It's All in the Game Ch. 02

More interestingly, I received an interesting letter from the publishers of an Apple magazine that every month included a disk with a few new programs on it. They offering me a one-time payment of $2000 for every program that I could send them for publication for that monthly magazine.

This presented interesting options. A few days of work, and I wouldn't have the time, labor or expense of disk duplication or packaging and shipping. Sure, I might make more if I marketed it myself, but that could be risky, and I could use the time that was saved for other programming. I talked it over with Marsha and she agreed to handle all of the daily operations from now on to free 100% of my time for programming.

It took me five weeks to come up with my first game for the magazine, but a lot of that time had been spent learning some new faster ways to code graphics plus fixing a screen bug that defied all attempts at troubleshooting for an entire week. I was starting to really understand computer graphics, and had thought of a neat trick or two that might make my next game a whole lot better.

My next game, "Billy and the Mushroom Cave", took only three weeks to create and was certainly a major improvement. I had wanted a fun game that I thought my daughters would play (I already began to consider Ashley as part of the family) and didn't want any violent elements to it. The plot was simple: Billy wanted to pick some mushrooms, but once picked the mushroom would grow back slightly faster and eventually Billy would have to run home to empty his basket before picking any more. Eventually, the cave becoming totally filled with mushrooms with Billy stuck outside. Game over. Simple mindless fun, and I forgot about it almost immediately after I sent it off in the mail and started on my next one, a variant of this that had a little girl picking five kinds of flowers from a field to fill orders for her Mother's Flower Shop.

The fan mail flooded in, mostly from other jealous and appreciative programmers who hadn't discovered my 'side scrolling' trick, so that the main character could walk forwards and backwards in the game but would always stay fixed in the center of the computer screen. Apparently this was something brand new, and within months nearly all of the new games for the Apple market now featured this trick.

Another fan offered me a flat $500 offer if I would grant him the Commodore-64 'rights' for this program. I said 'sure' and cashed the check. Supposedly, with only minor game-tweaks, this new version of 'Billy's Mushroom Cave' supposedly sold over 25,000 copies at about ten dollars each. Sure I can count… but since I didn't have the time (or multiple computer systems) to make conversions for other computer systems, I just chalked it all up to 'Free Money'. But I did require slightly better contracts for other game conversions in the future.

I delivered a new game every month for a little over a year until the Apple II market had declined enough to put the magazine out of business. My accounting suite was also declining steadily in sales and it looked as if the "fat days" were over. Pretty soon our revenue in was just about the same as our expenses. We had to eliminate the part time help entirely for a while and soon there wasn't really much even to keep Marsha busy on a full-time basis, but I of course kept paying her full time anyway. She was family.

It was time to rethink things a bit. We had gotten much too comfortable and hadn't done nearly enough strategic thinking and let ourselves become "obsolete". The Apple II market was virtually dead by late 1986.I, in fact its real creator, Woz, was no longer at Apple at all, and Steve Jobs had been fired by his own company as CEO. For the gaming market it was now either the Commodore 64 or their new Amiga (an insanely brilliant computer ruined by inept marketing) and for business, it was now the IBM PC/XT/AT and so forth, or rather a rapidly growing market of 'clones' from manufacturers no one had ever heard of.

The PC was not a particularly good game machine, but it was clearly going to completely own the entire business market soon, or at least 98% of it. The Apple Mac seemed like an interesting idea, but it just didn't have enough market share at this point as it was way too expensive for most buyers and marketed a bit too heavily towards academia. It did appeal to the computer snobs but it would probably never have quite enough market share to be worth my time to properly learn. We bought one anyway just to play with it and Marsha used it for years doing desktop publishing for our software manuals and company newsletters and brochures. I did break down and make a Mac version of my accounting suite but it never paid for the time it took me to create it, let alone the costs of advertising.

I made a couple of Commodore-64 and even a game for the Amiga, but they didn't pay back much in the way of big profits either, but at least the sales covered the advertising costs. There were already too many other folks doing the exact same thing and demand was becoming pretty tightly close to the supply of available games.

With a heavy heart, we decided to retire all Apple and Commodore development and convert everything to the PC. I had to buy all new reference manuals, naturally, and we bought two brand new Compaq 386 computers that just about cleaned out our entire company savings. I began to make jokes that Ralph was going to show up on our doorstep with another Care package of canned goods again sometime soon. I had long ago cut my bookkeeping hours for the County down to just a very minimal part-time, my salary much reduced accordingly, and now it looked very much like I might have to return to full time work there to keep the roof over our heads.

