they were actually quite intimidating for me i still wore a tie to the office to go to work i was completely um anti programmer these guys on the wall one guy wrote stories for pornography that was his sideline this was a cast of characters in an environment that i was just not familiar with i did work with one of them to produce the next game that i made out of epics and then i was going to work with the third one to produce the third game but that never quite happened that's what i left epics probably about two years after i started with them quite frankly i was intimidated i was not a professional programmer these guys were good they came in from working with hardware that i knew was extremely sparse and they did wonderful things with it i had to rely on the hardware for example the Atari 800 and the commodore 64 and couldn't work beyond that in terms of my programming skill how do i render um one of my the reason i did leave epics was because they had a project called Pitstop you might have heard of that one um that was fairly popular for epics at the time and i could not i spent about a month trying to figure out how i was going to do that on the Atari or the 64, I should say, at the time, I couldn't wrap my head around the three dimensions, presenting a three-dimensional view of a car running down a track. And that's really what made me realize I was out of my element as I could see it at that time, beyond my capability.

You mentioned there was an unfinished game after Summer Games. Was that Pitstop, or was that another? That was Pitstop,

yes. Yeah, that was Pitstop. I had started that. That was going to be my project, and I realized I could not undertake that. The guys that were there had to be the ones that they knew how to make that happen. I couldn't.

Well, you're being very humble. I'm really impressed with all the code that I've looked at. For instance, the vertical blank, you don't use a single vertical blank. You rotate through like a set of 10 vertical blank interrupts. Just the way you've set that up, again, it's a very modular system, and you put a lot of hooks in. So I'm terribly impressed with your code. I think it's great. I'm just still exploring just the fringes of it, but it's awesome.

Well, I appreciate that. I have another story related to the vertical blanks that's epics-related and design-related. Please. The other product, the game that came out after Jumpman, but before Summer Games and Pitstop, was called Lunar Outpost. You guys ever heard of it?

No.

Not me. well nobody else has either um it went into full production they did the box the whole nine yards sold it it didn't sell very well but it would be my second game and the game came about and you'll probably appreciate this story um we had a new ceo coming in from to epics from coleco and he wanted action games and he told all the programmers the other guys were there this time bring to me ideas whatever it is if it's stomping grapes i don't care let's have a bowl session and let's see what she got and from that you know we'll see what we can pick up so i had been experimenting with the the horizontal interrupt structure of the commodore 64 which is very much the same as the Atari and I hadn't done the technique before but I did on a sample on the 64 where I would reuse the sprites and keep them vertically separated so I could make 16 or 24 sprites on the screen by at the right moment as you can tell moving the position of the sprite and putting it in a new location had I had I had that technique on Jumpman maybe I could have done a few more things that were interesting um but what i did manage to do is provide a three-dimensional effect by having um i put uh spaceships or flying saucers coming at you and they'd be small and as they came down into the next region they would get larger and then larger and then larger so it looked like there was a whole bunch of moving sprites of three dimensions coming in and out and at you and that was my demo for them to look at i was just playing around with the hardware and he goes well that's cool i want a game based on that and that's what lunar outpost turned out to be a three-dimensional shooting game but not entirely all action there was a logical part to it as well you ran around on a lunar landscape and you would try to find out which of your bases were under attack and then you would go in and when you entered the base to fight that's when you would see this three-dimensional flying saucers destroying the buildings and so on and so forth if it was made how come it didn't wasn't sold how come it was about this game it was i don't know um i think because it didn't grab you um i don't know if they they weren't interested in promoting it um it was an okay game i i was lukewarm with it after it was all done i think my heart was the original aspect i actually like the two-dimensional aspect a little bit more it was the blend of action and strategy or phrases back at the time you know action games for strategy players as i recall i i don't think i think when somebody picked it up within five minutes they didn't quite think it was very exciting and that was the end of it but it was my second game and it had some characteristics when You see 20 or so flying saucers on a Commodore 64 screen. It's visually exciting for its day. But you've got to get there through this.

Jumpman was out the door, and then Lunar Outpost, and then Jumpman Jr. was next? Oh, Jumpman Jr.

actually was next after Jumpman. That was just a cartridge version. I was squeezing in some new content in a smaller 16K cartridge. and it was nice to have a cartridge format because at the time not everybody had that hard drive.

