.png)
2 weeks ago
1
Assembling the squad
“Star Wars made a surprisingly large amount of money, and George—rather than doing the usual thing of buying land with it in order to call it an expense and avoid paying taxes, which seems to be what people in Hollywood do—instead funded something called the Computer Division.”
Peter Langston
“Earlier you saw what can be done with million dollar computers. Now let’s look at the kind of animation that can be created with a personal computer costing only a few hundred dollars. In this half of the book, we will show you how to bring the exciting world of animation into your own home. If you have an ATARI microcomputer [...] you will be able to turn your computer into a fabulous animation machine.”
David Fox
In the early 1980s, Peter Langston was the oldest veteran still active in the video game industry. Born in 1946, Langston had his first contact with computers in his second year of chemistry studies at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. There, after catching the tail end of a Fortran lecture, he was won over by computers, which led him to spend more and more time in the lab, punching Hollerith cards and feeding them into an IBM 1620 late into the night. Over time, his interest in computing only grew: from Fortran he moved on to study machine language and finally assembly language.
When the university retired the IBM 1620 in favor of a new IBM 1130, thanks to his experience and broad knowledge Langston helped draft a document outlining the computer’s possible academic uses, and was then appointed student manager of the new Computer Center. By the end of his chemistry studies, he had amassed such impressive expertise in computing and programming—surpassing that of his instructors—that it caused him some trouble when it came time to graduate.
Langston: “At Reed, you must write and defend a thesis for a BA degree. I wanted my thesis topic to revolve around computing in chemistry, but I could not get a faculty advisor because, as one chemistry professor put it, ‘You already know more about computers than I do; how could I guide you?’ One chemistry professor had just acquired an analog computer and said he would sponsor me if I made my thesis deal with the use of analog computers in chemistry. So I learned how to program analog computers and wrote a thesis on it.”
Right after graduating, the same professor who had supervised his thesis obtained substantial funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build an analog computer. Langston was therefore hired onto the small team of four researchers tasked with carrying out the project and, when the computer was later transferred to The Evergreen State College, a new public university in Olympia, Washington, Langston followed his creation, taking care of its maintenance and operation. His position at Evergreen did not end with technical management of the computer, because he was also asked to teach small, independent groups of students.
Evergreen was equipped with an HP 2000 time-sharing system. Outfitted with a BASIC language interpreter (in the HP dialect), the system operated via teletypes: operators typed programs on a keyboard, stored them on the mainframe, then ran them, read the output on printed paper, and entered input again via the keyboard. Considering that only a few years earlier, when Catmull had begun studying programming, students generally still had no access to computers and classes were almost entirely theoretical, on paper, the mainframe-plus-teletype setup represented a major step forward. At a time when computers still cost tens of thousands of dollars, time-sharing systems were the most economical option available in contexts where multiple users needed to operate concurrently and were therefore very widespread in educational institutions. Thanks to time-sharing, numerous students could study at the same time—typing programs, executing code, and debugging their work.
Working with the students, Langston quickly realized that the best way to capture the attention of young people less interested in programming was to show them the earliest computer games. The result was almost always the same: the students had fun and then became passionate about programming, thrilled by the possibility of creating more games, often starting from those already available and freshly tried. Thus, between 1972 and 1974, Langston and his students developed a large number of games, including Empire, Convoy, Oracle, Galaxy, Wander, Beasts, Gomoku, Bolo, Dune, FF, Race, SPBT, and Today.
One way or another, they were all noteworthy pieces of software—sometimes for their originality and for anticipating other similar games, other times for the large user base they managed to reach—and many even found their way into other labs, all the more so because Langston himself often released Unix versions of the programs and helped spread them.
Wander, for example, was software that simultaneously integrated a text adventure—equipped with a parser to interpret the player’s input and generate output—and a development tool that allowed players to create new adventures. The way the game worked was not very different from the much more famous Advent: the player had to type commands like “South” to move south or “Take credit card” to pick up a credit card, and the program—by searching the tables defined by the adventure’s designer for the relevant output based on the object, the action used, and the room in which it was performed—generated the text informing the user of the result of the action. Although it had been developed starting in 1972, that is, two years before Advent, Wander did not achieve the same success and remained forgotten for a long time, partly because Langston did not freely release the source code as William Crowther and Don Woods did. Wander was long considered lost forever, until a friend of Langston, in 2015, realized he had preserved a copy in his correspondence.
