THE MAKING OF: SPACE TAXITHE MAKKING OF: SPACE TAXI
energy into the next title. I respect all the people at
MUSE, they gave me a chance – [but] I think with
a different publisher it probably would have sold
significantly more.” John was working for a decent
hourly rate and royalties, which he estimates was
around 10 per cent of what MUSE got.
W
hen MUSE went bankrupt, John
retained the rights to Space Taxi. “It
was always my IP, MUSE just had a
publishing relationship. So when they
went bankrupt, that ended. Someone bought a
lot of their rights and I let them distribute it for a
couple of years.” That was Main Street Publishing,
a US budget label. John remembers taking a
college roommate to the bankruptcy auction.
“It was comical that people were bidding on a
used C64 for more money than you could go
down and buy it at the store.” After consulting
for Microprose, John moved into programming
medical software designed for trauma units.
In 2005 Twilight Games approached John for
permission to make Space Taxi 2. “About once a
year someone would contact me and write a nice
note about how they liked the game, and several
people have expressed interest in doing various
remakes. Twilight Games put a lot of energy
into their version, I thought they did a great job
modernising the game. We talked through some
of the levels, and I shared with them the parameter
files for each level so they could simulate the
thrust and the gravity from data.”
Would John like to see a new Space Taxi? “I’m
always up for helping license the concept. I always
thought it would be cool to have a version from
inside the cab – Microprose’s founder Bill Stealey
said, ‘Hey what’s your next idea? ’ And I said I liked
the idea of doing Space Taxi from inside. But I just
didn’t have time, with college, and I got into this
medical software field and have been doing that
for the last 35 years.
“I got the emulator and tried to show my kids
a couple of years ago, and it’s humbling when
you realise they are so used to modern games – it
didn’t even remotely catch their interest!” John
laughs. “It’s very nice that people liked it and take
the time to talk about it. Apparently Space Taxi
was super popular in Germany, for some reason,
so I joke around with people that I’m like David
Hasselhoff, I’m more famous in Germany.”Thanks to Joerg Droege (sceneworld.org) for his helpTHREE MILE ISLAND
APPLE II, 1979
QFollowing the Three Mile Island disaster, this simulation put
the player in charge of a nuclear power plant. You have to meet
the demand for electricity, deal with government officials and
prevent a meltdown. Written in Integer Basic, the machine
code Special Edition (shown here) was released later.
ESCAPE!
APPLE II, 1978
QThis early first-person game by Silas Warner featured a
randomly-generated maze. Characters met can help or hinder,
giving extra items or lying to the player. The related Maze
Game by Silas released the same year featured options to
change maze size and leave footprints to aid navigation.“I would write something for an
hour and immediately test it. By
the time I got through a day it
was done”
John F KutcherGOING
SOLO
John F Kutcher on helping create
Solo Flight: Second Edition“[Former MUSE vice-president] Don Awalt
formed a consulting company called RDA
Consulting, which went on to be very popular.
I worked with them during grad school for
Microprose, with Sid Meier, building the
Commodore 64 engine for Solo Flight 2nd
Edition,” explains John, referring to the
third version of the game to be released on
that machine. “Sid had a language he called
SIDTRAN, basically like a byte-code language.
I wrote both the interpreter and the visual
renderer that went along with that. I helped
bring that game to life on the C64.”
Players learnt to fly on maps based on
real-life data, and could then fly mail deliveries
between American cities. John’s work involved
adding terrain features. “Some of it was
literally as simple as changing the colour,” John
remembers. “When you are flying over water,
making it blue instead of green. It was getting
that from map data... the land below showed
up as different colours or different shapes. I
don’t know if the concept of different altitudes
was something I introduced, or something that
had already been there, that I can’t recall.”
Solo Flight got mixed reviews but remains an
interesting take on the flight simulator genre.