So was this a directive from the publisher saying okay we need a cart version for people who don't have disk drives or was this you going wow I've got more level ideas that didn't make it into the original game? A combination of the two.

Why? To have people on the 400 be able to just plug in and go and still have the Jumpman experience.

and you i still haven't seen all the levels because that game doesn't have a randomizer

and must be played linearly and it is a bit rough yes it does get rough out there about level six or seven or eight yeah i might have changed that had i known how tough it actually was to get to the

last ones do you remember how how you had to change the code to stuff it into the 16k cartridge

not so much um i think it has the core engine um it was just about cutting down the code that handled the custom elements that you see in the other 30 levels on the other game with those not present um i believe it's actually pretty much exactly the same engine so it was just about creating enough uh scaling down the content um to fit the cartridge oh that's that's good for us

they were thinking about trying to maybe bring those levels back into the original jump man code as well.

That would be interesting, yeah. You can probably do that fairly easily. I think you'll find this exactly the same structure. I don't recall writing much code for that other than cartridge boot up or anything like that. It was really just about content. It plays exactly the same otherwise. So that would be possible to rescue whatever, I think, the 10, 11, and 12 on that one and have somebody actually see what they are.

Nice. Yeah, in my looking around, it seems like you change some things in the level descriptors to save some bytes, but it's largely the same, but I couldn't just copy and paste it to make it work. Yeah, yeah. But that'll be an interesting project for the later. So did you also make the Commodore 64 ports of the games? Yes, I did. Completely.

Yeah. That wasn't that typical. Yeah, I recall they were very similar in architecture. Once I changed the core stuff around, how to work with the sprite engine, how to deal with the sound engine, and so on and so forth, it went fairly smoothly.

And yet there are a couple levels on the Commodore that aren't on the Atari, and I think vice versa. My assumption was always that those were due to technical differences on the machines.

I believe you're correct about that. I can't recall which ones they were, but as I recall, there were a couple that I couldn't use. I want to say, no, I think Runaway was on the C64. But yes, I believe you're right. There were technical issues that prevented an exact copy from working. It was about the special content for each level. It wouldn't work well or wouldn't translate to the 64.

So it was largely the same code, it sounds like? Essentially,

yes. Yeah, I mean, I started from scratch, but I could easily copy the code from one to another and make whatever modifications, because it was all really hardware-level modifications primarily.

Were you still developing on an Apple II by then, or were then you on a C64 developing for the C64?

No, I was still on the Apple II at that time. Yeah, it was an environment I was comfortable with. Great for writing code. I never had a C64 Atari compiler, ever. Never seen one. Wouldn't know what it looked like, even today.

So it sounds like you did the Atari stuff. You learned that on your own. You didn't get much help from, let's say, Atari directly. And was it the same on the Commodore? You just cracked open some books and figured it out? Yep, same thing.

They left me pretty much alone. There was nobody in EPYX that had any more experience with any of that than I did. The original CEO, when I first started there, he had written everything on the VIC-20. No, there was no sound people. There was no graphics people. When I left, yes, they had a graphics person. Yes, they had the sound person. They started getting bigger, of course, and that's the way the games were going. So they did exist. But at my time, it was just me and what I chose to put together. And nobody ever said, oh, I don't like that or I hate that or take that out or change it in any way, shape, or form. Because they were so excited to have it. I guess that's the plus of their exuberance.

It was also an Apple II port. Did you do that?

I did not. I wasn't even aware of that. Nobody in our company, as far as I know, did that. It's what you could do on an Apple, right? Black and white and no interrupts at all. It was running around. Yeah. I mean, I don't know who did that. I don't think our company licensed it or anything. I think somebody knocked it off and sold it. And I don't know how successful it was. I can't imagine that successful.

And how about the ports to the other platform, like the PC? I read some stuff that you may have been involved with the PC version.

No, I wasn't. I wasn't involved with the PC version whatsoever. I think that was sold actually to another company, or another company knocked that off, pretty much, for the PC. When I left EPYX, it was Commodore and Atari only. At one time, there was talk of the Coleco. I think maybe there was something on the ColecoVision because our CEO that came in was from Coleco. But nobody in the Sunnyvale office ever wrote anything on the Coleco while I was there.

