We released it through APX [the Atari Program Exchange] in August of 1981 and it was
a huge success. It was generally considered to be the second definitive Atari game, the
first beingStar Raidersof course.
So you actually made the fancy graphical effects first, and then built the game
around that?
That’s a phase every designer has to go through. You start off designing around cute
techie tricks, and as you mature as a designer you put that behind you.
So you ended up releasing the source code forEastern Front (1941). What moti-
vated you to do that?
It was an extremely unconventional act. My feeling was, this is a fast-moving field. I’m
good. I’ll have new, wonderful technological discoveries by the time other people start
using this. I’ll be on to something else. I didn’t feel any sense of possessiveness: “This
is mine, I don’t want anybody else to know.” My feeling was and continues to be that we
all profit more from the general advance of the industry. But I’m not an intellectual
property anarchist. I do believe people have rights to claim certain things as theirs. I
just feel that this should be done with great restraint, and only in situations where there
is something very big which took alotof work. I felt this was just a little techie stunt, no
big deal. So I gave it away.
It’s funny. There were a number of technologies that I gave away that nobody really
used. The scrolling one was a good example: there were a couple of attempts to use it,
but they were all half-hearted. Then the other thing, I never could get anybody to learn
a wonderful graphics trick that was shown to me by Ed Logg, and I sort of picked it up
and ran with it. I did a number of extensions which took it well beyond what he showed
me. But it was a wonderful thing for doing dissolves, a variety of transitions, and it was
beautiful. Very clever code. You applied this to a bitmap and, wow, you could get fantas-
tic things happening. And I used that a number of times and nobody else ever seemed to
bother to use it. But I think lots of people did look at theEastern Frontsource code as a
way of realizing that games aren’t that hard to write.
So did your evangelism work take away from the amount of time you were able
to spend developing games?
Well, I was software evangelist for only a year. I was then asked by Alan Kay to join his
research team. In fact, I was the first guy he invited. For about three months the Atari
Research Division consisted of Alan Kay, myself, Alan’s administrative assistant,
Wanda Royce, and my employee, Larry Summers. And the only place they could put us
back then was in the executive suites, there was a spare room there. And there were
Larry and I doing programming in the executive suites. Ray Kassar, the Atari president,
was a very stuffy, straightlaced guy. And he really resented our being up there. I mean,
it really bothered him. So we got a new building real quick.
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