Not all the other games, however, survived the hardware and development environment in which they had been created. Galaxy, for example, had its source code lost, and what little is known consists of a few fragmentary details, including Langston’s own memories, in which he described it as: “Galaxy was the one that was sort of a precursor to Empire. In that one you were doing exploration using spaceships, and it was kind of a realistic simulation, which of course meant that it was not any fun at all because it took so long to do anything. So then I was trying to speed up time, and then I realized, okay, this needs to be narrowed down a little. And one of my students said, ‘Why don’t you just do it on a single planet?’ He had an idea about modeling civilization, so he made something called Civil—which of course was only five letters, so I figured that couldn’t be it, right? And so at that point I did Empire.”
Unlike Galaxy, Empire survived—at least in part—the test of time. Its development, which came after Galaxy, began in 1972 at Evergreen, again in BASIC on the HP 2000 mainframe. For this first version, however, despite already being much appreciated and played, the source code was not distributed—“because no one asked me,” Langston later explained—and the software was lost forever when the computer was decommissioned. The same thing, however, did not happen to the later versions.
Langston: “I left teaching [at Evergreen] because the acoustic music trio that I was performing in, called ‘Entropy Service,’ had hit the glass ceiling in the Pacific Northwest and needed to move to a location where we could be seen as the hot new band from out of town. So we moved to the Boston/Cambridge area and began playing there. While we were having the usual ups and downs of a struggling music act I was hired by the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to write software for them and I was made a systems programmer at the Harvard Science Center.”
Here Langston returned to working on his Empire, this time programming in Unix C on a PDP-11/45 during his time at Harvard University, between 1974 and 1977, as a programmer and systems analyst at the Harvard Science Center at Radcliffe. After distributing the early versions of his game, however, he had second thoughts: when he saw the changes introduced by some players and would-be programmers, he changed his mind, stopped distributing the source, and decided to take the game’s development back into his own hands, by which point it had evolved drastically.
Since the early versions seem to have been lost and their creator’s recollections are unfortunately fragmentary, it is impossible to reconstruct precisely the development of Empire’s versions; however, it is likely that its first iteration for the HP 2000 was already able to procedurally generate a random map based on user-defined starting parameters, allow multiple players to compete for resources, develop their own faction, and even go to war if necessary. In later versions, Langston continued to add mechanics and features, including a planet-generation system intended to create plausible continents by taking plate tectonics into account; an ever-growing number of resources to gather and exploit; combat units; and tools for managing diplomacy, trade, and, of course, war.
In the absence of the source code, around 1978 several Empire players set to work attempting to decompile or reverse-engineer Langston’s game. Moved by pity for the enormous effort his admirers were making, he decided to give them the code of the latest version he was working on. The features of this version are known precisely because, when the developer released the source, FAQs were created and later published on USENET a few years afterward: the terrain generator could create a square map 128 tiles on a side (the entire game was textual or used semigraphic characters, including the world map), with resources to manage; ships and aircraft to wage wars among 32 players; and a hybrid real-time game-update system that recalculated the state of the match at the player’s request.
This version thus became the starting point from which the branches created in parallel by individuals and small teams of programmers spread out, while Langston—shortly before implementing starships, useful for landing on other planets and joining other players’ games—decided to step back and leave Empire’s development to his most willing fans.
Thanks also to the support of enthusiasts and aspiring programmers, Empire remained in constant development for several years, eventually reaching the Internet era, adapted to run online with new technologies. Over the decades, countless versions were created by fans of Langston’s game, generally differing in map size, more complex resource management, the introduction of new combat units, alliances, and technologies to develop in order to strengthen one’s nation. One version of Empire was played by Sid Meier, who was so impressed that he drew inspiration for his Civilization (1991).
Oracle, another piece of software whose development began in 1972 on the HP 2000 mainframe, followed a similar path. It was not a true game but—under the false guise of an artificial intelligence algorithm—a sort of interactive application. The very name of the program clearly indicated the nature of the experience Langston created: the user could submit any kind of question to the computer and then wait for the answer, perhaps meanwhile responding to a question posed in turn by the computer. Thus, without the user’s knowledge, the system routed questions to users waiting to reply and then sent the answers back to whoever had asked, pretending to have spent the time reflecting on the matter.
Langston: “The original Oracle idea was mine, and I was inspired to do it by people. You know, when you told people about how great the computer was—this was at a time when most people didn’t have any experience with a computer, they had maybe only seen them in a movie—and if you were showing them the computer you’d say, ‘Yeah, it’s great, it can solve all kinds of things.’ Then they’d say, ‘Well, ask it what the meaning of life is,’ or something like that, for which you were completely unprepared. It occurred to me that a nice way to deal with those kinds of things would be to set up a situation where each person got to answer somebody else’s question, and it would somehow look like the computer was doing it. That was the idea: saying, ‘Well, that’s a great question, I’ll have to think about it. But while I’m thinking about it, perhaps you could answer this question for me.’ Then the answer would be emailed back to the previous asker, and so on. Moving that concept to the internet seemed like an obvious expansion.”