Look at that. Jumpman Jr. for ColecoVision.

Yeah, I've seen it. I heard it exists. But I'm not sure EPYX released it. It might have been something that somebody else did after the fact.

So were you getting royalties on all those other versions and things too?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Atari, Jumpman, Jumpman Jr. were both Atari and Commodore 64. And Lunar Outpost, yes, but that might have amounted to a couple hundred bucks. And then Summer Games, no. And then, of course, Pitstop never made it. Right.

All right. So let's talk about other versions of Jumpman that have come. Some of them are back then, and some of them are more modern. I'm aware of – maybe Rob is more familiar with the differences, but there are several here we have on a list.

Yeah, there's a project called Jumpman Under Construction,

which – Yes, and I had worked with a gentleman that was doing that one and played a little bit – that would have been about 8 to 10 years ago, maybe a little bit longer. Yeah, like early 2000s, I think. Go ahead. Yeah,

like a PC version. I think it was all PC-based, and there was a level editor involved. I read that you were involved in creating new levels and stuff.

Yeah, I created one or two underneath. That one did have a level designer that he had created, and I had tested it or made a couple of levels under that. But I never got deeply into it, but I can't even recall what had happened. I think he started not working on it. I was doing other things. And it had some potential. If I could scare up the level one that I wrote, I may have the source code for that. It was quite interesting. It had some nice graphics, and he put some nice stuff into his engine that could allow to do some interesting stuff that would have taken Jumpman to two or three levels above what it was on the C64, the Atari.

Some cool things. Was that like a fan project? He just approached you and asked you to help?

Well, yeah, and I didn't actually do much helping other than design a couple levels and see how it worked. Tested out his platform. He contacted me. Yeah, that was quite some time. I'd forgotten about that.

And I guess there was also another one, an unauthorized clone called Jumpman Lives, released by a different company that EPYX, I believe, made him pull the plug on it.

That's possible. Yeah, I did. There was another company, I think that was their whole business, was to knock off other games. And this was one of them that they knocked off, and I think they were big enough. They had made, I think, quite a few versions of different popular games at the time. I don't recall the company, but it's one you'll see on other games. And there were strictly knockoffs of other people's works in terms of that.

And then more recently was the kick-started Jumpman Forever, which the guy who did that says he had your blessing on that. Go ahead. When I asked him for your contact information, he couldn't give it to me. So I was just like, okay. I was confused about whether it was legit or not.

I believe it is. Yes, I talked to a gentleman, I want to say about six years ago or thereabouts. He had interest, as I recall, bringing it to the phone or that type of a platform. And at the time, I'd also been contacted by some company that said they owned the rights. I looked into who owned the rights to Jumpman. It was some overseas company, and they had bought some remnant of epics or copyrights. And so technically they owned it. And I got something from them, and I was able to write this guy a letter and say, yes, I have the control of it. I can't remember why I believed I did at the time. and you may go ahead and pursue your Jumpman project. And a few years ago, maybe three or four years ago, maybe less, I actually saw this, I think, in a PC version. Is this the one where it's three-dimensional and the thing spins around and you jump from one level to another level? In a three-dimensional type thing that could fit on a small screen? I don't know.

I don't think I've actually played this, even though I paid for the Kickstarter.

Jumpman Forever, I think, is the phone project. I think it's, well, you know what, it's cross-platform now that I think about it.

But it also works on phone. It's Windows and Mac. I know that. And then their website says the phone version is coming out in December. It doesn't say what year, but I think this is correct.

Yeah, I had seen the phone version or the one that would play on a phone. And surprisingly, it wasn't at all like the two-dimensional Jumpman in both a pleasant way and I guess it's the nature of the phone. But it had a rotating platform, hard to describe, that would spin. And you had to jump while it was spinning. So there were openings in it. And you would fall from one, the internal one to the external one, like rings with openings and stuff. So you could jump. But you could be upside down or sideways. And it gave it a three-dimensional look as well. So you could jump from inner ones to outer ones. So it was interesting to see. It did have the word Jumpman, and I believe that's from that particular project. And I did give them the go-ahead that, as far as I know, the ownership of Jumpman had reverted back to me, and I gave them the go-ahead to do whatever they wanted to with that to see, because I didn't have any monetary stake. I didn't know how far that was going to go. And I wanted to go ahead and encourage them to go ahead and develop whatever they saw in terms of a vision for that.

