Yesterday the incredible Indie Gamer Chick, held a Q/A with the amazing Garry Kitchen, the creator of classic games like Keystone Kapers and David Crane the creator of Pitfall, as part of the #IGCvAtari Legends forum.
Below we have a recap of the event.
(@IndieGamerChick)Welcome to the #IGCvAtari Legends Forum with
@PitfallCreator
&
@kitchengarry
. I’ve been playing their latest release: Circus Convoy for the Atari 2600. Be sure to follow
@audacitygames
and check out their website: https://adgm.us/portal/index.html
Let’s do some Q&A with living legends!
(@IndieGamerChick)The band is back together and your title Circus Convoy is a wonderful welcome-back party.
My first question for @kitchengarry
& @PitfallCreator
: has Audacity Games been something you guys have been talking about for a while?
(@KitchenGarry)Hey Cathy. Yes, it’s something we’ve talked about for quite a few years.
(@PitfallCreator)It was a common request at every retro game show we attended.
(@KitchenGarry)But we decided early on not to even hint that we were doing it until we were sure it was done.
(@Obscur_Game_Con)Have you guys thought about bringing your games into a retail space like LRG has done with Best Buy?
Or on a smaller scale when the conventions pick back up, getting a booth and selling them at conventions?
It would be pretty wild to see Atari 2600 Games on store shelves.
(@KitchenGarry)We have talked about the LRG model. Considering it.
(@KitchenGarry)We also shipped our first games to a group of mom-and-pop video game retailers this week, as well as the gift shop of the National Video Game Museum (Frisco TX)
(@IndieGamerChick)You guys REALLY need to talk to @evercaderetro
. It’s a match made in heaven, for real, and they’re good people who have discovered lightning in a bottle.
(@KitchenGarry)DM me the right contact, if you know.
(@IndieGamerChick)I’ll make sure someone there reaches out to you guys.
(@KitchenGarry)We are going to attend CORGS (Columbus Ohio, Oct. 23). We will have games to sell.
(@IndieGamerChick)Remember when vinyl came back in the early 2000s, faded out, THEN came back and stayed? Because now I’ve seen Vinyl in big boxes.
I think video games are due for that too.
(Obscur_Game_Con)Good to know! Another question I have is this:
Have you guys thought about or are there plans to bring back old IPs?
Like a port of Keystone Kapers to another platform, or a sequel to that game or another you guys have previously worked on?
(@PitfallCreator)When we founded Activision we broke a barrier to create third-party publishing. What we should have done as well is break the publishers’ stranglehold on IP. All of the old IP you mention was done as “work for hire” and no rights are held by any of the creators.
(@Obscur_Game_Con)So there would be no chance of getting the licensing rights for a sequel or port?
(@KitchenGarry)Generally not possible. Activision, for example, has no bandwidth to even consider a proposal for old 2600 IP; they have no many other things going on. There’s no appreciable money in it for them.
(@IndieGamerChick)I do want to personally thank both of you for helping to create the industry that has meant so much to my life. Gaming is EVERYTHING to me. It pretty much saved my childhood.
Do you guys have any “fish that got away” stories? Projects that never got out of the starting block?
(@KitchenGarry)The demo made its way around Activision lab then, for some reason, I switched to GameMaker (or Designer’s Pencil). I put the baseball game aside. Then Alan Miller/Bob Whitehead left to form Accolade and 6 mnths later Hardball came out. Just saying…..
(@IndieGamerChick)Yikes……
It’s so weird to that those guys basically had one of the most important lawsuits in gaming history over copyright.
(@KitchenGarry)I don’t hold anything against them. I abandoned the project; Bob Whitehead is brilliant and doesn’t need ideas from me to make great games. More power to them.
(@IndieGamerChick)Yea I’ve tried talking to them too. It’s like a fricken brick wall.
(@IndieGamerChick)Circus Convoy hits that sweet-spot where it feels like it could be an Activision game that fell through a time warp.
