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with Stephen H. Landrum, lead programmer of SummerGames
He is now 35 years old and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
How is life treating you today?
Life's treating me fine. In a few months, if the project I'm tinkering with doesn't
turn into anything, I may get a "real" job. It'll definitely still be something to do
with computers, either games or Internet, or both.
What was your role in the development of SummerGames?
I was the lead programmer. I did the intro sequence, the Pole Vault event, the Diving
event, and helped Randy Glover with the swimming events.
I also did part of the Atari 800 conversion, and helped with the Apple ][ conversion.
Can you tell me something about the development in general?
Summer games actually was an evolution of a Starpath title that was finished when the
companies merged. We were doing a decathlon game. Since the 1984 Olympics were coming
up in a few months, we decided to do an Olympic event game. The idea for a decathlon
game was not original with us, we used to play Microsoft Decathlon on the Apple ][.
Summer games was the first game that I'd worked as a team effort, and it was also the
first time we had enlisted the help of a graphic artist. It revolutioned our thinking
about game development at Epyx.
Afterward, it was assumed that graphic artists would be part of software projects, and
later we added music/sound FY specialists.
The original Summer games took about 6 months to develop.
This game you had developed at Starpath - what was that?
It was a decathlon game for the Atari 2600 that had a couple of events finished. None
of the 2600 code was used in SummerGames.
Which software did you use to create SummerGames?
It was all written in assembly code. We used a custom assembler running on Apple ][
computers.
The animations were mostly done with pencil and paper, and then hand converted into
data for the animation sequences.
Some background screens were done with Koala paint.
Sound and music was again figured out by hand and custom coded.
How did it sell?
It sold very well. Around a million copies of it after being converted to various
formats. The reactions were very enthusiastic and positive.
After this success, Epyx released more "Olympic" games...
Yes, there were Summer Games II, Winter Games, World Games, The Games Summer Edition,
The Games Winter Edition, California Games, California Games II.
Did you earn a gool salary?
I got salary and some royalties. Of course Epyx got most of the money for the product,
but the programmers were paid well.
What was done to protect the games?
Very little. On various products we did various encodings on the disks to slow down
pirates, but there was no way to stop people pirating the product.
I suppose you programmers never had contact to the "scene"?
I broke the protection on a lot of software myself, and wrote a number of different
protection systems, but I didn't have contact with other hackers. I never distributed
any copies of software that I broke the protection on, it was mostly for research to
see what protection people were using, and aso so that our Fast Load product could be
made to work with certain protected programs.
I once read about the cracking of SummerGames.
Summer Games was trivial to crack. A more interesting challenge was to crack Summer
Games II.
Are there any build-in cheats, screens or pokes?
Not in the original one, I don't think. There were in a lot of sequel products. The
Apple ][ version of the game would play the game upside down if you booted from the
back of the floppy. I don't remember all of the Easter eggs that were added to the
later games.
The credits say: "Scott Nelson, Stephen Landrum, Erin Murphy,
Jon Leupp, Stephen Mudry, Randy Glover, Brian McGhie" -
Were they the only ones that worked on SummerGames?
Yes, they were the only ones who did actual work on the game.
I suppose, you were quite good players?
The programmers were very good at the individual events they programmed. Most of us
played video games a lot at the time.
Were some of you athletes themselves?
Not really.
But you were sport fans, weren't you?
Surprisingly, not really.
Why went Epyx bankrupt?
Epyx went bankrupt because it never really understood why it had been succesful in
the past, and then decided to branch out in a lot of directions, all of which turned
out to be failures.
Do you kow why the christian Bridgestone Group bought Epyx?
Peter Engelbrite was a born again Christian, and wrote a game called Bible Builder
for the IBM PC. He was interested in continuing to develop Christian software. At
that point of time, there was not much left of Epyx, but Bible Builder was selling
reasonably well, so I imagine that's why Bridgestone got interested.
Do you still play SummerGames once in a while?
I haven't touched a C64 in about a decade. I rarely go back and play games that I
worked on.
Thanks a lot for the interview!
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They write role-playing adventure games in BASIC for computers like the TRS-80
and Apple ][.