The development of Oracle benefited greatly from Langston’s work at Harvard, where—among his many programming assignments—he was also tasked with installing an email messaging system on Unix computers. With email in use, a good portion of the staff ended up spending their time answering one another’s questions and, in return, most of the time receiving replies steeped in wordplay, paradoxes, philosophy, sarcasm, and irony.
Langston: “[In 1976] After the band broke up I moved back to New York (where I was born) and did computer work for a financial firm on Madison avenue and then accepted a job running a new computer department for a large Wall Street law firm (200 associate lawyers and 50 partners) called Davis Polk and Wardwell. Part of my employment agreement with them included having time to work on my game projects.”
With a solid employment contract that guaranteed not only free time to pursue his interests but also access to the company’s powerful computers for his games, Langston stayed in New York for a few years, remaining a very active and well-known member of the Unix user community. His games—and his Oracle—continued to attract users, both inside and outside the company. Thanks to careful code optimization, the programs occupied only a small share of the company computers’ resources, but the time and attention spent by secretaries, employees, and even managers were, by contrast, a decidedly significant factor. If back at Evergreen and Harvard Langston’s games had cost several students their academic careers, things in New York were not much different: etched in the programmer’s memory was the time a manager—flustered by an imminent attack on his empire—showed up in the computer room intending to cut the power to interrupt the match and save his nation.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Langston’s programs were at the height of their popularity: distributed through USENIX, they had a large number of players and devoted Oracle users. Because of the fame he gained through his games, Langston’s name was very well known in research institutes and in the Unix-user community, which also included some members of the Graphics Group working at Industrial Light & Magic, such as Tom Duff. For this reason, when Lucasfilm management began seriously considering entering the video game industry, Langston’s name was placed near the top of the list of potential developers to whom the new working group could be entrusted.
According to Langston, Lucasfilm was not dragged into the video game industry by Atari because of the spectacular impact of the Star Trek computer-graphics footage; rather, the move was the natural continuation of George Lucas’s initial investment in the Graphics Group in the wake of the incredible success of Star Wars.
Langston: “Initially, Star Wars made a surprisingly large amount of money, and George, rather than doing the usual thing of buying land with it in order to call it an expense and avoid paying taxes (which seems to be what people in Hollywood do), instead funded something called the Computer Division. [...] So then, when The Empire Strikes Back was about to be released, they knew there would be a big influx of money. They had already funded the Computer Division, so they were looking for a way to use this money beneficially. The idea came up: let’s see if there are other ways to apply this high-technology approach to the entertainment industry. At that point, it seemed that games were probably the way to do it. I think they asked around within the company about who they needed to hire to run this, and my name was one of the names that came up because people knew of my games work through USENIX.”
The Genesis Device footage, then, had perfectly timed the closing of the deal with the best possible outcome for Lucasfilm: it pushed Atari to shoulder the entire burden of the operation. The first half of 1982 had brought excellent results to the Warner subsidiary, but ominous challenges were looming on the horizon due to ever fiercer competition. The investment—hefty though it was—of one million dollars, essentially sight unseen, was nonetheless small in a period when the market seemed capable of endless growth, all the more so since Atari had many other initiatives underway to create home and handheld consoles, video games, and arcade titles.
After two hit films, Lucasfilm was a formidable brand, extremely popular among younger audiences, and thus seemed an excellent choice to counter Coleco, Mattel, and all the new competitors, each in search of IP to exploit. Moreover, for Lucasfilm, Atari was a very important business partner, because right as the details of the contract that would lead to the formation of the Games Group were being discussed, Lucas’s company had sold the rights to turn Indiana Jones into a VCS video game and, shortly thereafter, would enter negotiations for Spielberg’s E.T., which it produced.
When the offer to head the Games Group reached Langston, the programmer was completely taken by surprise. By then settled in New York, with a good job at the law firm that allowed him, without too much trouble, to run his programs on the company computer, Langston found the proposal interesting—also because computer games had been a passion to which he had devoted much time and energy. However, the prospect of having to move to the other side of the United States, to Marin County in California, was enough to prompt him to decline the offer.
According to Langston, after taking his refusal on the chin, Lucasfilm’s recruiters combed through Catmull’s numerous contacts. Thanks to his policy of publishing papers and sharing the results of his research, the leader of the Graphics Group was very famous throughout the United States, but, curiously, this was not enough to ensure he could quickly find a suitable candidate willing to set about making games. Within the community of programmers and computer experts, in fact, video game development was seen as a fallback: a second-rate job, not very serious and with limited growth prospects. And so the search returned to square one: the Unix expert in New York.
