of the very early games, such as the very first version ofFlight Simulatorwith the
wire-frame graphics. You had to write your own machine language patch to get it to run
— that was funny. But just the idea that you could build your own little micro-world
inside the computer intrigued me. So I saw it as a kind of modeling tool. At some point I
just got so into these things that I decided I would try to make one myself, and that was
right around the time the Commodore 64 was first coming out. So I bought one of those,
figuring that it would be better to start on a new machine where everybody was on a
level playing field, because other people had learned the Apple II years before I decided
to do this. So I bought a Commodore as soon as it came out and just dove into it, and
learned it as quickly as I could. And that’s what I did my first game on.
So how did you come up with the design forRaid Over Bungeling Bay?
Back then just about all the games were arcade games, you know. I had always loved
helicopters, so I wanted to do a little helicopter game. And then I was looking at the
Commodore. It was driven probably more by the technology than the game design side.
I found that the Commodore had this really cool trick where you could redefine a char-
acter set, make it look like graphics, and then smoothly scroll it around the screen. So
you could give the impression that you were scrolling over this huge bitmap, when in
fact all you were doing is moving ASCII characters around on the screen. And when I
saw that feature, I thought that would be really cool looking, because I knew the Apple
couldn’t begin to move that much in the way of graphics around the screen that
smoothly. So I designed the game around that feature in a way.
I understand the game was much more popular in Japan than it was in the
States.
I think that was right when piracy was probably at its peak. We sold around 30,000 cop-
ies in the U.S., which was average for a game like that. But then everybody I’ve talked
to who had a Commodore back then had played it. Whereas the same game on the
Nintendo in Japan sold about 750,000 copies. It was a cartridge system, so there was no
piracy.
Do you still look back on the game positively?
Oh yeah. I look back on it with fond memories. It was a learning experience. It was one
of those times where you realize that the last ten percent, getting the game out the
door, that’s the really hard part. And unless you plan for that last ten percent, it’s just a
killer. So I learned a lot of lessons from it. And back then programming wasn’t nearly as
elaborate as it is now. Every game was written by one person and that game was about
eight thousand lines of machine language. So you could totally control the memory and
totally control the machine. It was a good learning vehicle. It’s kind of a shame that the
programmers who learn to program nowadays are coming at it from a totally different
point of view.
You mean because they’re using higher level programming languages?
Oh yeah. Which isn’t necessarily bad, I guess. But you still have the old hacks like
myself. There were eight bytes of memory free on that machine when I finished that
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 409