Has this continued interest in Jumpman surprise you?

No, I guess not. I suppose, you know, I think it's just a fun platform. People that played it when they were younger, I've met a few people that have, and everyone says, oh, I love that game. And that is what Jumpman was. It was built in a way that people just intuitively loved or felt good about, And it might not have been the most technically executed project, but what that meant for me as an author is I was able to convey my sense of fun to the people that played it. And that was the whole thing. In fact, still to this day, I think in terms of is it fun to play? Is it interesting? I've never been one, as you can tell by the development of the game, to sit back and say, well, let's just do this or let's just do that. Or this is technically cool or such like that. In fact, my favorite game or games are those things that I just find, for lack of a better term, fun. And so I think Jumpman hit that mark from way back in the day. And if somebody can produce a newer version and use the Jumpman moniker and make it fun, that would be cool.

After Lunar Outpost came Summer Games. How did you get that assignment, and how did that go?

That was a project that I worked on that multiple programmers did because it was divided into events. One could write the code for an event independent of another event. And so I wrote the swimming event in Summer Games. So I was credited with that part of it. And I thought that went pretty well. It was a little weird to make a swimmer, but I thought I was able to execute that because it was really a two-dimensional platform, still based in the sprite level, something I was comfortable with at the time. I don't recall ever receiving any royalties for that. At that time, we were lock, stock, and barrel owned by basically the CFO from Coleco. And so they were driven by what names can we put out, what's the big name we can get, what license can we buy. And that would have been about 1984. So as a programming challenge, it was interesting to develop the control for it. But that's all that was really interesting about it.

Did you do any other games after that?

But no, nothing else since. Everything's been business related. I got into personal computers after that from a business side and in the personal computer industry per se. So I got sucked into IBMs, which until the last 15 years weren't really game friendly. And of course, now they're quite game friendly. But no, all computer business and never really missed it. I do play a game that's been around for 15 years. Oh, I did get into MMOs in the late 1990s. And that genre I enjoy a lot. I played most of the major ones on and off over the years. But I still like one of the old ones that's been around for a long time. I still play Asheron's Call. And it's been around for 16 years now. But again, I like the feel of it. It's friendly. I don't like, in terms of designer, I don't like scripted things, and that's my beef about most games today. I'm sure when they sit in the boardroom and decide what they're going to do, they want to know what the experience of the end user is really going to be down to a very small detail, I believe, at this point in time. And although the experiences can be awesome, I'm sure first-person shooters, some of those are great fun, but they keep you sandboxed. and they keep you under control through the entire experience. And I like to think that Jumpman or any other game that I would ever develop would try not to do that because experimentation and running into things that are both awesome like a discovery or horrible as a discovery, I think is what makes a game truly fun for people. Now, I'm a bit older, obviously, so I've lost touch with millennials, and I'm sure that may not be what they would want to hear. They would probably drop your game in two minutes if it killed them within that space of time. And so from a marketing perspective, I guess that would be a horrible design choice. But I'd be willing to go through that. But, of course, it's not my money.

Well, that's one of the things I've always liked about Jumpman is that you didn't have to take it in a linear fashion. There might be different ways to solve a level. You could do one side than the other. With a couple of exceptions, like figure it and things, you could take it from the direction you wanted to, and that was always cool.

Yeah, and I never designed them to be run in a certain way, other than you're right. A few of them I did. It was all about, let me start you here, let me give you an environment, and then you see what you can do. I didn't know what I thought would be the optimum for it until I actually played it, and I wasn't the best at it. Trust me. There were those few playtesters that were much better than that. Only thing I do regret about the game is I would have liked the sense of the points meaning more than they actually did. In retrospect, I would have spent some time really thinking about scores and that they were or were not meaningful. Now, maybe that would fly in the face of, hey, this is just fun to play and I really don't care what the score is. But I think that would have helped it a bit in terms of bragging rights. For example, we're talking the technical details, but the grand puzzles, their rewards and their time constraints should have been – I should have spent time bringing those out more, making them more to the forefront. Because they were meant to be like a showpiece, and the scores that you got never really reflected that, as did the timing. There wasn't enough differences in the timing or scoring of one level. If you could get it 20% faster than the next guy, that wasn't a big advantage. And I think in retrospect, I would probably scale the points, not linear, but scale them based on that toward the end, it becomes more important. And if you can shave off 10%, that's a significant bonus to your scoring. That would have probably been the only change I would make in the original game. Otherwise, I'd let the play go on.