Langston: “I think universally people said, ‘Well, that sounds like a lot of fun, but that’s not real work, and you’d never make any money that way.’ So they came back to me and said, ‘Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t like to do this?’ And in various ways they made it impossible to resist. So I took the job.”
To move the project forward he needed a team, but Langston shared with Catmull several philosophical positions on how to organize software production, how to assemble the team, what kind of developers were needed, and even on the use of Unix systems, which the Graphics Group already had. Langston and Catmull did not want to recruit from among seasoned designers; they preferred to look for programmers with extraordinary skills to create the first core and lay the foundations of the video game division.
The first hire, in truth, required no search at all but happened by chance, shortly after Langston’s arrival in Marin. It was the result of the renown and pull the Graphics Group exerted in the field of computer-graphics specialists across the country, as well as Lucasfilm’s incredible appeal to the millions of young and not-so-young who had seen Star Wars in theaters.
Born on December 30, 1950, in Los Angeles, California, David Fox had been interested in animation from a very young age. The chance to start practicing on his own came by happenstance, when he discovered where the technicians at the Hanna-Barbera studios—located near his home—used to dispose of the unused animation cels from their films. The young man recovered a few boxes of materials, mostly containing cels of characters from The Flintstones, and then began trying to make films using the stop-motion technique—that is, photographing frame by frame the animations he could create with the materials at hand. Just like Alexander Schure, Fox realized that the process was far less interesting—and decidedly more tedious—than he had imagined.
Fox’s first encounter with computers came shortly afterward, during his high school years, when he took part in a course organized in the lab of a nearby university. The language taught was Fortran, and students were asked to program by punching cards that then had to be loaded into the machine in the correct order so that the system could run the program—always hoping no mistakes had been made.
Fox: “It was an interesting introduction. It was mostly frustrating because of the technology and the way that I would probably either have syntax errors in the punch cards or logic errors after that. I mean, you basically get a problem like ‘create a program which will print out a calendar,’ or whatever, and you give them a stack of punch cards. Each card has a single line of a command and has to be in a specific order, obviously. Then you give it to the operator and it gets put into a queue and it gets run maybe overnight, and the next day you come back and you get a printout of all the syntax errors you got if the program didn’t run. So you have to retype those cards, and then if you get all the syntax errors correct when they run it through again, then you get the program output—which invariably has a logic error—so you have to do it again. So there’s like a day turnaround at least for each time that you make a change.”
Despite the extreme laboriousness and slowness of the programming process, Fox was impressed by the experience, so much so that upon arriving at UCLA he took another course that proved very similar to the previous one—except that, instead of punched cards, the computer operated with a continuous tape. In truth, from his user’s perspective, Fox didn’t gain many advantages in the shift from cards to punched tape.
Fox: “So instead of each card, you have a long paper tape that you punch on a punch typewriter. And if you make a syntax error there, you have to run the entire tape through again up to that point, correct the error, and then have it continue typing.”
Also during his university years, Fox had his first encounter with arcades and later with video games. In the late 1960s, before the arrival of Pong, arcades were electromechanical devices that relied on light effects, optical tricks created with mirrors, and moving mechanical parts—such as reels that tirelessly wound cloth backdrops painted with aerial battlefields, or belts that carried miniature torpedoes. One of the young student’s favorite arcade machines—so much so that it stayed in his memory decades later—was Sea Wolf, the arcade created by American designer Dave Nutting and based on Namco’s Periscope.
Fox: “You see on the horizon what looks like a ship. You have to blow it up with a torpedo, and when you press the button a motor runs and a light moves off the screen. If you time it properly, you might get a flashing red light. But it’s all mechanical—there were no computers involved.”
At Stanford University, however, it was a whole different story. Fox ended up there on an educational field trip after changing his course of study. When they reached the university, the students toured the facilities, including the laboratories, and when the group arrived at the Stanford Research Institute, Fox had his first chance to see a video game—and even to try it himself.
Fox: “They were demonstrating what they were doing with computers, and one setup had a CRT connected to a minicomputer running Spacewar!. You could sit at the console and it was immediately interactive: you pressed keys to steer your ship and fire little dots from the front. The ship was a small triangle or similar shape. I don’t think there was any sound, but the immediacy of the interactivity opened my eyes—an aha moment: wow, this is a lot of fun.”
And yet his fascination with computers, programming, engineering, and video games faded in the face of the life choices that followed. After three years at UCLA, Fox set those interests aside, moved to Sonoma State University, and devoted himself to psychology. Having earned a BA, he opened a practice, began counseling individuals and small groups, and for a few years computers stayed out of his life—at least until technological progress made it possible to design and build the first home computers created by hobbyists.
