A woman contacted me on Facebook to tell me that she of a gift she was preparing for her grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. The boy is a very avid gamer, and she wanted to present him with a book of letters written by people who worked in the game industry. She asked me to make a contribution, and here is more of what I wrote.

As I sat in my apartment trying to figure out what to do next with my career, a programmer who had worked for me at Edu-Ware called me up to tell me that he had seen an advertisement from Disney looking for a “software development specialist”. I applied for the position, and after a job interview in which I was asked to name the Seven Dwarves; I was working for The Mouse.

It was a blast! I was making games based on films, television shows, and theme park attractions, and I got to make a lot of trips to the studio lot and Disneyland for “research”. Now, we weren’t actually making the games ourselves – we were what was called a “licensor.” That is, we licensed our characters and other properties to game publishers so that they could make games based on them. My job was to supply them with the reference material they needed, and to review the games they were making to make sure that they were representing the characters properly.

However, Disney soon realized that it could make more money if we were to make the games ourselves. So my job was to find game development companies to make the games for us, and I made sure that they were delivering the games on time, on budget, and with the quality we were expecting. In the game industry, we call this role a “game producer” and so my job title was changed to “associate producer”, which I liked a lot better than “software development specialist.”

We were very successful producing games. We made games based on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, DuckTales, Dick Tracy, and of course, Mickey and his friends. Of course, when you are successful, other people want to become involved in that success, and soon we found that every time we wanted to make a new game, we had to make what is called a “pitch” to a dozen business executives, very few of who knew anything about games. In order to show themselves as being important, they would come up with all sorts of objections whenever we made a game pitch. I tried everything I could to pitch new game ideas – including dressing up in costumes from Disneyland when trying to convince them to “green light” a game based on a theme park attractions – but nothing seemed to work. After six months of not being able to get a game green lit, I left the company.

But I wound up at someplace even better. As I said before, I was a big science fiction geek. It turned out that a small software publishing company called Cyberdreams that specialized in games developed in collaboration with famous people in science fiction, and they were looking for a producer. With my experience in working with licensed properties, I was soon hired for the job.

This was a dream come true. I traveled to Zurich, Switzerland to meet with the artist H.R. Giger, who is best known for designing the creature from the film Alien, and I made a game called Dark Seed based on his artwork. Even better was that I got to work with author Harlan Ellison to adapt his short story “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream” – which just happened to be my favorite short story of all time – into a computer game. That game went on to win all kinds of awards, but unfortunately Cyberdreams had the same problem that Electric Transit had – poor distribution – and so we didn’t sell as many copies as we thought we should have. And so after four years, Cyberdreams closed down its business, and I had to look for work again.

A woman contacted me on Facebook to tell me that she of a gift she was preparing for her grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. The boy is a very avid gamer, and she wanted to present him with a book of letters written by people who worked in the game industry. She asked me to make a contribution, and here is more of what I wrote.

While most of my college assignments involved using the computer to solve scientific and business problems, I took any opportunity I could to use the university computer to print out poetry or pictures. My COBOL professor took an interest in my creative efforts and offered me a job as a clerk in the computer store he owned with several partners.

Rainbow Computing was the second computer store to open in the Los Angeles area, about a block away from the Cal State Northridge campus. The store mainly sold mini-computers for small businesses, but soon after I started working there, we began selling a computer made for home use – the Apple II.

Programming was now emerging as a hobby. People formed computer clubs to discuss this new technology, computer magazines appeared with programming tips, and hobbyists would hang out at their local computer store on the weekend. At first, people had to write all their own software, including games, but as they did, computer stores began selling them. Rainbow Computing published its own software catalog selling programs mostly written by its customers. Part of my job was to make copies of the floppy disks containing the programs, photocopy instruction manuals, and put everything into zip lock baggies for sale either on the store floor or through the catalog.

Once people realized that there was money to be made here, some began forming actual software publishing companies. A couple of the earliest game publishers, including Ken Williams of Sierra Online, bought their first computers at Rainbow Computing. Another, Sherwin Steffin, formed a company called Edu-Ware Services, and asked me to write games for him.

The first game I wrote was what would now be called an expansion for a science fiction role-playing game called Space that Edu-Ware had published. I wrote Space II in about two weeks (I still had my college homework and store clerk duties to do, after all!). It received good reviews from the computer magazines, and I earned about $100 in royalties for my efforts. Afterwards, I wrote an oil crisis simulation called Windfall (one week programming time) and a television programming strategy game called Network (I had to do that one in three days because Edu-Ware wanted to show it at the San Francisco Computer Faire that weekend).

After I graduated from college, I joined Edu-Ware as a full-time employee. The company operated out of Sherwin’s apartment, and I was being paid $800 a month. My parents were horrified and thought that I was throwing my education away.

I didn’t care. Although Edu-Ware was primarily in the business of publishing educational software, it allowed me to also occasionally design and program games for them. Now, when I was in college, I watched a British television show called The Prisoner airing on the local PBS station. It was about a spy who, after resigning, was abducted and taken to a resort-like open-air prison called The Village. The show dealt with issues about individuality and the role of authority, but it was also very surreal and bizarre. I absolutely loved it, and I convinced Edu-Ware’s management to let me spend six weeks making a game based on it, even though the show really wasn’t that well known here in the United States.

The game turned out to be a critical hit and sold well for Edu-Ware. However, we never acquired the rights to the television series because we were naïve about such things as trademarks and copyrights, but the entertainment industry wasn’t paying attention to home computer games, so we got away with it.