So how did your time at EPYX come to an end? Oh, I left.

Got a trophy. They said, thank you very much. It was a nice party. And I went. As I told you, I went actually because I realized I was not going to be able to compete with real programmers. That was really why I probably would have stayed if I had had success at wrapping my brain around Pitstop, for example. I probably would have still been there.

And you left to do what? And what do you do today? Oh,

I went back to my company that I worked for before, EPYX. That was the cash register company. I wrote software for them in the cash registers. Those were going through their own modernization from electronic to programmable cash registers. After that was about five years, then I started working and selling PCs. And from about 1992 till 2006, my brother and I owned and operated a couple of computer stores in the Central Valley. And those were great times, too. Back in the 1990s were good times for that. The 2000s sucked for a computer store. And if you've got one today, it's really rough. But that's what I ended up doing. And now, of course, as you probably checked, I'm doing software and hardware for elevator controls. So I've always had a bit of myself in the embedded programming level. I like that from the early days in the late 70s, getting into looking at registers and so on and so forth. That's what I like to do. And then the software now, of course, is a part of all of that.

All right. So does the closed door button do anything?

Yes, it does. it actually closes a door. There's an instruction for it. And it is an important function of the elevator.

All right. Sorry, needed to know. I know it was off topic. No problem. Those are the kinds of things that we do now. Go ahead. You mentioned your brother a couple of times. There was a man named Roy Glover who did the music for Mule. I'm wondering if you're related to him.

I am not. My brother is Rick Glover. He is not a programmer. He was with me, and we worked in the same company in the early 80s. I worked with him in doing the software for that TRS-80 Model 2, but he never got into the games. He wasn't part of my Jumpman experience. And, you know, as he is not a programmer per se, he knows how to write some code, but he went off to do other things. I'm still close to him. But we had split, even though we lived together in the early days of Jumpman. He went on to do regular work, and I went on to play around with games for a few years. Mule was a game I liked, by the way. Very fun in its day.

Yeah,

that's a good game.

What other games did you play on the Atari back in the day?

Not that many. Mule was one that I liked. What's that other one? Oh, Barry Bucks. Don't ask me why. If you recall that game on the Atari where you have to drop bombs and dig a hole and get down there and get the things. Every time I touched the edge and went, I jumped in. And I just loved that experience about how weird it was and how free it was. Mule and that one are the only two I remember. I tried some of the others, but those were classics for me in those days, playing them. nice do you still have an Atari machine i do still have one i bought one about eight years ago made sure i had one and i have a jump man game in the box and they're out in the garage somewhere i don't pull them out i i fired it up about eight years ago um played around with it said oh yeah i remember all this this was cool of course it worked and it was all nice and um but i don't have any particular desire to play it i've shown it to my friends once and that was enough you know this is a time and a places they weren't involved in um i did get one kick out of i was watching a thing on uh on the computers uh Atari the company and for five seconds they had a screen of jump man in the documentary about Atari's evolution um even though Atari as a company was not involved in jump man in any way shape or form it was just nice to see my little screen up there for a split second you know somebody picked that out maybe they played it and liked it

so i didn't i don't think i read this explicitly but i kind of got the sense that jump man saved epics at a time where it could have just gone under because people weren't buying their war games anymore and they needed something new and here comes jump man out from out of nowhere and and you save their asses do you get that sense i believe that to be entirely true when

I had started there when I had brought down my game. The CEO was the founder of Automated Simulation. He was the guy that started Dragonriders of Pern. He was the guy that wrote the code. And the company was not making money. They didn't have anything. He didn't know how to write an action game. And yes, I think I did. When I appeared there and the guy said, oh, we love it. And the company essentially said, this is the thing that's going to get us into the action games. that are the hot property today. I think it actually did. They made a lot of money off of that in the period of a year or two. And during that time is when they brought in the CFO or CEO from Coleco a year or so later. It helped them get to that focus of action games. And I think that's what made them move on to the summer games and the licensing, the things that EPYX did do. So yeah, I believe that's actually true. Just happened to be that they were more excited than I was about having something. So it worked out for both of us.