Fox: “There was a homebrew computer club that met at Stanford, about an hour and a half away from our house, and I went there with a friend. I remember maybe two or three hundred people in the auditorium—I guess it was a lecture hall—and people in the front would be giving demos and talking about the things they were doing with microcomputers, building kits or inventing kits. Lee Felsenstein was the moderator who ran the club. This was where people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would come to show what they were working on. Everyone there was super enthusiastic about it, but I didn’t really understand the language they were speaking. There was no Google Translate to help me understand the computer terms they were using. So it was like hearing people talk about stuff where I understood some words, but most of it just went over my head.”
The launch of the first microcomputers coincided with an important moment in Fox’s personal and family life. His wife, Annie, had just lost her job, and after a couple of years of counseling work he had begun to feel the need to change course, as he was increasingly dissatisfied with how slowly his practice produced change in the world around him. The people who came to his office struggled to find their way, and the process was long and laborious. For this reason, Fox felt he wasn’t making a difference. He wanted to do more, and faster: he wanted to improve people’s lives at a pace that counseling couldn’t achieve—but that computers—ever faster, cheaper, easier to use, and with constantly growing capabilities—might make possible.
Fox: “I was imagining some sort of interactive Disneyland, like an immersive theme park experience—something at the scale of a theme park, but totally interactive. The idea was that by going through this experience, or by participating in it, you’d learn something about yourself. Maybe you’d have a ‘win’ that felt emotionally satisfying, or maybe you’d do something you didn’t think you could do—something you were afraid of—so that, through the process, something would change in you and affect your life afterward. I realized that was still a long way off. I thought it was a lot closer than it actually turned out to be. But we said, ‘Okay, how do we get to that stage?’ and we kind of pulled back to the present time and started imagining something involving computers.”
By attending the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California, Fox realized that despite his school courses, he didn’t know enough about computers. He imagined making up for lost time by creating an activity centered on computer use that would, in some way, leverage his wife’s teaching skills and his own counseling experience. He didn’t want to open a computer store, because his goal wasn’t to sell machines but to make a positive impact on people’s lives through computers. For this reason, in the end, the couple decided to try the non-profit route.
With substantial funding from a wealthy friend—$50,000 to buy the necessary computers and refurbish the then-unused Marin library—the two set to work. Having cleared the first financial hurdle, they now had to choose which computers to buy. It was the summer of 1977, and the market offered several microcomputers, some launched a few years earlier, such as the Altair 8800 (available since late 1974) and its clone, the IMSAI 8080, as well as the Sol-20 Terminal Computer, designed and marketed in 1976 by the computer club’s moderator, Lee Felsenstein. These machines were broadly similar, sharing key features such as the Intel 8080 microprocessor, an S-100 bus architecture, and the option to purchase them as assembly kits (a cheaper choice, but one that required good hands-on skills—ideal for hobbyists who knew enough to assemble a computer but couldn’t design and build one from scratch) or preassembled. In addition, each of these platforms had interpreters for the BASIC language, designed specifically for beginners and far simpler than other programming languages.
There were also more recent computers, including the second microcomputer produced in Cupertino by a company named Apple. To evaluate it, Fox went in person to the manufacturer’s offices and ended up speaking with two people whose names were well known at the Homebrew Computer Club: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The two spent a long time explaining why he should choose their Apple II over the competition. Imagining that most users would come to the library to use the computers for word processing, however, Fox wasn’t particularly convinced by Apple’s machine because, in its 1977 version, it couldn’t display lowercase characters on-screen. In the end, therefore, he opted to purchase an initial batch of Sol Terminal Computers to kick off the courses.
When the library doors opened—greeted immediately by a first crowd of 750 enthusiastic users—Fox and his wife discovered that what drew people in wasn’t so much the software and the possibility of doing word processing as computer games. By paying a dollar and a half per hour, users of the Marin Computer Center could type in early programs made available through listings published in specialist magazines and try playing them, or try their hand at programming, perhaps after taking one of the courses taught by the center’s two founders. The audience was varied: there were young people thrilled by the chance to try a computer for the first time or driven by curiosity sparked by the science-fiction films and TV series of the time—among which Star Trek and Star Wars naturally held pride of place—as well as adults who wanted to learn how to use computers partly out of personal interest and as a hobby, and partly for possible professional applications. Invariably, everyone was drawn to the games, especially the younger visitors.