Slowly, my 'Updated for the PC' Accounting Suite got hammered into some sort of usability, and using the very bottom scrapings of my savings I placed a few small ads in several PC magazines. At that moment when finances looked especially tight, Marsha handed me her own savings of about $1200 to help keep us afloat for another month. I didn't find out until about a week later that she had sold her car to come up with this money for us.

My feelings were a little hurt that my employee had had to "bail her boss out", but I got over it. She believed in "us" and it was my job to deliver the goods.

Now it was a race to see if I could get the last bugs out of my conversion and make everything look corporate and professional before people actually paid me money for my not quite finished product. It was a very near thing and the last week was a sleepless nightmare for everyone. Marsha had designed a retail box with some attractive packaging and put the final touches on a quality documentation manual for the Suite. Our previous user documentation in the Apple days had been very minor and wholly inadequate in comparison.

When at last the first of the orders came in, the feeling of relief was overwhelming. We had a small ceremony in which four packages of Ramen Noodles were burned in the fireplace and we all swore that we would never eat them, ever again (let alone live on them solely for nearly a month). It was not quite the overnight success that our original Apple version had been; the business software market was maturing and there were many more alternate choices now, but still it looked as if we would be financially back in the black again, if not quite rolling in the green.

We paid off some of our 'past due' bills and got settled again into productivity once more. Marsha designed a beautiful four page promotional flyer that described our new PC Accounting Suite and we scraped up the money to have 5000 of them printed. Marsha then printed mailing labels for every single previous customer we had ever had and set the girls to mailing out the flyers. We didn't win back everyone, but we gathered enough repeat customer business to remove our financial worries for the summer, so that I could still stay part-time once again with my day job so that I could put in some serious programming time to develop some new products.

Game designing for the PC was not half the fun it had been on the Apple. Everything seemed to take at least twice as long and the results only looked half as good. The less I say about the EGA graphics card format the better.

I was not a happy camper, but at last I had done 'tolerable' conversions of all of my Apple II and Commodore games for the PC, which fit onto two floppy diskettes. Marsha created a nice packaging coversheet for the bag (we still used mostly Ziploc bags for packaging in those days) and she designed a catchy 4x6 inch magazine advertisement proof ready for mailing out to a few magazines.

Sales of my 'Black's Classic Game Package' were slow, but steady and we got a surprising amount of fan mail from folks who had remembered and played the original versions and were delighted to have "their old favorite games" now available on the PC. I think Marsha's ad ran for nearly two straight years before sales finally declined enough to make the expensive advertising costs prohibitive. Then I offered the package for free to a Shareware company and for another few years we received small, but steady royalties.

I started working on a few new games, but nothing spectacular until I leaped at the opportunity to upgrade both of our Compaq's with the brand new (and far superior) VGA card. The old EGA cards enjoyed a proper Viking funeral in our fireplace. 16 colors at 640x480 or 64 colors at 320x200 with 256kb of video memory doesn't seem like much now, but it meant goodbye to stupid block characters entirely. You could now have real smiles on faces and show semi-realistic movement and far, far more background detail.

More computer technical reference manuals were ordered and I buried myself deep in them, especially enthralled at the possibilities of doing 3D graphics rendering. Instead of just having two directions available for a character to move, all six were now possible. Sure, this had been done years ago on the Apple, but now with VGA graphics it could be done on the PC where it looked quite good!

Sitting with Marsha that Christmas of 1987 while watching our girls playing with their new toys I received two unexpected bombshells. First, her ex was finally throwing in the towel and her divorce should be finalized soon. Great news! Second, would I be at all put out or angry if she began to date again? There was a particular man (not me) that she was kind of interested in and would I be greatly upset if she started a relationship with him?

I think she could tell by the crestfallen look on my face that the answer was really "Yes," even while my mouth was saying silly things like, "Sure, go ahead," and, "No problem." She confided later after the girls had been put to bed (they shared a single bedroom now and hated to be parted from each other), that she did have 'feelings for me', but that she was too scared of something 'going wrong' and thus also ruining our perfect working relationship.

Frankly I did understood her reasoning; I had much the same fears myself and earlier reached an identical conclusion that I'd rather keep her nearby me, but platonically, rather than risk losing her.

This was, of course, a terrible mistake that we both regretted for almost the next ten years.