When it was reviewed at the time, were you aware of all the reviews coming in and how well it was being received?

I tracked it primarily through the Billboard game. I mean, I didn't read many reviews on it. I did go to two of the shows in Chicago, two years in a row. Big Epics booth, Jumpman was featured, so I got to talk to a lot of players and people who had seen it, and everybody was excited about it, and everybody loved it. So that would have been the review I had. People seemed to just enjoy it, but I did not go around reading print reviews or anything like that. It was really just about tracking it, how popular was it on the Billboard Top 100 game I think they had at the time.

I would like to ask a little bit more about the travel and the shows you went to, and did you receive any awards in person? And tell me a little bit about taking any junkets you got. Thanks to Jumpman.

Yeah, the only junket, the two junkets were going to Chicago both times for the, I don't recall what it was called. It was a big game. It was when Atari and all that had the giant booths, and EPYX had a presence there, spent tons of money on a booth, And they had their games running on the screen. So those were the only two junkets. I'm a bit of an introvert. I don't get out. I didn't think that traveling is, I still don't think that traveling is a big thing for me. So they were outside of my box in terms of doing it. But I enjoyed the experience both times that I went. Those would have been the only two things that I traveled with in terms of epics and being plugged right into Jumpman at that time. I'd never done anything else. There were no awards. I think in large part that might speak also to EPYX. As a company, I'm sure there were many other companies in Silicon Valley developing Atari games. And I never heard, other than purchasing that one company, of the people that work there, the CEO, being really involved in the circuit. As you're alluding to, there was a lot going on. Atari, as I watched the documentary, was really doing a lot of things as a company. And I never really got any sense that EPYX had any relationship at all with Atari directly or some of the larger things other than going to the shows. So they seem to be a bit isolated as a company.

To get back to some of the – so Jumpman was essentially – you're seeing Donkey Kong and trying to bring that to the Atari and bring your ideas to it. To me, it's like – it's a very good example of an arcade game. It's got the title screen. It's got the attract mode. It's got the high score table. As I'm kind of digging into the code a little bit, I was really interested by the demo level, where the jump man runs around, he jumps around, and he jumps over to the demo screen and runs around and gets chased and stuff. I'm just curious. Do you remember how you created the controls for that jump man guy? I mean, I found the code that does it, But did you have to figure out, okay, I've got to make Jumpman run for 60 pixels? Or did you have an auto player that you could record yourself?

Yeah, no, that was exactly it. It was a pathing for it and the things with it that scripted the exact lineup of time and so on and so forth. You'll see that on the Commodore 64 Jumpman Jr., I think it is, where he stomps on the letters and they all fall down. That was hand-scripted in the sense that, yes, I had a little path, exactly what you said. Run this direction for X number of time. Run this direction for X number of time. Because I had to get the timing all just exactly right. Which might not have been the way somebody else would have done it. They might have recorded the visuals. But I was using, again, the same game engine and just changing how it would work. So, yeah, that was kind of a fun project. But it still used much of the same core. But it was scripted, yes, very much so in terms of paths and objects.

It always bothered me that the demo level wasn't a level that you could play in the game. That was where the little guy came out of the side and tried to hit him. Yeah, there was a rocket and little things happened. Anyway, so once we figured out how the levels work, basically the first thing I did was take the demo level and play it. Of course, the little baddies can't kill you, but I could jump around all day and just play the demo level myself.

Yeah, I guess that wasn't right of me, was it, to put out things you couldn't actually see? I never thought about that. It just looked like a fun demonstration of what you might – it was supposed to be kind of enticing to see it, and I think it did do that. Oh, it was, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean just like an arcade game that would lure you in to put your quarter in. It's the same.

Yeah, yeah. It was just meant to be a visual interest. Yeah, indeed.

So, yeah, I mean, as we've alluded to, we've been working with the code a little bit, and I have to ask, could we convince you perhaps to write some new levels for the game? You might be able to.

That would be an interesting experiment. I actually think that would be fun. It would be nice to – did you reverse engineer the source code you have in a way that you could send it to me? And it's been a lost art. for me.

