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This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-episode-15-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-gray-chang-jonathan-halliday
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz
Kevin: It's Tuesday, August 12, 2014. I am Kevin Savetz and this is my interview with Gray Chang. He was an Atari 8-bit programmer. He made four games, Dog Daze, Dog Daze Deluxe, and Bumpomov's Dogs. Those three were published by APX and Claim Jumper which was published by Synapse Software in 1982. This interview was conducted over Skype. A slightly edited version of this interview will appear in Antic: The Atari 8-bit podcast at ataripodcast.com.I believe that will be in episode, we'll call it 15 and this is the full unedited version of the interview. If you need to contact me, I'm Kevin Savetz at savetz.com. You can contact Gray at his website, ataridogdaze.com. Here's the interview.
Kevin: Well, thank you for taking some time to talk to me.
Gray: Sure, I'm glad to do it.
Kevin: Cool. So, I'm a co-host of a podcast which is just about Atari 8-bit stuff and we like to find people to interview who were there back in day, and you were certainly one of them. So, what I hope to do is, the edited version of this interview will be included in the podcast and kind of unedited version, unless we go off the record or something but, assuming we don't.
Gray: Yes, you mentioned that in your e-mail.
Kevin: Right, so that will be up on archive.org for posterity and history and all those other good things. So, let's talk Atari.
Gray: Sure.
Kevin: How did you get started with the Atari 8-bit machines, the first time you saw one or bought one or how did to get into the fold?
Gray: Well, I played arcade video games, like I played Space Invaders, just occasionally. I was not a really big fan but I just want to do once in a while. And then this arcade game came along, Missile Command. You probably remember that one.
Kevin: Sure.
Gray: I was really intrigued by it. I played it everyday, one or two times everyday. It just really fascinated how it worked. You know the colors, the play, and everything was so interesting, exciting. So, I decided I wanted to do that. I wanted to make a video games, like Missile Command. So, I applied for some jobs but I had no experience. I was not successful in getting jobs. So I said, "All right, if I can't make video games professionally, I'm gonna do it just for fun." So, I looked at the computers available at that time and Atari was the best for what I wanted to do so I got one. And I started programming for fun and I wrote Dog Daze.
Kevin: What year was this?
Gray: 1981, I think it was.
Kevin: Okay.
Gray: So, I went to the Atari users group meetings in the South Bay area, Sunnyvale, Campbell, wherever it was. There was a guy there who give a demo or something, Paul Cubbage [SP] from APX. So, I approached him and said ,"You know, I wrote this game. Can I show it you?" He actually said, "Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Bring it to our office. We'll take a look at it." So, I took it down there and they liked it immediately and they wanted to work with me. So, I finished writing it. They introduced me to Chris Crawford, and set up a meeting with him because I was having a problem with something. Chris Crawford gave me a copy of De Re Atari, which I didn't know existed at that time. I finished writing Dog Daze, they put it in the APX catalog and the royalties starting pouring in, and the rest is history.
Kevin: So, Dog Daze was one of the earlier entries into the APX catalog, as I recall.
Gray: Yes, it was.
Kevin: So did the royalties pour in? Was it a significant flow?
Gray: Yeah, it was lucrative. It was good enough that I was making more money from Dog Daze than I was from my regular job. So, I quit my job. First, I went part-time to devote more time to writing games, then I eventually quit my job entirely. I was just programming games. I'd like to say full-time, but I was kind of lazy. I was working part-time programming video games and making a good living at it.
Kevin:What were you doing before? What job did you quit?
Gray: I was working at National Semiconductor as a technical writer. Before that, I worked at Intel. So, I gave up a good job to write video games. I didn't know at time, but it wasn't going to last that long.
Kevin: So, we went from you bought an Atari and then, all of the sudden, you had Dog Daze. Let's talk about the period in the middle. How long did it take you to learn the program and was Dog Daze your first effort? What language was it in and talk to me about that middle time before you showed up with the finished product.
Gray: Sure. So, I got the Atari, I got a cassette recorder for recording programs, no disk drive.
Kevin: I'm sorry.
Gray: Yeah, and I got the basic cartridge, so of course the first thing I did was start kind of reading the basic manual. So, I was just playing around and making colored dots appear on the screen and then I made us a crude draw program with the joysticks. I would make dots appear, different color dots appear randomly and I'd draw rectangles randomly, sort of a light show kind of thing. One of the one things I did was I wrote a simple, basic program that made a draw program and also, at the same time, randomly made dots appear on screen and had two joysticks. Two people drawing and then, when a dot would appear on the screen, the two people drawing would naturally try and draw their line towards the dots. "Hey, that's the game," I thought. Something appears on the screen and people race for it.
I looked up player missile graphics and I started programming. I tried to animate some kind of moving spaceship or something using player missile graphics and basic and I quickly found that basic was too slow. The animation was slow and jerky and I said, "This is not gonna work, I'm going to have to do assembly language." So, I bought an Atari Assembler Editor cartridge and started learning 6502 assembly language. And I bought the Atari technical manual which is, basically, a bunch of specifications thrown together into a book and it wasn't easy to read. I had to figure out stuff. But once I figured it out, I was able to animate a dog. It was pretty exciting, just to get the dog to move across the screen left and right or up and down and to have some very simple animation like the legs moving back and forth, and tail flipping up and down. And so, I started getting the game start together. You know, it was pretty fun. It didn't take that long. I don't know, a couple of months maybe. So, that's the story of Dog Daze, how I got started with it.
Kevin: So, you made Dog Daze, you showed it off. It started to sell, you quit your job, and, then, your next thing was Dog Daze Deluxe? Was that the next product?
Gray: No, the next thing was Claim Jumper.
Kevin: That was for Synapse, right?
Gray: Yes, for Synapse.
Kevin: Okay, so how did they come about?
Gray: I don't remember how I got in touch with Synapse but they had a more generous royalty schedule. So, I started to work with them. They were located in Kensington, near Berkeley at that time. So, I would just go there personally and say, I'm working on this game. We signed a contract and we started working on the game or I think I probably got started on it already. As you know, Claim Jumper is actually similar to Dog Daze, two-player game where the characters run around and race for something, but there's a lot more interaction than Dog Daze, because you can shoot the other player, you can pick up gold, change it for money and buy bullets. You can shoot your opponent and then there's these snakes and tumbleweeds crawling around on the screen. It was visually more interesting and more complex than Dog Daze.
