R.I.P. John J. Anderson

One of my favorite writers and game authors from the 80's was John J. Anderson. I first got acquainted with John from his excellent game Sea Dragon (published by Scott Adam's company Adventure International) and then Eliminator.

I used to read his columns in Creative Computing magazine and he was a very bright guy, crossing over between the Apple II and Atari 800 with ease. He was one of the few authors back in the day to write code for both platforms because it required quite a bit of knowledge to do both well. Not only did you have to be completely fluent with 6502 assembler but you also had to know the entire memory map of the system and all the important switches and places in RAM and ROM. John was a master of 8-bit systems alongside Jim Nitchals and David Lubar.

John Anderson died on October 17, 1989, seventeen years ago. R.I.P. John.

AWESOME UPDATE: Evidently, the John Anderson who died in this news article was NOT the game programmer, but the journalist. The game programming John Anderson contacted me and said he's quite alive still.

The Fracas Reveal

Some of you may have noticed one of the random messages along the top has been "Stuart Smith, where are you?" I am, of course, referring to the author of the great Adventure Construction Set and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves from Quality Software.

One of my small hobbies is locating lost greats from the dawn of the game industry with most of my focus on the Apple II authors. Stuart Smith is one of those lost authors I have yet to find.

One of the earliest and probably first-published titles Stuart worked on was Fracas, a lo-res turn-based RPG that could eat up a LOT of hours. I recently ran the game again and remembered that it was written in Applesoft Basic, a language that I'm very familar with.

While scrolling through the game listing (this is a game from 1980, mind you) I immediately noticed the line:

5 DEF FN RN(I) = INT( RND(1)* I )

and I thought "oh yeah, I never did figure out what the hell that DEF FN keyword was used for." Then I resolved to learn what it actually did so I looked up an Applesoft reference manual and found out.

Wow. I cannot believe I never learned the value of DEF FN and the countless times I could have used it in my games! It's really simple: you are defining a function that you can call without a GOSUB and it can take a parameter. Basically an inline function.....in Applesoft Basic!

Amazing. And to think that I learned this from a game written at the dawn of the PC gaming age.

Doom Archaeology

I've been doing some digging around in the original Doom development directory since I'm working on consolidating all my data in a sane arrangement. The Doom source that was released years ago wasn't the nice raw development directory otherwise you would have all seen the NeXTSTEP DoomEd source, Doom map source files, and what I have here: unreleased Doom MIDI files.

There's a reason these weren't released - they're not very good, at least not as great as the music we actually shipped with the game. Some of the songs are just repetitive riffs. All the songs are named unXX.mid where XX is a number.

Some of the standout tracks are:

opening: this was an idea for the original Doom title screen song.
un17: Would have actually fit in the game.
un30: I like it's funkiness. Reminds me of Wolfy.
un36: I hated this song. I assigned it to e3m6 originally and everytime I ran that level I just cringed. I eventually removed it.
un39: Would have been a cool intermission screen.
un52: A better version of this song was in the game.

I think a few of the songs are early versions of some that were in the game. So for any of your Bobby Prince fans out there, here's more of the man's work.

Get it here

Nasir Gebelli Interview Clip

August 8, 1998 was a night to remember. I hosted an Apple II Reunion and invited many Apple II pioneers and it was quite a turnout: over 40 legends showed up along with many game industry folks and the atmosphere was electric.

In one area you had Steve Wozniak talking about the Apple II hardware, in the conference room you had stacks of old computer magazines and Apple II's being signed by pioneers, in the game room everyone was mingling and talking about the old days while upstairs Steve Kent and I were busy interviewing some of these people on video for posterity.

I plan to make a DVD of this event but for now here is a short clip of an interview with Nasir Gebelli - one of the people that everyone was dying to meet at the party. For those of you who don't know, Nasir co-founded Sirius Software, what I call the "id Software of the early 80's". Nasir also programmed Final Fantasy 1,2,3 on the NES and then Secret of Mana. He's completely awesome.

I have a poster of Nasir in my office and you can print one yourself from my photo gallery (poster section). You can watch the video here:

Nasir has a lot of Japanese fans who will probably be happy to see this video.

A quick note about the video: there's a point where an observer asks Nasir a question about how he felt about Mark Turmell regarding him as a game god at the party. What this person probably didn't know is that Mark Turmell's games were published by Nasir's company Sirius Software. Yes, Nasir was The Daddy way back when Mark got into the industry. And if you didn't know, Mark is still going strong at Midway in Chicago