Was it like riding a bike to get it to look and play so authentically Activision or did you have to go back to school, so to speak? @PitfallCreator
/@kitchengarry
?
(@KitchenGarry)A lot of time was spent on tools and technology, to make sure that what we ultimately released was at the highest level of quality for the platform.
(@IndieGamerChick)One thing I’m curious about is, like you said, the tools you used in the 80s are not used today. You had to start from scratch in a sense. What was the toughest hurdle you had to deal in designing the tools/game?
@PitfallCreator
/@kitchengarry
?
(@KitchenGarry)We revisited the platform and developed some more sophisticated techniques to up the graphic quality. To do that, David made a nifty tool that we could use to create more complex characters, like the snake.
(@PitfallCreator)I have published games on more than 2 dozen platforms over the years, but the 2600 has always been my favorite. I think 6502 and 2600 in my sleep!
(@IndieGamerChick)(6502 is the MOS Technology 6502 CPU, the same chip that powers, among other things, the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, the NES, the Atari Lynx, and more, for my readers who don’t know why he’s dreaming of 6502. Those also might be winning lottery numbers. Give it a shot!)
(@IndieGamerChick)Can you elaborate on what makes it more sophisticated? Because to the layman (which I most certainly wouldn’t be, no sir) it looks like an Atari snake.
(@IndieGamerChick)You guys have a LOT of puzzles and item-usage in the game. Did you guys keep adding stuff as you went along or did you have a pretty solid set-plan for how many items there would be, where they would go, etc?
@PitfallCreator
/@kitchengarry
(@IndieGamerChick)Today the neo-retro market tends to go more for the spirit of the classic games but exceed the native limits. Like Shovel Knight famously “cheats” by having parallax scrolling, which the NES couldn’t do.
Did you ever think of cheating? @PitfallCreator
/@kitchengarry
?
(@PitfallCreator)Re “cheating”, it would have been easy to add hardware assist or acceleration. After all, Pitfall II was the first example of that in the industry using a circuit of my design. But we are purists, and wanted to allow this game to be compared to any game ever made.
(@IndieGamerChick)That same “cheat” is what made the NES/Super NES as successful and diverse as it became of course. Every major game had special processors built into the carts themselves.
Did you ever pitch this solution at Atari before you guys founded Activision, and how grumpy was Ray to it?
(@PitfallCreator)When the guys and I left Atari, development of the Atari 800 was in full swing. That was the engineering department’s answer to advancing gaming technology. Sadly, the marketing department saw the Apple II and decided to sell it as a ‘home computer’ rather than a gaming system.
(@IndieGamerChick)Apple considered games frivolous. They wouldn’t look at 3rd party sales data on games either.
(@PitfallCreator)Toughest was probably the 20,000 lines of code to create a WSYWIG drag-and-drop graphics tool for making those “nifty characters”.
(@IndieGamerChick)Video game fans have a long memory and some of the most solid brand loyalty in all of media.
Almost 40 years later and people still long for the type of games you guys did.
Do you two ever stop and think “jeez, we did some really amazing things?” @kitchengarry
/@PitfallCreator
(@PitfallCreator)The day Garry created the Giraffe graphic, as simple and ‘8-bit’ as it is, we realized we could push the old limits. (Not to mention QR codes and other in-built software technologies.)
(@IndieGamerChick)My Dad wants to know about the QR code. How long did it take to get that down where the phones would read the code?
Honestly it seems like it SHOULD work good. As if Atari and QR were made for each-other.
(@PitfallCreator)The QR code was one of the hardest tasks I have ever done on an 8 bit processor. The QR code uses a Reed-Soloman error correction algorithm, calculating a 22 term polynomial divide. These days you can download a Javascript routine – try doing it in 8-bit assembly language.
(@IndieGamerChick)How much of the three-year development cycle did the code eat up?