Kevin: I was just watching your play through videos on your website and kind of looking at your games with fresh eyes and I was impressed with Claim Jumper, just the amount of stuff that's going on with the screen, a lot of movement. Little tumbleweeds tumbling and little snakes crawling around. That seemed pretty darn impressive.
Gray: Yeah. For the benefit of your listeners who don't already know this, the Atari has two graphic systems, the background and foreground. The background is usually made up of characters or redefined characters. For example, in Dog Daze, the fire hydrants are actually characters that I defined the shapes for, instead of like letters, like A and B, numbers and punctuation. I made a character that looks like a fire hydrant and then, to animate a fire hydrant that's popping up, I would make a hydrant that's just barely come out of the ground, a little farther, then a little farther. I just keep changing those characters and making little differences. Instead of A,B,C,D,E changing a spot. I'd make the little hydrant just barely popping up and then popping up a little more, and then, fully popped up. That's how you animate characters.
Then, foreground the is what called player missile graphics or, on the Commodore, they're called sprites. It's a foreground that's made up, a player is actually a vertical bar that runs from top to bottom and you can control the dots in that vertical bar, where you have a zero you see through it to the background. When you have one, you could see a solid color. So, the dog, for example, to move left and right, you just put a number into a register and that bar will move to whatever position you specify. So, you just change a number to move the dog left and right. To move up and down, you just erase and redraw that dog within that bar. Up and down and, where you've erased it, it's clear and you can see the background. Where you haven't erased it, you can see the dog. And to animate it, you just erase and redraw it every frame.
So, the screen gets updated once every TV frame. There were two world systems, NTSC and PAL. NTSC was the U.S or North American system, which redraws the screen 60 times per second. You've got a 60 Hertz refresh cycle. The PAL system used in Europe and most of the rest of the world redraws 50 times per second. So, all the games and everything are synchronized to the refresh rate of the TV system. So, you notice that the games are run slower in Europe than in the U.S., because when you run your emulator, you can set it to either the PAL system at 50 Hertz or NTSC to 60 Hertz. That actually changes the speed of the game. So, people who run the emulator, say " Hey, this game doesn't look quite as fast as I remember it,” and all you have to do is change from PAL to NTSC and you got the perfect time that you remember the game.
Kevin: So, as a programmer, did you need to make a different version of the game for PAL systems?
Gray: No, it was actually the same software code. It's just that the PAL and NTSC actually run the same software exactly. It just gets refreshed on the screen at a different rate, depending on which kind of Atari computer you have.
Kevin: Right.
Gray: So, your emulator, it has both versions on it and you can set your emulator to run either system. It will run the same code, the same way, but it will a little bit faster on the NTSC system. I've seen people write on their blog or where they comment, they say, "Hey, this game doesn't run as fast as I remember it." Those were the U.S players, running at the default speed with the Europeans. And that's the answer to their problem. Just set that thing, and they'll get their authentic experience.
Kevin: So, you just did the one game for Synapse, right?
Gray: Yes.
Kevin: Why?
Gray: Well, after I did Claim Jumper, I was thinking about what to do next. To tell you the truth, I'm not a very creative or imaginative person. So, I should have done Bumpomov's Dogs on that point, but I didn't. I thought back to how much people enjoyed Dog Daze, so I can really improve Dog Daze. So, I'm gonna make an updated Dog Daze version. I'd fixed several bugs and improved the screen resolution, used a high resolution mode to get more life-like animation. The main new benefit was the one player version of the game. I programmed with artificial intelligence for the opponent, so that you don't need a party. You can play against the computer if you want to, but nobody wanted to take that game because Dog Daze already existed and the sales would not be that good for something that's already out there. An improved version would not sell that well. So, nobody would take it. So, as far as making a living, it was not a worthwhile effort, but I still enjoyed it and it was fun, I'm glad I did it for that reason. Synapse was not interested in Dog Daze Deluxe.
Kevin: I mean, did they ask you to do another game, Claim Jumper Two or something completely different or were they done with you?
Gray: I don't remember. They probably did. This was already getting late in the game, as they say. I think the collapse was about to come. I wrote Bumpomov's Dogs. I showed it to Broderbund. They liked it but said it wasn't original enough and they encouraged me to keep writing games and to submit any new ideas to them. I went to sell it to through APX, they were happy to take it. In fact, they were spending a lot of money on promotion at a trade show in San Francisco for Bumpomov's Dogs. They set up a booth with Bumpomov's Dogs running, they got helium balloons with Bumpomov's Dogs logo on it. They were set to sell a lot of Bumpomov's Dogs, so, when I went to the trade show, I got there and the APX guy, they're saying, there have been some changes at APX since we last saw you, which was like a week earlier. They laid off a whole bunch of people. This was the collapse. They'd laid off bunch of people and most of the people I knew at APX had lost their jobs but they'd already paid for this trade show, so they still went through with it. But it was kind of disappointing that this is happening. So, I never earned any royalties at all from Bumpomov's Dogs, even though I saw people purchase Bumpomov's Dogs at the trade show, but they collapsed and then never came through with any royalties.
Kevin: So, that was it. That was your whole [inaudible 00:19:14] right there, those four games, right?
Gray: Yes, that was it.
Kevin: Did you create any others on the side or anything that was unpublished or started or unfinished or anything?
Gray: No, that was it entirely and I actually don't like video games very much. I never play video games except, occasionally, I bring out my own and play Dogs Daze or Bumpomov's Dogs. I still enjoy Bumpomov's Dogs. Yeah, that was my whole entire game career. It was a great time. I had a great time. I guess that's my 15 minutes of fame or 15 months of fame.
Kevin: 15 months, that was the period from when you put your job to when you had to go back to the grind.
Gray: Yeah, it was about year or two. I don't remember exactly. It was not that long. I think the collapse was already going on when I was writing Bumpomov's Dogs but I didn't realize it. I realized something was wrong when I got my quarterly letter from Synapse. Not only did I not earn royalties, but the returns had exceeded sales and I actually owed them money, I owed Synapse money back, royalties, but they never bothered to collect, so I actually kept what they gave me. So, I knew something was wrong at that point. That was when I realized that I better start looking for a new, non-game programming job.