How do you guys do that? I'm somewhere through. Actually, I wrote a tool, a disassembler and hex viewer and stuff. Actually, my goal was to reverse engineer Jumpman. I wrote this whole tool to do it, and that was the reason I wrote this tool. So I've got a bunch of notes. Kay and I have like 25 pages of notes typed up so far. It's not in a state where I can recompile it, so I'm still kind of like patching the binary. Gotcha. Inserting, type up some assembly code and stuff it in there and then run it again. But I'm definitely working towards the idea where I could pull it all out and then just have the actual source code and recompile it all. But I'm not at that state yet.

Yeah, it might be a fun experience to do.

And as for the levels, I mean, yeah, I have written a description of how your level descriptors work, which is what I did yesterday when I published the first new Jumpman level in like 33 years. I just coded it by hand like you did just right in the hex editor. But it's something that can be done now. Good. I'd love to see what you did.

I'd love to see your new level, see what it looks like and go, wow. Is it play on a PC? I assume not on actual Atari.

it plays on an actual Atari but there are Atari emulators so yeah you can just dump the rom and and play it on a pc yeah right yeah it's not a great level it's but it's it's something you know

it's a start so yeah um i would i would i'd love to take a look that you've reminded me also of the jump man under construction um i may have that on the pc here somewhere it was about seven years ago or so but it might be interesting for you guys to take a look at that too because in the style of of jump man he built a level creator that had quite a few more things that you could do with it in terms of his engine so it might be a fun perhaps a project for us to look at say well i wonder if we can recreate the experience of jump man in a newer format that can bring more interesting visuals to it it's not you know it's not anything super sophisticated but as i said three times more interesting visually than the original Jumpman. So, yeah, I'd like to do that. That would be fun. I'd like to see what you guys have done, revisit some of my old code, perhaps. I've forgotten a lot about it. I do remember some things. And then put together some type of level, publish something where people can add to it and make changes to it. That would be kind of fun. Yeah, that would be great.

If you could send a message to the Atari computer community that still exists, and you can right now, what would you tell them? Or just to the people who played Jumpman. Just send a message to the people who played Jumpman.

If it put a smile on your face and you couldn't put it down for days or hours in a row, you have paid me the greatest homage I could think of. That is all I want to get out of that, that other people had the same experience that I envisioned and I had with that type of a platform. It's just surprisingly fun, and you smiled, and you laughed, and you couldn't put it down. And eventually you did move on, but that's it. If you tell me that that's the experience you had, I've heard that a few times. I've heard it from you and I've heard it from others that when I was younger, I played this and I couldn't get enough and it was just great fun. And maybe, although this is asking a lot, other games that came the years after were also enjoyment. But that little bit of what's extra special about Jumpman, that feeling is still remembered.

That would be the best thing I could hear. All right. I spent hours playing it with my dad, and it was just bonding time. It was a great game, and it was great spending time with him. You said people have moved on. Some of them have moved on, but clearly some of them haven't. That's right.

Moved on, I have too, but that experience transcends playing a game. Let's put it that way. That's the way I would like to remember the Jumpman as being. It could transcend playing a game. whatever that means for each individual that did it sure

well I think that's about all I have Rob do you have any more questions? comments?

thanks very much I have so many great memories of the game and yeah thanks for all you did for writing it

I appreciate that people still remember it people pay attention to it and that you've taken the time to track me down and let me talk a little about as I say these things, it's great for me as well. Brings back a lot of fun and pleasant memories the whole time. Send me what you have. You've got my email address and I will endeavor to look up Jumpman Under Construction, what I had for that because I think you'd be most interested in seeing what that gentleman did in terms of trying to keep Jumpman alive and what actually can be done with his platform that fills that void. Be kind of cool.

awesome thank you so much and I know you said you don't have it but if in your basement or your attic you find your design notes or any old floppy disks you need to let us know

I will I will rummage through my oldest PC and I'll spend some time thinking about where that might be and that would be cool for me to see having a couple guys that take interest in that would be also interested me to review it because you're telling me information I have long forgotten and to have an actual copy or print out of that I'm not saying it's impossible, unlikely but if I do I'll certainly be sending that to you by UPS Overnight Courier or I might just attach it to an email and shoot it to you Alright, great Thank you so much Randy, I appreciate your time today Gentlemen, thank you and I appreciate it Thank you.

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