Not too long after The Graphics Magician was published, we got a call
from an amazing guy at Stanford University named
Eagle Berns. A great, creative
person, he went on to make his mark at Apple Computer (on the Macintosh team),
Micro Focus, and Oracle. But first and foremost he was a great friend who also happened to
write, with Michael Kosaka, the first game with Graphics Magician: Pie
Man. The game was loosely based on an I Love Lucy skit, with pies coming
rapidly off a conveyor belt while you try to put whipped cream and a cherry on top and put
the pie in a rack, while avoiding grease spots and obstacles. (Remember that these were
the days when state of the art was Break-Out,
Space Invaders, and Pac-Man.) A non-violent game with a bit of
personality was very unique and new! Eagle and his friend Holly Thomason would also later
go on to write one of our better adventure games, The Coveted Mirror.
At the AppleFest show in New York City we met Alan Zeldin, who'd written
a game called "Poof!". It met all the requirements of the time: the rules were simple, and
it was disturbingly addictive! Our Mary Locke changed the character into a spy toting a
briefcase, and the resulting game was titled Spy's Demise (with belated apologies
to the Safe House in Milwaukee). This game sold rather well, and we converted it
to Commodore 64 and Atari and sold into Sears and Toys 'R' Us.... all those bastions of
"success". It even has the distinction of being one of the games copied and pirated under
different names. We've seen Atari 2600 rip-offs of the game idea, clones
for the Macintosh, and variations of all types.
And then a 16-year-old from Ann Arbor, Michigan sent us a game. It was a text
adventure, but he liked Complete Graphics System and was wondering about how he
could put graphics into the game he wrote. We sent him an early copy of The Graphics
Magician, and he produced truly wonderful graphics for the time. We took Antonio
Antiochia's Transylvania game and re-programmed it using assembly language. And
when it was released, it was easily the best "adventure" type game of its time. The
graphics were stunning! And the game is still a good one today!
The person behind the Macintosh release of Transylvania was Bob Hardy.
Bob was a good friend and a freelance author who lived 2000 miles away in San Luis Obispo,
California. We met him at a computer show in San Francisco, and he became one of our most
prolific authors. He wrote many of our tranlations (from one computer to another), but
more importantly, he improved each program in the translation process. He was also the
person manning the San Francisco booth in a later year when Robin Williams stopped by to
say how much he liked (the forbidden company name). At the time I was at the back
of the booth doing a radio interview, but I did notice someone at the booth who looked a
lot like "Mork". Surprise... it was!
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