I talked with Jon Freeman about Crush, Crumble & Chomp!
Crush, Crumble & Chomp was done even before Epyx, I think. Can you tell me the history of that game? Which version was first and who programmed it? How developed it?
"The original version of CC&C; was done before the company name was officially changed to Epyx but *not* before the Epyx brand was being used. (Odd and funny story about the "Epyx" name. We had been using it for a while before we started thinking about actually registering it as a trademark and getting official control of the rights. Around that time, we had found a young guy - Aric Wilmunder - to do an Atari conversion of CC&C.; When Jim Connelley did a trademark search on "Epyx," he found that the name was owned by... Aric Wilmunder's parents!!! THAT'S what you call a coincidence!)
I had done some design work in the late '60s for a war game featuring movie monsters, and I had proposed doing such a game at Automated Simulations first in late 1980 and again in early 1981, but my partner in ASI, Jim Connelley, didn't think it could work. The third time I suggested it was shortly after the publication of the board game, The Creature that Ate Sheboygan, which convinced him that such a concept was both plausible and appealing.
The program was a fairly straightforward adaptation of Star Warrior, itself an "outdoor" version of our basic Dunjonquest/Starquest engine. Jim and I collaborated on the system design - basically, what sorts of powers the creatures could have. Flying and most "weapons" were pretty easy and obvious, since they were already implemented in Star Warrior. We disagreeed on adding fires because they seemed such a key feature of Sheboygan, but it was an obvious thing to do and worked very well in the game, and we treated them differently. Digging/burrowing and hunger effects were the other major additions to the system we already had.
The choices of cities were fairly obvious - New York because of King Kong, Tokyo from all the Japanese monster movies, San Francisco because of "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (and the fact it was in our backyard, so to speak), and D.C. for its multitude of familiar landmarks. I did the city layouts based on actual maps of all four cities.
I also picked the monsters, defined their powers, set the costs for the grow-your-own options, and was primarily responsible for play balance.
As was the case with all but the very earliest games (Starfleet Orion and Invasion Orion) at Automated, the initial version of CC&C; was programmed on the TRS-80 by Jim Connelley. (I did the "graphics" - such as they were.)"
I tracked down four versions so far: Apple 2, Atari 800, C64 & TRS-80. Can you tell me who programmed all these?
"All of our Dunjonquest/Starquest series of games - including CC&C; - were converted (almost immediately) to the Apple by Mike Farren. Toni Thompson did the Apple graphics. As I noted above, Aric Wilmunder did the Atari version. (A few years later, Aric was an early hire at LucasArts Games, where he helped develop their S.C.U.M. graphic adventure system and became a programming mainstay.) The C64 version came years later, after I left the company; I have no idea who did it."
From the giant list of classic game programmers I learned that you were a designer, not a programmer? How did this work in the the early 80's?
"It differed somewhat depending on the people, but generally somewhat like the way it works now. In my case, it went from system design - what characteristics define a ship, vehicle, character, monster, weapon, etc.; the way those characteristics affected the action; how combat worked (choosing a system based on "hit points," determining how weapons and armor worked) - to scenario design - dungeon layouts, ship designs, the numbers assigned to variables (the number of monsters in *this* room, the strength of *that* critter, the damage done by each weapon, and so on).
In CC&C;, this included such details as the food value of each sort of unit, the hit points of buildings and monsters, the speed of reinforcements (e.g., tanks), the chance (a percentage) a Mad Scientist would appear, and (as noted above) the point cost of each option (flight, mass, armor, webs, etc.)."
C,C&C; was packaged like an Infocom game, with cards of every monster and such. Who was responsible for that?
"This was largely before Infocom; we certainly weren't imitating them. We used reference cards for most of our early games. As I recall, we used a different card for each suit of armor in Star Warrior; it was an easy and obvious step to do a different card for each monster. I believe it was my idea to do an origin story on the flip side of each card. (I wrote them, certainly.)"
Why - oh why - is there no version, where you can control the monster with a joystick?
"Well, for one thing, joysticks weren't in common use on computers in 1981, and later versions just imitated the TRS-80 original. And remember that CC&C; was still using a variation of the Dunjonquest engine originally written for Temple of Apshai in early 1979. There were, for the time, a large number of keyboard commands."
Apart from that: Is there something in the original gameplay you are especially proud of? Or can you think of something really bad designed? You know that: "If we'd had more time, we..." stuff.
"Hunger worked really well, I thought; the fact that, as the monster, you had to pursue food fairly constantly (or go berserk and lose control completely) meant that to a large degree you had to stay in character. You couldn't play a monster as if the whole thing were a chess game with a coolly human intelligence in charge."
Which was your favourite monster and why?
"Probably Mantra, because it flew. Monsters in flight moved automatically, which kept you from "stopping to think" and made grabbing snacks (humans) more of a challenge than usual."
The monster in the game is always doomed, or is there a way to win? How do you judge that aspect now, almost 20 years later?
"Since the monster always got killed in the movies, it seemed appropriate to have a similar end for the ones in the game. However, it was possible to meet the victory criteria and "win" a particular scenario, although no monster could last indefinitely. That compromise is pretty much forced by game balance: any monster that could successfully go toe to toe with what would were effectively infinite reinforcements would unbalance the game and take the challenge (and most of the fun) out."
Some years later Epyx did another 'Movie Monster Game' for the C64. You had nothing to do with it? How would you compare it to the original C,C&C;? Is it *better*?
"I checked it out once. Since they used large monsters onscreen, it *looks* better, but it was unplayable. They didn't adjust the scale, so any monster could win the "Escape" scenario in a minute or so just by moving straight in any direction and ignoring everything that came up. They obviously did no play-testing at all. A terrible game. Someone told me the C64 version of CC&C; had the same problem, but I haven't seen it, so I can't verify that."
Do you think the way C,C&C; was done influenced Cinemaware?
"No idea, really, but I don't have any reason to think so. I don't know that anybody at Cinemaware ever saw CC&C.;"
Thank you for the interview!