Fox: “If I were to do it over again, I definitely would have gone with the Apple II, because—based on the use of the computer center we opened—by far the biggest use was kids playing games. Programming in Applesoft BASIC would have been a lot easier since it was resident; we didn’t have to load it from an audio cassette each time like we did with the Sol-20. So, all in all, it would have made more sense, but we didn’t really know how the center would be received or what people would do with it.”
In addition to the walk-in visitors, entire school classes came to try out the computers. For them—after grabbing their attention with games—Annie personally devoted herself to teaching programming through PILOT courses.
Annie Fox: “Kids love computer games and we have used games very successfully to introduce kids (of all ages) to the wonders of micro computers. Now those of you who have spent any time with computer games know that it's a very rare game that deserves a second or third go around with most bright kids. So we've found that giving kids the tools with which they can create their own games has them captivated totally. At that point they are creatively computing. And the novelty of the experience is then omy limited to their creative imagination. When kids who have been through our classes come back to the Computer Center, they often spend more of their time programming games than playing games. After they know how to program, they feel that programming is more fun; with PILOT, they really do get the sense that they ‘know how.’”
Given the popularity of games, as soon as they were able to make a new investment, the Foxes expanded their machine pool by buying other computers—an Equinox-100, a Tandy TRS-80, a Commodore PET, an Apple II, and an IMSAI VDP-40—bringing the total to fourteen computers by mid-1978. They even purchased a very expensive hard disk, onto which they stored a software library of 150 programs that users of the Computer Center could access quickly via a loading interface programmed by David, avoiding the very long cassette loads or having to type listings by hand. Of all this software, games made up the majority, mostly sourced from listings printed in newsletters and published in newspapers, but there were also the first commercial games, such as Scott Adams’s text adventures, which the author distributed personally via mail order.
As in other parts of the United States, Adams’s adventures were very well received in Marin too, but the problem for users of the Marin Computer Center was that the programmer had initially developed them in Level II BASIC for the TRS-80, so there was only one computer capable of running them—unless they were ported to the other systems available.
Fox: “We converted some of Scott Adams’ early games to Apple II and CP/M machines, and in the process wrote this conversion software that we called Apple Spice. Adventure International sold it for us. It was an assembly-based extension to the BASIC that came with the Apple IIs. It gave them the same functionality as the RadioShack computers had that Scott’s original code used. Rather than rewrite all the code, we added to the language. Doing that let me take apart other people’s games, learn about them, and find bugs and suggestions to improve them. It was tough being self-taught by looking at other people’s work.”
The opportunity was excellent for Fox to start understanding how the games of the industry’s early pioneers were made and to become familiar with the most widespread microcomputers of the time. The market was very lively then, with a large number of systems being sold—often incompatible with one another—which made the choice very complicated for those who, like the Foxes or Adams himself, had to figure out where the market was headed in order to reach as many users as possible. The collaboration between Adams and the Marin Computer Center did not last long, because the renowned text-adventure designer soon realized that his initial choice—the TRS-80, selected mainly for its low cost and easy availability through the Radio Shack chain—was proving the least suitable for creating computer games, which convinced him, as soon as possible, to migrate to the Apple II. It was on this platform that a growing number of enthusiasts and users—interested in games as well—were moving, slowly but steadily increasing the sales of the Cupertino company which, while still lower than the competition’s, had become sufficient to make the platform commercially interesting. Unlike the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET, both released in 1977, the Apple II—though lacking lowercase characters—had markedly superior graphics capabilities, which made it particularly attractive to anyone who wanted to create games.
Then, in 1979, Atari also entered the microcomputer market, selling its first home computer. Based on the MOS 6502 microprocessor—the same at the heart of the VCS, the Commodore PET, and even the Apple II—Atari’s microcomputer came in two different models: the cheaper version—equipped with only 8 KB of non-expandable memory, a single expansion slot, and an awkward built-in membrane keyboard—was called the Atari 400, while the more expensive one—with three expansion slots and a more comfortable standard keyboard—was named the Atari 800. Aside from memory and expandability, the hardware capabilities of both models were identical and very compelling, because the two computers featured high-resolution color graphics superior to the Apple II and, unlike Wozniak’s machine, they included an audio chip, POKEY, capable of generating sounds and music. This was a major advantage over every other computer, since the competition had put on the market devices that were either completely mute or had very rudimentary sound capabilities—like the Apple II, which had an internal speaker meant only for simple beeps.
When the first Atari computers arrived at the Marin Computer Center, Fox immediately recognized the qualities of these new machines, and not just in graphics and sound. They were also much lighter and easier to move—decidedly useful qualities given that the couple often traveled to local schools to bring the computers directly to students in their classrooms. In addition, to promote its computer, Atari had a special weapon in its arsenal.