Kevin: So, where did you go after that?
Gray: I went back to work for National Semiconductor, doing technical writing.
Kevin: So, your best selling game was Dog Daze, which sold about 10,000 copies. Is that right?
Gray: Yes. On a unit basis, it was Dog Daze but on an income basis, I earned more from Claim Jumper because they offered a more generous compensation. APX gave about 10% of sales, whereas Claim Jumper gave around 25% to the authors.
Kevin: 25% you said?
Gray: Which is very generous, yes.
Kevin: When I wrote Internet books early on, publishers would give an advance on royalties, a few thousands dollars to get you started. Did that happen with Synapse or was it just strictly royalty?
Gray: No, there was no advance. It was strictly royalties, which was fine for us programmers at that time. It was so lucrative. I mean, what more could you ask for?
Kevin: Sure. You could ask for advance. That's what you could ask.
Gray: No, we didn't need advance. There was one guy who I heard, it was just crazy. This one guy, I heard that he bought his mother a house and, from my understanding, was that he didn't make a down payment for the house. He actually bought the house for his mom, using the royalties earned from programming computer games. It was just crazy that time. I should have known better. It wasn't going to last.
Kevin: No, nothing does. So, what else should I ask you? What should the world know about Gray and Atari and Dog Daze?
Gray: Well, one thing I thought you'd ask but you didn't ask is why would you write two player games?
Kevin: That's an excellent question I didn't ask.
Gray: First of all, when you think about, outside of computers and technology, what are games? Games are activities you engage in, either fun or exciting, with other people. If you took a soccer ball to the park and you kick it around, that's exercise, that's play but that's not a game. That's not a game. If you get together with three other friends and set up some goals and start kicking the ball against the other players and having a competition, that's a game. A game is interaction with people.
So, now we have computer games. Why do we even call them it games? I mean, any solo activity, outside of computers, you would not call it a game. You'd call it a puzzle or whatever. It's because the computer reacts. The computer is interacting with you. You do something, the computer reacts to. So, it's sort of like playing with the person but sort of not. The computer can do a lot of things a person cannot do but, on the other hand, what a person can do and a computer cannot do, I think, is much more interesting and fun. I think that the computer is a poor substitute for a person.
So, my games are like a board game, like Monopoly. If you play Monopoly by yourself, it would not be very much fun. In fact, it's simply no fun to play Monopoly by yourself. All the fun of the game of Monopoly comes from your interaction with human players. The thrill of victory, agony of defeat, laughter, aggression, whatever it is. You interact with other people and that's what makes it fun. So, Dog Daze is like a board game. All the fun comes from your interactions with the person your playing with, the shouts, the fear when the car is coming. You can get Dog Daze Deluxe, and play by yourself or play against the computer opponent but I don't think that's very much fun. It's a little fun but it's not quite the same as playing against the person.
Kevin: It's better than no game at all.
Gray: Yeah, it's people that makes games fun. That's why I program two-player games. Also, it's easy to program a two-player game because all the intelligence and the complexity comes from the behavior of your opponent, not from the computer.
Kevin: But you could learn how AI's going to behave, right?
Gray: You use natural intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. That's what makes the game fun to play.
Kevin: So, who did you play with?
Gray: Anybody who is around, friends, neighbors, whoever is around. When I first programmed Dog Daze Deluxe, the one player version, I took my game to my cousin's house in El Cerrito, which is near the Synapse offices, and I sat down and said," Hey, let's play a game of Dog Daze." He said, "Sure, let's play." So, we started playing but I secretly let the computer play instead of myself, play against him. Then, after a little while, I put down my joystick and left the room and he was still playing away and it took him a while to realize that I wasn't there. So, I was testing to see how good my human emulator was working. That was a good test.
Kevin: That's funny. I thought that was interesting, something I didn't know. I was watching your play through videos is that, I think it was in Deluxe, you can start playing with joystick 1 against the computer and you can just put down the joystick and switch players with the computer will just,"Oh, okay,” and start playing one while you're playing two. It's a rather unique feature.
Gray: Yeah, I think the mistake I made is that you can only do that at the beginning. If you start the game as a one-player game, you can switch sides but if you start a two-player game, it won't let you go to one-player mode in the middle of the game. I can't remember why I did it that way but, if I were to redo it, I would say, if you're playing Dog Daze Deluxe, anytime you feel like it, you can just set your joystick down and the computer will take over for you, but it won't do that. It would have been very easy to implement that but I didn't and I can't remember why.
Kevin: That was, I thought, a unique feature, just being able to swap. The other feature I really like is that the split-screen in Bumpomov's. We were just discussing split-screen games in a episode or two ago and we were trying to list them all and I didn't even know about this one but it's like your play field is taller than the screen and if your two dogs are in the same area, that's fine, it's just one screen. But if one goes high and one goes low, a split just appears on the screen and you can each do your own thing. And then it seamlessly joins up again. That's a really cool effect.
Gray: Let me tell you how I programmed that.
Kevin: Please do.
Gray: First of all, if you see the game and watch the demo, you see obvious similarities to Pacman. You go through a maze and pick up dots or I called them dog biscuits. It's obvious where that idea came from. Then, the main fun thing you do in that game is the bumping thing, where you pick up a bone and launch it against your opponent and bump him through the maze. That was also not my original idea. As I've said, I'm not really all that creative. That idea I got from an Atari VCS game called Slot Racers, by I forgot his name. I have to say, he programmed a great game and that's where I got the idea.
So, the original feature of this game is this splitting and recombining screen. So I started writing this game. I wanted to have a two player scrolling game. So, I thought about what happens when the two players go to different places and you can't fit them on the same scrolling screen. I thought about, is it even possible to... Well, first, the most obvious way to implement that would be a permanent split-screen, one screen for one player, one screen for the other player. So, you can always see what's going on for you and the other player can always see what's going on for him but that sort of detracts from the interaction. You really want to have the two players playing on one screen when you can and then maybe split it only when you need to. Then, if you have a split, you want the split to be smooth. You don't wanna have somebody looking at their dog and, all the sudden, it jerks into a new position on the screen.
