Nick Turner's
video game adventures
days of glory and despair
When I first came to Silicon Valley, I was immediately hired by Atari. It was a dream come true! What a job, to design video games.
For the first game, I took over a project from another person who was leaving. It was Super Breakout for the 2600 VCS Stella machine, and it turned into a medium-size hit. What was so special about this otherwise simple, ordinary game? I could not decide which of 16 different sounds to use for the brick-scoring, so I included them all, selecting one at random each time the game was reset. This simple creative element turned the game into something unique and new... and the game brought me over $250,000 in royalties by the end of 1982.
I designed a variety of other games while I was at Atari, including a colorful children's game called Demons To Diamonds, a cute frogs-and-bugs game called Frog Pond, and an aerial chase-and-catch game called Snoopy And the Red Baron, in which Snoopy on his doghouse flies around and catches food and other goodies that fall from the sky, while avoiding the evil Red Baron.
Also at Atari, I built a set of tools for the Children's Television Workshop (the Muppets people), including a series of game skeletons and video kernels.
By the middle of 1983, I was beginning to reach burnout. I saw other game designers at Atari falling into dangerous patterns, including alcohol and drug abuse. I didn't want to stay around and watch this, and I was dead tired of working 80-hour-plus weeks, so I left Atari, with my money and my sanity, and moved to Boulder Creek, where I settled in and rested.
After several months, I fell in with a little group of crazy techno-weenies called Flyghts of Fancie. We had some cool ideas for games. I worked on a neat game for the Commodore 64 called Middle-Of-The-Road Lizard, and another one that never made it called Gahan Wilson's House of Horrors. We had some fun times, coming up with wacky game ideas, but unfortunately, none of us really knew how to run a company, so poor little FoF folded.
Anybody want to work on an artificial life game?