(@KitchenGarry)And to be honest, we had day jobs through much of that time. When there was downtime, we took advantage of it, but for much of the 3 years it was a nights and weekends chore.
(@KitchenGarry)Yes there were moments where we amazed ourselves in this game
(@IndieGamerChick)This is one for a generation of indie devs who idolize you: sometimes developers struggle with giving up ideas in games.
Was any idea for Circus Convoy abandoned? And how do you know when an idea is not going to work? When’s the time to give it up? @kitchengarry
/@PitfallCreator
(@KitchenGarry)I have half a dozen games on my hard drive in various stages of development. Sometimes you don’t abandon them, you just walk away from them for a while (sometimes years).
Dave’s sitting there thinking, what games? I haven’t seen any games.
(@KitchenGarry)Of course sometimes you just know it’s not going to work. In that case, I’ll look at taking it in a different direction, rather than killing it.
(@IndieGamerChick)I have to ask this for personal curiosity before I move on to asking Casey’s Gold: do you two still play new games? And if so, what’s some recent stuff you’ve enjoyed? What consoles do you have?
@PitfallCreator
/@kitchengarry
(@IndieGamerChick)The next release is Casey’s Gold by @dankitchen
, and you’ve both teased a third today..
Is it safe to assume Audacity Games is here to stay? And would you guys consider publishing the neo-retro works of other creators? @kitchengarry
/@PitfallCreator
(@KitchenGarry)We are hoping to engage the efforts of other “name” game designers from the Atari era. Nothing to announce yet.
(@IndieGamerChick)Well I’d love to see it.
(@KitchenGarry)And yes, Audacity is here to stay.
(@KitchenGarry)We teased a 3rd game? I didn’t hear that 🙂
(@IndieGamerChick)One last question for you guys and then I’m going to go cry because the Warriors are playing like crap..
What is “gameplay” to you? What is the single most important element any game must have in order to be fun?
@PitfallCreator
/@kitchengarry
have tapped into “IT” again & again
(@PitfallCreator)If we could quantify what is “fun” our jobs would be much easier. But then who would need us? Gameplay evolves 10 times a day, and the trick is having a feel for what small tweaks will make a game better. We old timers have found we are pretty good at doing that.
(@IndieGamerChick)Okay, let me flip that then: is there something a game SHOULDN’T have?
(@KitchenGarry)In app purchases
(@IndieGamerChick)So it’s safe to say Audacity won’t be asking me to spend an extra $1.99 for more parachutes 😛
(@KitchenGarry)Damn straight
(@Ariwl1Ray)My favorite is when a game can lay ground rules and just let me go and my brain will flow with it and fill in all the blanks.
“So if I can do this…can I then do this? YES!”
That kind of thing.
(@KitchenGarry)Agreed!
(@IndieGamerChick)I want to thank @PitfallCreator
and @kitchengarry
for hanging out with me today! An honor!
Audacity Games debut title, Circus Convoy, is out now and it’s really fun. Not just fun for an Atari game, but FUN in a vacuum, on its own merit. It’s for-sale now!
https://adgm.us/portal/pricing
(@KitchenGarry)Thank you Cathy! A great job of leading the discussion. Go Warriors!
(@IndieGamerChick)Oh, they’re going all right. They’re going home I reckon.
(@PitfallCreator)Thanks Cathy and to all who participated!
…………………….
You can follow everyone on twitter at the appropriate handles
Welcome to the #IGCvAtari Legends Forum with @PitfallCreator & @kitchengarry.
I've been playing their latest release: Circus Convoy for the Atari 2600. Be sure to follow @audacitygames and check out their website: https://t.co/jKFOD5HZVX
Let's do some Q&A with living legends! pic.twitter.com/S43WDrnmjG
— Indie Gamer Chick (@IndieGamerChick) May 22, 2021
In addition, for access to an extensive variety of active retro gaming groups on Facebook, visit Retro Gamers Hub.