everything together. I took a microphone and
ran wires through transistors into an analogue-
to-digital converter, hooked to the C64 expansion
port. I wrote software that would pulse the
converter, sampling the voltage level as an 8-bit
value. I would read that back through the port,
store it in memory and repeat the cycle. Basically,
converting the signal to a volume from 0 to 255.
“I took the sound chip and played it back – all
I did was change the volume of the speaker, I
set a tone like a C-note, whatever that frequency
was. I changed the volume based on what I had
sampled. It talked, holy crap it actually worked!”
And the different voices? “I just changed the speed
I played it back at or the base pitch for the tone,
and it made it sound like different people. It was
pretty innovative back then, one of the first talking
games,” John proudly recalls.S
ilas Warner, another MUSE coder,
had done something similar with
Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II; he
composed the music for Space Taxi.
What are John’s memories of working alongside
Silas, who passed away in 2004? “He was larger
than life both in size and character, an Andre The
Giant type of figure. [...] He gave me the routines
to play the music file. I was always very impressed
with that. The C64 not only had the sprite
innovations, it had the sound chip, and he was
really able to make that come to life.”
The game allows for up to four (alternating)
players and is split into three eight-hour shifts, a
full 24-hour shift and a 24-hour shift that plays the
levels in a random order. “I wanted to get to the
24 hours for three shifts, so I wanted to make 24
levels and then be done,” says John. The coder’s
programming style meant there was little testing
needed. “I would write something for an hour and
immediately test it. By the time I got through a day
it was done. There wasn’t much left to check.”
Promoting the game lead to good reviews and
selection for the Winter CES Software Showcase
(highlighting ten top titles) in January 1985.
“MUSE had a really effective public relations
guy at the time, Jack Kammer. He did a great job
getting the game into magazines. I would go into
a bookstore, for a couple of months, and it was in
like 20 magazines.” Space Taxi would go on to sell
approximately 10,000 copies, enough to pay for
a year of John’s college tuition. “It was limited by
some of the success of MUSE; once MUSE came
out with their next title, they kind of put all theirMORE FROM MUSE More games from Ed Zaron’s Micro Users Soware Exchange
RESCUE SQUAD
C64, 1983
QJohn Kutcher’s first game played out over three different
screens and is still pretty enjoyable. Race to the fire dodging
traffic Frogger-style, catch the people jumping out of windows
and then go inside to rescue more people in a Pac-Man maze
(with asbestos suits acting as the invincibility pill).TITAN EMPIRE
APPLE II, 1983
QThis early real-time strategy game has the Titan Empire
tr ying to take over the Solar System, but the player’s
starship must stop them. By conquering enemy-held worlds,
transporting armies and defending friendly planets, the
Empire can be defeated.ROBOT WAR
APPLE II, 1981
QThe player used a built-in language to ‘program’ a robot,
which was then sent into an arena to fight up to four other
robots automatically (no player input). Robots were saved
to disk and shared, with Computer Gaming World magazine
hosting an annual contest to find the best robot.» John F Kutcher worked on the likes
of Space Taxi, Rescue Squad and Solo
Flight: Second Edition.» [C6 4] Level 21, Rebound : “I got the idea when you got hit by something
it didn’t have to kill you but it could move you around,” says John.54 | RETRO GAMER