I thought, "Is that even possible, to have a smooth transition from a single screen to double screen?" And I thought about it. It is if you're only scrolling in one dimension. If you're scrolling left and right and up and down, there's no way to have a smooth transition because the way that the two players move apart will determine how it splits on you. You cannot have a smooth transition. So I decided I would have a scrolling game, scrolls up and down, that would smoothly split, so the dog will not jerk around during the split. It would just be right there but the background would split and you have a smooth transition to a split-screen and a smooth transition back from a split-screen to a single screen.
So, again, it's kind of complex. I used assembly language and I was able to program that and it worked. I wasn't sure how well it would work until I tried it and, when I tried it, it worked great. I was very happy with that feature. So, if you ask me what was my proudest accomplishment in my game career, I would say it was that, thinking of the idea of doing that and implementing it to make a game that the splitting and recombining screen really worked and people can enjoy using.
I put up my website in 2003. Someone had written to me saying, "There's a PS2 game that uses that same feature," and they were calling it innovative and so on. So, this person had written to the company to tell them they were not first to do it.
Kevin: It is a great feature. It's a really well done effect. If you could send a message to the Atari 8-bit community, and you can, right now, what would you tell them?
Gray: Well, thanks for playing my game and I really enjoy hearing from you. If you go to my website, you can send me a message. That's the reason I did this. I wanted people to enjoy my games. I really enjoy hearing from people who enjoy it. APX had this comment form people would send in. So, people would write in and APX would forward me the comment letters, but I didn't get very many. I think I got maybe two or three all together, even though they sold, what, 10,000 copies. The letters meant a lot to me. That was the great satisfaction of creating the game. I would go to computer stores all the time, just to see if I can find my game on the shelf and that really excited me.
So, when I put up my website in 2003, I got, I don't know, maybe a dozen or a two dozen emails from people, saying that they're excited to see the website, they played the game when they were a kid. They still play it sometimes. They really had fun. There was a blog somewhere, somebody said that he got a fist fight with his brother playing Claim Jumper and that a fond memory of his, getting in a fist fight with his brother while playing Claim Jumper. That shows the intensity of the game. Of course, it's not Claim Jumper that made him fight, it was his brother that made him fight. It's the interaction with his brother, it was an exciting interaction. Maybe it was a little too exciting.
Kevin: That's why you make two-player games, right? To make brothers fight.
Gray: Yeah, my game allowed them to do something exciting together that they remember as a good experience in their past. There's some people, somebody wrote to me saying, "My friends are all up on the latest PS2 games,” or whatever it was at the time, “but still ask to get out Claim Jumper because it's so exciting, it's so fun. They really get into it.” So, the pleasure I get is from hearing from people who enjoyed it. So, if you've played Dog Daze or Claim Jumper or Bumpomov's, especially Bumpomov's Dogs, because no one ever played it back then. Whoever played it are the people who are picking it up now, you know, 30 years later. If you send me an e-mail, I would really appreciate it.
Kevin: Great. Thank you, that's an excellent message. Did piracy affect you back then? I mean, I know you made some good money from it but were you sitting there going, "Wow, I could have made 10 times as much if those dirty pirates hadn't copied my game." How did you think of it then? How do you think of it now?
Gray: I don't know how much I was affected by piracy, but I was doing fine financially until the collapse, of course, so how can I complain? It's more important that people enjoy the game, even if they had to steal it. Like I said, I'd rather have them steal it and play it than to not steal it and not play it. Obviously, the thing I would have liked best is for them to buy it but if they didn't want to spend their money and or couldn't afford it and they steal it and play it, you know, what's that to me? I just wanted everybody to have fun. So, to answer your question, no, I was not affected.
Kevin: Okay. I pirated your game. I'm sorry.
Gray: That's all right. I used to be very protective of my source code, I don't want people copying my ideas, but now, I don't care. To this one, I went and found my source code floppies and I'm ready to lend them to you to copy and post on the Internet. All the source codes to all the games.
Kevin: Excellent. That would be exciting.
Gray: One thing that would be good for me is there were a few changes I want to make ib Bumpomov's Dogs. For example, instead of filling the whole maze full of dog biscuits, I should have only put in 199 biscuits in the maze, so that there's just barely enough to have a contest between the two players. Potentially, each dog could collect 99 biscuits and have only 1 biscuit in the maze. You can imagine the ferocity of the competition for that, bumping each other and then, at the last moment, one of those rewards courses might pop up and change the outcome of the game at the very last moment. So, it would be more exciting if I just put the minimum number of biscuits in the maze but, of course, to do that, I need that source code and a very simple matter to, probably just 10 or 20 lines of code to reduce the number of biscuits.
Kevin: Do you have enough assembly language in your head that you can do it?
Gray: Oh yeah, I'm sure. I used a send assembler, by the way. Anybody out there, if you want to program assembly language, forget the Atari Assembler editor cartridge, use [inaudible 00:40:21]. That's a Synapse assembler. It runs about a 100 times faster. When I would compile an assemble game like Dog Daze, it might take five minutes to assemble it with the Atari Assembler Editor but with the [inaudible 00:40:39], it would take like five seconds. It was just that big a difference.
Kevin: It's a whole other world, now.
Gray: There's a slight difference in syntax between the Atari assembler editor and the Synapse [inaudible 00:40:55]. So, if you're going to learn one, learn the [inaudible 00:41:00]. I think you can download it for free nowadays. I don't know. Are there people still programming games for the Atari?
Kevin: Yeah, there are. There certainly are. New games come out semi-frequently. There's a user group in Germany that has programming contests, game programming contests and, every year, there's 20 entries of really high quality games. So, absolutely.
Gray: That's surprising. I mean, computers have advanced so much and yet people are still doing this, by modern standards, a very simple, crude computer system. And yet, the games are fun. I think the amount of fun you can get from Atari is no less than what you can get from today's computers. Today, you have fine graphics and all kinds of sound capabilities and so on, but are the games any more fun? I don't think so.
Kevin: Sometimes, they're super less fun 'cause there's no playability there. They're pretty and they sound good but there's no there there.
