"Confessions of The Game Doctor"
by Bill Kunkel
Hi Steve, not sure if you remember me, but I'm Bill Kunkel. Arnie
Katz (who did that Today Show with you) and I created ELECTRONIC
GAMES magazine back in '81 (it qualifies as the first game zine
-- we even made it into the timeline in TIME magazine last week).
Anyway, I met you in Sunnyvale at Atari just as you were finishing
off Championship/Pele Soccer. I am now writing my game-related
memoirs "Confessions of The Game Doctor" for Rolenta
Press and wondered if you'd take a look at the section of a chapter
you appear in:
I never much cared for Atari's Adventure but I couldn't get
enough of Superman and Championship (later Pele) Soccer on
the 2600 (how about that fireworks display when you scored
a goal was that awesome or what?).
Speaking of that Atari VCS Soccer game (Atari acquired the
Pele license after the game had initially been released as
Championship Soccer) brings to mind one of my favorite game
designer stories from the early years. I was up at Atari at
some point doing God only knows what when I wound up interviewing
Steve Wright, one of the most delightful, creative guys who
ever worked at Atari during the 2600 years.
Of course, back in those days, there were no individual designers,
artists, programmers, sound fx guys and composers. In fact,
on my first visit to Activision, David Crane assured me that
there would never be such a diversity of talent involved in
the creation of videogames because only a lone programmer (well,
maybe an assistant to handle the small stuff) could work with
such small amounts of memory and keep everything balanced.
I knew he was wrong because somehow he seemed to have no idea
that these systems would grow exponentially to the point where
the creation of a single game would begin to rival the production
of a motion picture.
Anyway, Steve was showing off his soccer game and I admitted
to being blown away.
"I've never seen vertical scrolling on the 2600 before," I
observed, causing a smile to break out across Steve's face.
"Funny you should mention that," he told me. "I'd
been fiddling with the vertical scrolling for quite a while
before I finally nailed it. So I went to one of the programmers
upstairs and told him that I was doing a vertically scrolling
soccer game on the 2600. He just shook his head. 'You can't
do a vertical scroll on the 2600,' he informed me. 'The machine
can't execute it.'
"I just smiled and said: 'Glad we didn't discuss this
last month!' And I thought to myself how happy I was that I
hadn't known I was attempting the impossible or I might never
have accomplished it."
I discovered that there were two kinds of game creators in
those days the guys who had a list of things you could do and
couldn't do on the system for which you were developing and
the guys who decided what they wanted to do and figured out
a way to do it.
Like Steve Wright, our group decided we wanted to write about
videogames and totally ignored the voices of experience who
assured us that nobody wanted to read about Pong machines.
What could you say about a bunch of bleeps and bloops and stair-step
lines? And besides, there weren't enough games to write about.
- Bill Kunkel
Excerpt from "Confessions
of The Game Doctor"
Atari's Adventure: How does one get to the secret
room,
and how did the secret room get termed 'Easter Egg?'
To get into the secret room, there was a 1-pixel object (the
smallest possible little insignificant looking dot) that was the
small color (gray) as the background. The Gray Dot was hidden in
a little chamber that was surrounded by walls, and could only gotten
to by using the Bridge object to cross the walls. Since it was
the same color as the background, you couldn't see it until you
ran into it and then saw it against the walls of the maze. If you
took this object around throughout the game world, you might eventually
discover that it let you get through one of the side walls near
the Yellow Castle and into the secret room which contained my signature.
By the time the existence of the secret room became known to
Atari, I no longer worked there. I figured they would expunge the
secret room when they found out about it, but the manager of the
Atari game designers at that time, Steve Wright I think it was,
said that he thought it was kind of cool to have little hidden
surprises in video games, like searching for Easter Eggs on Easter
Sunday. So it was not expunged, possibly influenced by the fact
it would have cost $10,000 to make a new mask for the ROM chip
used in the Adventure cartridge. They did assign a programmer to
track down where in the code the signature was -- he later told
me that if he had been asked remove it, he would have replaced "Created
by Warren Robinett" with "Fixed by Brad Stewart."
- Excerpt from Warren Robinett Interview
http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_Warren_Robinett.html
Superman III
The video game "played" by Ross Webster
was created for the film and originally looked very life-like,
so much so that the creators were asked to make it look more computer-like,
so that the fact that it was actually a game would be more obvious
to the audience. So, Atari, Inc. was hired to work with Warner
Brothers to produce advanced video game effects for Superman III
under the direction of Steve Wright.
- "Never underestimate the power of computers",
Ross Webster (Robert Vaughn)
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