Fox: “I remember having Chris Crawford, who worked at Atari—he was kind of an evangelist, but also the author of De Re Atari. It was basically the bible for how to program on the Atari. He came and gave a talk at the center, I think as part of the monthly meetings we held for the local computer group. Since we had a large space, we hosted the meetings at our place. That’s when I started getting really interested in that machine.”
Fueled by Crawford’s enthusiasm, Fox began experimenting with programming on the Atari computer and was won over. He had the same revelation as Schure, Catmull, and Smith: you could make graphics with a computer, and computer graphics were far less tedious to produce than cel animation using Hanna-Barbera’s discarded cels.
While he was experimenting on the Atari, an old acquaintance, Mitchell Waite—the person who had introduced him to the Homebrew Computer Club—came up with the idea of writing a book about computer-made animation. It wasn’t the first time the two had collaborated, since a couple of years earlier Fox had coauthored a programming book with Waite, Pascal Primer, published in 1981. The computer graphics book, however, was a much more ambitious project, because they decided to split it into two major sections: the first—written mainly by Waite—would cover the history of the technology up to the most recent developments and its applications in the film industry, while the second—entrusted to Fox—would be more practical, providing readers with the basic knowledge to create rudimentary computer-graphics animations on systems available on the market. Fox had no doubts: even if he would make a few references to other computers, including the Apple II, his text should be centered on Atari’s computer.
Fox: “Mitch wrote most of the first one, but I was the one who ended up contacting the relatively new Computer Division at Lucasfilm, which I had heard about. I probably knew about it because one of our members at the computer center, Gary Leo, worked at Industrial Light and Magic and worked with computers. He had invited me there to see his work on the movie Dragon Slayer, where they connected a model of a dragon to an Apple II and came up with this technique called Go Motion.”
His visit to the Graphics Group was very pleasant. The engineers went out of their way to show the technologies they were developing and even let the writer see some fragments of the animation they were working on for the Star Trek film. Of all the programmers Fox met, he found a natural affinity and rapport with one in particular: Loren Carpenter, author of Vol Libre, the fractal-engine animation that had been reused in the Genesis Device video. The two lingered for a long time discussing technological progress and the future of computers, reflecting on the eventual availability of home machines with high-resolution graphics. Many of the observations from that fruitful conversation later made their way into the book Computer Animation Primer, and Alvy Ray Smith even offered to review the text to catch any inaccuracies.
A year later, after finishing the manuscript—which would be published the following year, in 1983—Fox heard, again through Gary Leo, that the Computer Division was creating a department for video game development.
Fox: “After seeing Star Wars in 1977, which was the same year we opened our computer center — and we were also in the same county where Lucas was based — I really wanted to be a part of that company. I was just so enamored, so impressed with what they had done, but I realized that there was nothing I had—no skills that would match anything they were doing. I wasn’t a computer scientist, I didn’t know anything about computer graphics at that level, and I wasn’t a model maker or anything like that. I mean, I had interest in all of it, but no professional experience. But the Games Group… that I definitely could do.”
Remembering the positive experience he’d had while researching his second book, he wasted no time and applied in person, bringing along a draft of his manuscript. The fact that he had placed Atari’s computer at the center of the book’s second part hit the mark, because the Games Group had been created with funding from Atari and with the goal of developing games for the company’s platforms.
Fox: “I called them up, and got an interview. They had just hired the guy who was going to be the head of the group — Peter Langston. This was in the early summer of 1982. A couple of months later, after constantly calling Peter every two weeks and hearing, ‘Oh no, in two weeks,’ I finally got the job. So, I was the second one on.”
A month after David Fox was hired, Langston managed to find the third member of the team: David Levine. The two knew each other because they were both active and well-known within the USENIX community, united by a passion for developing games in a Unix environment. Levine didn’t have Langston’s boundless creativity—who, even before officially entering the industry, had already created about ten innovative and successful noncommercial games. He had only a handful of titles to his name, including two clones of Spacewar! and Pac-Man; yet over the course of just under twenty years, through his studies and work experiences, he had amassed a large number of significant accomplishments and important achievements.
His first professional experience with computers dated back to 1972, when he was employed in Evanston, Illinois, at Ted Nelson’s Itty Bitty Machine Co. store, where he worked on developing the Videographic Display Generator, an S-100 add-on board for the Altair 8800. In his honor, Nelson called it the “Levine Board,” sold it in his shop for $500, and even wrote about it in his 1977 book The Home Computer Revolution: “The Levine Board is an S-100 board offering 256x192 squares of graphic animation. Unlike the Dazzler, it does not slow the computer down.”