Gray: Yes. Yes. I'm glad the people are still programming on Atari and using their creative juices and creating new things. So, it was a great time for me, being more of a technical person than artistic or creative. It was a way for me to be artistic, in a way, and have people enjoy it. That was a very satisfying thing.
Kevin: So, I'll e-mail you my address and you'll lend me those disk and I can get the source code out to you and the world.
Gray: Okay, and you're a collector of Atari memorabilia, is that correct?
Kevin: Yes, I am.
Gray: I can give you couple of Claim Jumper posters and an APX instruction book for Dog Daze.
Kevin: That would be awesome. Thank you. I'll get those scanned too, the instructions.
Gray: Okay.
Kevin: I'd appreciate that very much. Would you sign a poster for me?
Gray: Oh, sure. Yeah, sure. I'll sign a poster for you.
Kevin: Awesome. It'll go up on my wall. That'll be great, thank you. I've really been on a quest to try to find source code that's not out there and get it online for the world before all the disks rot away and they're starting to do it. I mean sometimes, the disks are old and they're sad. So, it's exciting that you kept them. Did you keep the letters? You said back on the day you got a couple letter from people who used the software. Do you still have that?
Gray: Yeah, I probably have those letters. I have those stashed away somewhere.
Kevin: If you find them, scan them please or send them to me and I'll scan it if you're willing to share them.
Gray: They're not that exciting. The stuff I got 10 years ago, when I first set up my website, they were more exciting.
Kevin: Right.
Gray: But I have to look. Because it's paper, I've got stacks of paper, so it might be hard to find, or it might not. I'll have to look.
Kevin: Great, cool. Anything else?
Gray: That's all I can think of.
Kevin: All right, me too. Thank you so much, Gray.
Gray: Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Okay, bye.
Kevin: Have a great one. Bye.
Source: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast
Source URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-episode-15-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-gray-chang-jonathan-halliday
Interviewer: Kevin Savetz
Kevin: It's Tuesday, August 12, 2014. I am Kevin Savetz and this is my interview with Gray Chang. He was an Atari 8-bit programmer. He made four games, Dog Daze, Dog Daze Deluxe, and Bumpomov's Dogs. Those three were published by APX and Claim Jumper which was published by Synapse Software in 1982. This interview was conducted over Skype. A slightly edited version of this interview will appear in Antic: The Atari 8-bit podcast at ataripodcast.com.I believe that will be in episode, we'll call it 15 and this is the full unedited version of the interview. If you need to contact me, I'm Kevin Savetz at savetz.com. You can contact Gray at his website, ataridogdaze.com. Here's the interview.
Kevin: Well, thank you for taking some time to talk to me.
Gray: Sure, I'm glad to do it.
Kevin: Cool. So, I'm a co-host of a podcast which is just about Atari 8-bit stuff and we like to find people to interview who were there back in day, and you were certainly one of them. So, what I hope to do is, the edited version of this interview will be included in the podcast and kind of unedited version, unless we go off the record or something but, assuming we don't.
Gray: Yes, you mentioned that in your e-mail.
Kevin: Right, so that will be up on archive.org for posterity and history and all those other good things. So, let's talk Atari.
Gray: Sure.
Kevin: How did you get started with the Atari 8-bit machines, the first time you saw one or bought one or how did to get into the fold?
Gray: Well, I played arcade video games, like I played Space Invaders, just occasionally. I was not a really big fan but I just want to do once in a while. And then this arcade game came along, Missile Command. You probably remember that one.
Kevin: Sure.
Gray: I was really intrigued by it. I played it everyday, one or two times everyday. It just really fascinated how it worked. You know the colors, the play, and everything was so interesting, exciting. So, I decided I wanted to do that. I wanted to make a video games, like Missile Command. So, I applied for some jobs but I had no experience. I was not successful in getting jobs. So I said, "All right, if I can't make video games professionally, I'm gonna do it just for fun." So, I looked at the computers available at that time and Atari was the best for what I wanted to do so I got one. And I started programming for fun and I wrote Dog Daze.
Kevin: What year was this?
Gray: 1981, I think it was.
Kevin: Okay.
Gray: So, I went to the Atari users group meetings in the South Bay area, Sunnyvale, Campbell, wherever it was. There was a guy there who give a demo or something, Paul Cubbage [SP] from APX. So, I approached him and said ,"You know, I wrote this game. Can I show it you?" He actually said, "Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Bring it to our office. We'll take a look at it." So, I took it down there and they liked it immediately and they wanted to work with me. So, I finished writing it. They introduced me to Chris Crawford, and set up a meeting with him because I was having a problem with something. Chris Crawford gave me a copy of De Re Atari, which I didn't know existed at that time. I finished writing Dog Daze, they put it in the APX catalog and the royalties starting pouring in, and the rest is history.
Kevin: So, Dog Daze was one of the earlier entries into the APX catalog, as I recall.
Gray: Yes, it was.
Kevin: So did the royalties pour in? Was it a significant flow?
Gray: Yeah, it was lucrative. It was good enough that I was making more money from Dog Daze than I was from my regular job. So, I quit my job. First, I went part-time to devote more time to writing games, then I eventually quit my job entirely. I was just programming games. I'd like to say full-time, but I was kind of lazy. I was working part-time programming video games and making a good living at it.
Kevin:What were you doing before? What job did you quit?
Gray: I was working at National Semiconductor as a technical writer. Before that, I worked at Intel. So, I gave up a good job to write video games. I didn't know at time, but it wasn't going to last that long.
Kevin: So, we went from you bought an Atari and then, all of the sudden, you had Dog Daze. Let's talk about the period in the middle. How long did it take you to learn the program and was Dog Daze your first effort? What language was it in and talk to me about that middle time before you showed up with the finished product.
Gray: Sure. So, I got the Atari, I got a cassette recorder for recording programs, no disk drive.
Kevin: I'm sorry.
Gray: Yeah, and I got the basic cartridge, so of course the first thing I did was start kind of reading the basic manual. So, I was just playing around and making colored dots appear on the screen and then I made us a crude draw program with the joysticks. I would make dots appear, different color dots appear randomly and I'd draw rectangles randomly, sort of a light show kind of thing. One of the one things I did was I wrote a simple, basic program that made a draw program and also, at the same time, randomly made dots appear on screen and had two joysticks. Two people drawing and then, when a dot would appear on the screen, the two people drawing would naturally try and draw their line towards the dots. "Hey, that's the game," I thought. Something appears on the screen and people race for it.
