![]() To the left you can see a piece of Apple II gaming history: the packaging for an awesome game by Larry Miller, published by Sirius Software in 1981. The Arcade Machine by Broderbund had the largest manual back in the daysof fold-over packaging - it was about 100 pages long! Sometimes there were some folded and stapled 8.5"x11" pages with the instructions printed on them (this was the "manual", usually 3 pages. Pressing F11 again will bring the window back down to launch size.Įven today I still have ads for my games, except now I don't create them and they look a million times better!īack when computer games were first sold in computer stores, packaging was usually a piece of cardboard folded in half that had a nice picture on the front and back while the inside was black & white text and graphics.Ĭomputer store walls were usually covered in ziploc baggies with games in them games that all had a folded cardboard brochure with the instructions in the middle. One very helpful hint for Internet Explorer users: press F11 when the new window opens up so you can see everything. You can click on the ads to the right and a new browser window will open up with a full-size version. No one else saw these ads, by the way, since they were all hanging on my wall in my bedroom. I think I was trying to be funny or something. You'll notice that in the second ad, Birgan was renamed to Quadraturd. The second ad I created was about a year later when I was just pumping out the ads for all my games at once. I created my first ad for Alien Attack shortly after I created the game (along with my Bomb Attack ad). I was just being really creative and wanted to create my own ads, just to bring the game more to life for me - so I could see what it would look like if it was hanging on the wall with all the other games in a store. The other trend I began with Alien Attack was drawing my own ads and packaging. It was always funny to see a new game name he came up with and I thought the same thing about my game names. John Besnard was a popular Apple II programmer who used to name his games starting with "Bez" and, to me, it showed that he had a little more personality than your average game coder. And after awhile, my goal was to fill the entire alphabet up with games titled this way, but I moved into the PC world and that goal of mine died along with the Apple II industry. I guess it was one way to add a different twist to my games. If you look at a list of my games you'll notice a lot of them named with two words that have the same starting letter. It was a bit beyond Alien Attack IV (which you can actually try out), but alas, was never finished.Īlien Attack was the first game that started a couple important trends for me, even if they were strange.įirst, I started naming my games alliteratively (same starting letter) and using two words. What I did have finished on Alien Attack V was a really nice playfield with totally different sounds, colors, super-smooth control of your ship, etc. I believe I was developing Alien Attack V in 1984 and it was looking very nice indeed, but I decided that I needed to concentrate on actually creating games that could be published in magazines, and giant 6502 assembly language games were pretty much impossible to print. 5 to be exact, except that I never finished the fifth one. Since I loved the simple concept of Astro-Blaster, I kept making Alien Attack sequels. I had yet to figure out how to code a game properly for it to be enjoyable - witness the way you have to wait while your shot moves up to the top of the screen. But sadly, since this was only my third game or so, it's just awful and no fun at all. I modeled the screen layout of Alien Attack after Threshold since I played it quite a bit more. I loved playing Astro-Blaster in the arcade and when I could play it at home (Threshold), it was even cooler. ![]() and Threshold was a copy of Astro-Blaster (Sega, 1981). I modeled Alien Attack after one of my favorite games, Threshold (Warren Schwader, 1981 Sierra On-Line). ![]() This was the first in a series of 5 Alien Attack games.
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