Although more expensive than the Dazzler—the alternative produced by Cromemco, a company co-founded by another Homebrew Computer Club member, Harry Garland—the Levine Board had remarkable graphics capabilities, all the more so because it operated without overloading the microcomputer’s CPU. Unfortunately for Levine, his invention did not achieve significant commercial success and was soon overtaken by cheaper alternatives.
Levine: “This card was rendered obsolete two years later when Motorola, Inc. announced the first integrated graphics controller-on-a-chip, which coincidentally replicated my design, timing, and specifications almost exactly”
As for games, Levine’s first contact came thanks to the PLATO system, shortly after he designed the Levine Board.
Levine: “I first encountered PLATO during the ’77-'78 school year at UIUC, and became an itinerant player of Empire, the four-team multiplayer Star Trek world, and Airfight, the multiplayer POV flight and battle simulator. My friends and I played mostly at CERL, the Computer Education Research Lab on the engineering campus, where although they had two large rooms with many PLATO terminals, one wasn’t always available. During the spring term I was enrolled in the university’s Institute of Aviation, and had access to a little-used PLATO terminal at the local airport (which was populated with student aircraft pilots, student aircraft mechanics, and student air traffic controllers.) The PLATO terminal keyboard had a hard-metal case and heavily-sprung keys. They were nearly indestructible. The two realtime multiplayer games I played involved learning rapid keystroke sequences. The best players learned to bang on those loud keyboards with speed and precision, like musical instruments. PLATO frequently had 1000+ global users online, playing graphical games together with low enough latency to be a lot of fun, decades before the internet.”
PLATO terminals were equipped with high-resolution monochrome plasma displays, with a distinctive orange color. Thanks to the TUTOR language, teachers and students were able to program interactive lessons; in reality, these were often true games—most of them multiuser—in which players faced off in team space battles with Empire, aerial dogfights with Airfight, and dungeon explorations with dnd and Oubliette. Owing to his prior experience designing the Levine Board, Levine was very impressed by the potential of the terminal network and multiuser applications—features he would later also find in Unix systems—but he was not particularly impressed by the PLATO terminals’ graphics, which used a tiled system with customizable characters. Nonetheless, he too decided to try his hand at creating a computer-graphics animation, attempting to replicate on the PLATO terminal the common cinematic animation techniques used at studios such as Hanna-Barbera or Disney.
Levine: “Multiplane animation was the technique employed by the cartoon film makers of the era, whereby distant objects moved sideways proportionally slower than near objects, creating a three dimensional visual context for two dimensional objects. The PLATO demo I wrote for a CS class was an old-style steam locomotive with visible moving parts, and windows, moving sideways, around and through which could be seen background objects at different depth levels, each level moving proportionally. This was novel on PLATO at the time.”
In 1978, after finishing his studies, he obtained his pilot’s license and found employment at Gimix, where he designed a video board with a programmable character set for the European market; then, in 1980, he moved to Mark Williams Company, just in time to cross paths with Tom Duff during his “clean-up” period to avoid legal action from Alexander Schure. It was in 1980 that Mark Williams Company released Coherent, a Unix-clone operating system, first marketing a version for Digital Equipment Corporation computers and, in the following years, for the IBM PC and other personal computers of the time.
Levine: “Mark Williams Co. was one of the first software development entities to clone the Unix operating system, which was not publicly available at the time. Their OS was called Coherent, built from the ground-up to be code-compatible with Unix V7. [Whilte there] I learned C, systems-level programming, and compiler design, and wrote clones of the sophisticated Unix tools lex and m4, adding my own enhancements, as well as writing a networked multiplayer realtime Spacewar game utilizing a loadable kernel level driver, and a popular clone of PacMan (photographed with former President Ronald Reagan on his tour of a Digital Equipment Corporation plant.)”
Arriving at the Games Group in the fall of 1982, Levine joined the team as the third and final hire of that year. Langston knew he needed more staff, but on one hand there were recommendations from his superiors—above all Robert Doris, the Computer Division manager overseeing both the Graphics Group and the Games Group—not to expand too much and to be cautious with investments; on the other, his own desire to recruit only a certain kind of developer. There was no shortage of applications: like Fox, many had come forward after reading in the newspapers that Lucasfilm had entered the video game industry. The candidates Langston wanted, however, were the ones most inclined to turn him down: just as Catmull had struggled to persuade him—and had racked up quite a few refusals from programmers in his trusted circle—Langston found himself in a similar situation, all the more so because, as he later joked, he may have been a bit too selective and ended up turning away interesting candidates.
With this core group of programmers—who would be joined in 1983 by two other valuable members, Charlie Kellner and Gary Winnick—Langston prepared to storm the market, not realizing that time was working against him and his team.