I looked up player missile graphics and I started programming. I tried to animate some kind of moving spaceship or something using player missile graphics and basic and I quickly found that basic was too slow. The animation was slow and jerky and I said, "This is not gonna work, I'm going to have to do assembly language." So, I bought an Atari Assembler Editor cartridge and started learning 6502 assembly language. And I bought the Atari technical manual which is, basically, a bunch of specifications thrown together into a book and it wasn't easy to read. I had to figure out stuff. But once I figured it out, I was able to animate a dog. It was pretty exciting, just to get the dog to move across the screen left and right or up and down and to have some very simple animation like the legs moving back and forth, and tail flipping up and down. And so, I started getting the game start together. You know, it was pretty fun. It didn't take that long. I don't know, a couple of months maybe. So, that's the story of Dog Daze, how I got started with it.
Kevin: So, you made Dog Daze, you showed it off. It started to sell, you quit your job, and, then, your next thing was Dog Daze Deluxe? Was that the next product?
Gray: No, the next thing was Claim Jumper.
Kevin: That was for Synapse, right?
Gray: Yes, for Synapse.
Kevin: Okay, so how did they come about?
Gray: I don't remember how I got in touch with Synapse but they had a more generous royalty schedule. So, I started to work with them. They were located in Kensington, near Berkeley at that time. So, I would just go there personally and say, I'm working on this game. We signed a contract and we started working on the game or I think I probably got started on it already. As you know, Claim Jumper is actually similar to Dog Daze, two-player game where the characters run around and race for something, but there's a lot more interaction than Dog Daze, because you can shoot the other player, you can pick up gold, change it for money and buy bullets. You can shoot your opponent and then there's these snakes and tumbleweeds crawling around on the screen. It was visually more interesting and more complex than Dog Daze.
Kevin: I was just watching your play through videos on your website and kind of looking at your games with fresh eyes and I was impressed with Claim Jumper, just the amount of stuff that's going on with the screen, a lot of movement. Little tumbleweeds tumbling and little snakes crawling around. That seemed pretty darn impressive.
Gray: Yeah. For the benefit of your listeners who don't already know this, the Atari has two graphic systems, the background and foreground. The background is usually made up of characters or redefined characters. For example, in Dog Daze, the fire hydrants are actually characters that I defined the shapes for, instead of like letters, like A and B, numbers and punctuation. I made a character that looks like a fire hydrant and then, to animate a fire hydrant that's popping up, I would make a hydrant that's just barely come out of the ground, a little farther, then a little farther. I just keep changing those characters and making little differences. Instead of A,B,C,D,E changing a spot. I'd make the little hydrant just barely popping up and then popping up a little more, and then, fully popped up. That's how you animate characters.
Then, foreground the is what called player missile graphics or, on the Commodore, they're called sprites. It's a foreground that's made up, a player is actually a vertical bar that runs from top to bottom and you can control the dots in that vertical bar, where you have a zero you see through it to the background. When you have one, you could see a solid color. So, the dog, for example, to move left and right, you just put a number into a register and that bar will move to whatever position you specify. So, you just change a number to move the dog left and right. To move up and down, you just erase and redraw that dog within that bar. Up and down and, where you've erased it, it's clear and you can see the background. Where you haven't erased it, you can see the dog. And to animate it, you just erase and redraw it every frame.
So, the screen gets updated once every TV frame. There were two world systems, NTSC and PAL. NTSC was the U.S or North American system, which redraws the screen 60 times per second. You've got a 60 Hertz refresh cycle. The PAL system used in Europe and most of the rest of the world redraws 50 times per second. So, all the games and everything are synchronized to the refresh rate of the TV system. So, you notice that the games are run slower in Europe than in the U.S., because when you run your emulator, you can set it to either the PAL system at 50 Hertz or NTSC to 60 Hertz. That actually changes the speed of the game. So, people who run the emulator, say " Hey, this game doesn't look quite as fast as I remember it,” and all you have to do is change from PAL to NTSC and you got the perfect time that you remember the game.
Kevin: So, as a programmer, did you need to make a different version of the game for PAL systems?
Gray: No, it was actually the same software code. It's just that the PAL and NTSC actually run the same software exactly. It just gets refreshed on the screen at a different rate, depending on which kind of Atari computer you have.
Kevin: Right.
Gray: So, your emulator, it has both versions on it and you can set your emulator to run either system. It will run the same code, the same way, but it will a little bit faster on the NTSC system. I've seen people write on their blog or where they comment, they say, "Hey, this game doesn't run as fast as I remember it." Those were the U.S players, running at the default speed with the Europeans. And that's the answer to their problem. Just set that thing, and they'll get their authentic experience.
Kevin: So, you just did the one game for Synapse, right?
Gray: Yes.
Kevin: Why?
Gray: Well, after I did Claim Jumper, I was thinking about what to do next. To tell you the truth, I'm not a very creative or imaginative person. So, I should have done Bumpomov's Dogs on that point, but I didn't. I thought back to how much people enjoyed Dog Daze, so I can really improve Dog Daze. So, I'm gonna make an updated Dog Daze version. I'd fixed several bugs and improved the screen resolution, used a high resolution mode to get more life-like animation. The main new benefit was the one player version of the game. I programmed with artificial intelligence for the opponent, so that you don't need a party. You can play against the computer if you want to, but nobody wanted to take that game because Dog Daze already existed and the sales would not be that good for something that's already out there. An improved version would not sell that well. So, nobody would take it. So, as far as making a living, it was not a worthwhile effort, but I still enjoyed it and it was fun, I'm glad I did it for that reason. Synapse was not interested in Dog Daze Deluxe.
Kevin: I mean, did they ask you to do another game, Claim Jumper Two or something completely different or were they done with you?
Gray: I don't remember. They probably did. This was already getting late in the game, as they say. I think the collapse was about to come. I wrote Bumpomov's Dogs. I showed it to Broderbund. They liked it but said it wasn't original enough and they encouraged me to keep writing games and to submit any new ideas to them. I went to sell it to through APX, they were happy to take it. In fact, they were spending a lot of money on promotion at a trade show in San Francisco for Bumpomov's Dogs. They set up a booth with Bumpomov's Dogs running, they got helium balloons with Bumpomov's Dogs logo on it. They were set to sell a lot of Bumpomov's Dogs, so, when I went to the trade show, I got there and the APX guy, they're saying, there have been some changes at APX since we last saw you, which was like a week earlier. They laid off a whole bunch of people. This was the collapse. They'd laid off bunch of people and most of the people I knew at APX had lost their jobs but they'd already paid for this trade show, so they still went through with it. But it was kind of disappointing that this is happening. So, I never earned any royalties at all from Bumpomov's Dogs, even though I saw people purchase Bumpomov's Dogs at the trade show, but they collapsed and then never came through with any royalties.
Kevin: So, that was it. That was your whole [inaudible 00:19:14] right there, those four games, right?
Gray: Yes, that was it.
Kevin: Did you create any others on the side or anything that was unpublished or started or unfinished or anything?
Gray: No, that was it entirely and I actually don't like video games very much. I never play video games except, occasionally, I bring out my own and play Dogs Daze or Bumpomov's Dogs. I still enjoy Bumpomov's Dogs. Yeah, that was my whole entire game career. It was a great time. I had a great time. I guess that's my 15 minutes of fame or 15 months of fame.
Kevin: 15 months, that was the period from when you put your job to when you had to go back to the grind.
Gray: Yeah, it was about year or two. I don't remember exactly. It was not that long. I think the collapse was already going on when I was writing Bumpomov's Dogs but I didn't realize it. I realized something was wrong when I got my quarterly letter from Synapse. Not only did I not earn royalties, but the returns had exceeded sales and I actually owed them money, I owed Synapse money back, royalties, but they never bothered to collect, so I actually kept what they gave me. So, I knew something was wrong at that point. That was when I realized that I better start looking for a new, non-game programming job.
Kevin: So, where did you go after that?
Gray: I went back to work for National Semiconductor, doing technical writing.
Kevin: So, your best selling game was Dog Daze, which sold about 10,000 copies. Is that right?
Gray: Yes. On a unit basis, it was Dog Daze but on an income basis, I earned more from Claim Jumper because they offered a more generous compensation. APX gave about 10% of sales, whereas Claim Jumper gave around 25% to the authors.
Kevin: 25% you said?
Gray: Which is very generous, yes.
Kevin: When I wrote Internet books early on, publishers would give an advance on royalties, a few thousands dollars to get you started. Did that happen with Synapse or was it just strictly royalty?
Gray: No, there was no advance. It was strictly royalties, which was fine for us programmers at that time. It was so lucrative. I mean, what more could you ask for?
Kevin: Sure. You could ask for advance. That's what you could ask.
Gray: No, we didn't need advance. There was one guy who I heard, it was just crazy. This one guy, I heard that he bought his mother a house and, from my understanding, was that he didn't make a down payment for the house. He actually bought the house for his mom, using the royalties earned from programming computer games. It was just crazy that time. I should have known better. It wasn't going to last.
Kevin: No, nothing does. So, what else should I ask you? What should the world know about Gray and Atari and Dog Daze?
Gray: Well, one thing I thought you'd ask but you didn't ask is why would you write two player games?
Kevin: That's an excellent question I didn't ask.
Gray: First of all, when you think about, outside of computers and technology, what are games? Games are activities you engage in, either fun or exciting, with other people. If you took a soccer ball to the park and you kick it around, that's exercise, that's play but that's not a game. That's not a game. If you get together with three other friends and set up some goals and start kicking the ball against the other players and having a competition, that's a game. A game is interaction with people.
So, now we have computer games. Why do we even call them it games? I mean, any solo activity, outside of computers, you would not call it a game. You'd call it a puzzle or whatever. It's because the computer reacts. The computer is interacting with you. You do something, the computer reacts to. So, it's sort of like playing with the person but sort of not. The computer can do a lot of things a person cannot do but, on the other hand, what a person can do and a computer cannot do, I think, is much more interesting and fun. I think that the computer is a poor substitute for a person.
So, my games are like a board game, like Monopoly. If you play Monopoly by yourself, it would not be very much fun. In fact, it's simply no fun to play Monopoly by yourself. All the fun of the game of Monopoly comes from your interaction with human players. The thrill of victory, agony of defeat, laughter, aggression, whatever it is. You interact with other people and that's what makes it fun. So, Dog Daze is like a board game. All the fun comes from your interactions with the person your playing with, the shouts, the fear when the car is coming. You can get Dog Daze Deluxe, and play by yourself or play against the computer opponent but I don't think that's very much fun. It's a little fun but it's not quite the same as playing against the person.
Kevin: It's better than no game at all.
Gray: Yeah, it's people that makes games fun. That's why I program two-player games. Also, it's easy to program a two-player game because all the intelligence and the complexity comes from the behavior of your opponent, not from the computer.
Kevin: But you could learn how AI's going to behave, right?
Gray: You use natural intelligence instead of artificial intelligence. That's what makes the game fun to play.
Kevin: So, who did you play with?
Gray: Anybody who is around, friends, neighbors, whoever is around. When I first programmed Dog Daze Deluxe, the one player version, I took my game to my cousin's house in El Cerrito, which is near the Synapse offices, and I sat down and said," Hey, let's play a game of Dog Daze." He said, "Sure, let's play." So, we started playing but I secretly let the computer play instead of myself, play against him. Then, after a little while, I put down my joystick and left the room and he was still playing away and it took him a while to realize that I wasn't there. So, I was testing to see how good my human emulator was working. That was a good test.
Kevin: That's funny. I thought that was interesting, something I didn't know. I was watching your play through videos is that, I think it was in Deluxe, you can start playing with joystick 1 against the computer and you can just put down the joystick and switch players with the computer will just,"Oh, okay,” and start playing one while you're playing two. It's a rather unique feature.
Gray: Yeah, I think the mistake I made is that you can only do that at the beginning. If you start the game as a one-player game, you can switch sides but if you start a two-player game, it won't let you go to one-player mode in the middle of the game. I can't remember why I did it that way but, if I were to redo it, I would say, if you're playing Dog Daze Deluxe, anytime you feel like it, you can just set your joystick down and the computer will take over for you, but it won't do that. It would have been very easy to implement that but I didn't and I can't remember why.
Kevin: That was, I thought, a unique feature, just being able to swap. The other feature I really like is that the split-screen in Bumpomov's. We were just discussing split-screen games in a episode or two ago and we were trying to list them all and I didn't even know about this one but it's like your play field is taller than the screen and if your two dogs are in the same area, that's fine, it's just one screen. But if one goes high and one goes low, a split just appears on the screen and you can each do your own thing. And then it seamlessly joins up again. That's a really cool effect.
Gray: Let me tell you how I programmed that.
Kevin: Please do.
Gray: First of all, if you see the game and watch the demo, you see obvious similarities to Pacman. You go through a maze and pick up dots or I called them dog biscuits. It's obvious where that idea came from. Then, the main fun thing you do in that game is the bumping thing, where you pick up a bone and launch it against your opponent and bump him through the maze. That was also not my original idea. As I've said, I'm not really all that creative. That idea I got from an Atari VCS game called Slot Racers, by I forgot his name. I have to say, he programmed a great game and that's where I got the idea.
So, the original feature of this game is this splitting and recombining screen. So I started writing this game. I wanted to have a two player scrolling game. So, I thought about what happens when the two players go to different places and you can't fit them on the same scrolling screen. I thought about, is it even possible to... Well, first, the most obvious way to implement that would be a permanent split-screen, one screen for one player, one screen for the other player. So, you can always see what's going on for you and the other player can always see what's going on for him but that sort of detracts from the interaction. You really want to have the two players playing on one screen when you can and then maybe split it only when you need to. Then, if you have a split, you want the split to be smooth. You don't wanna have somebody looking at their dog and, all the sudden, it jerks into a new position on the screen.
I thought, "Is that even possible, to have a smooth transition from a single screen to double screen?" And I thought about it. It is if you're only scrolling in one dimension. If you're scrolling left and right and up and down, there's no way to have a smooth transition because the way that the two players move apart will determine how it splits on you. You cannot have a smooth transition. So I decided I would have a scrolling game, scrolls up and down, that would smoothly split, so the dog will not jerk around during the split. It would just be right there but the background would split and you have a smooth transition to a split-screen and a smooth transition back from a split-screen to a single screen.
So, again, it's kind of complex. I used assembly language and I was able to program that and it worked. I wasn't sure how well it would work until I tried it and, when I tried it, it worked great. I was very happy with that feature. So, if you ask me what was my proudest accomplishment in my game career, I would say it was that, thinking of the idea of doing that and implementing it to make a game that the splitting and recombining screen really worked and people can enjoy using.
I put up my website in 2003. Someone had written to me saying, "There's a PS2 game that uses that same feature," and they were calling it innovative and so on. So, this person had written to the company to tell them they were not first to do it.
Kevin: It is a great feature. It's a really well done effect. If you could send a message to the Atari 8-bit community, and you can, right now, what would you tell them?
Gray: Well, thanks for playing my game and I really enjoy hearing from you. If you go to my website, you can send me a message. That's the reason I did this. I wanted people to enjoy my games. I really enjoy hearing from people who enjoy it. APX had this comment form people would send in. So, people would write in and APX would forward me the comment letters, but I didn't get very many. I think I got maybe two or three all together, even though they sold, what, 10,000 copies. The letters meant a lot to me. That was the great satisfaction of creating the game. I would go to computer stores all the time, just to see if I can find my game on the shelf and that really excited me.
So, when I put up my website in 2003, I got, I don't know, maybe a dozen or a two dozen emails from people, saying that they're excited to see the website, they played the game when they were a kid. They still play it sometimes. They really had fun. There was a blog somewhere, somebody said that he got a fist fight with his brother playing Claim Jumper and that a fond memory of his, getting in a fist fight with his brother while playing Claim Jumper. That shows the intensity of the game. Of course, it's not Claim Jumper that made him fight, it was his brother that made him fight. It's the interaction with his brother, it was an exciting interaction. Maybe it was a little too exciting.
Kevin: That's why you make two-player games, right? To make brothers fight.
Gray: Yeah, my game allowed them to do something exciting together that they remember as a good experience in their past. There's some people, somebody wrote to me saying, "My friends are all up on the latest PS2 games,” or whatever it was at the time, “but still ask to get out Claim Jumper because it's so exciting, it's so fun. They really get into it.” So, the pleasure I get is from hearing from people who enjoyed it. So, if you've played Dog Daze or Claim Jumper or Bumpomov's, especially Bumpomov's Dogs, because no one ever played it back then. Whoever played it are the people who are picking it up now, you know, 30 years later. If you send me an e-mail, I would really appreciate it.
Kevin: Great. Thank you, that's an excellent message. Did piracy affect you back then? I mean, I know you made some good money from it but were you sitting there going, "Wow, I could have made 10 times as much if those dirty pirates hadn't copied my game." How did you think of it then? How do you think of it now?
Gray: I don't know how much I was affected by piracy, but I was doing fine financially until the collapse, of course, so how can I complain? It's more important that people enjoy the game, even if they had to steal it. Like I said, I'd rather have them steal it and play it than to not steal it and not play it. Obviously, the thing I would have liked best is for them to buy it but if they didn't want to spend their money and or couldn't afford it and they steal it and play it, you know, what's that to me? I just wanted everybody to have fun. So, to answer your question, no, I was not affected.
Kevin: Okay. I pirated your game. I'm sorry.
Gray: That's all right. I used to be very protective of my source code, I don't want people copying my ideas, but now, I don't care. To this one, I went and found my source code floppies and I'm ready to lend them to you to copy and post on the Internet. All the source codes to all the games.
Kevin: Excellent. That would be exciting.
Gray: One thing that would be good for me is there were a few changes I want to make ib Bumpomov's Dogs. For example, instead of filling the whole maze full of dog biscuits, I should have only put in 199 biscuits in the maze, so that there's just barely enough to have a contest between the two players. Potentially, each dog could collect 99 biscuits and have only 1 biscuit in the maze. You can imagine the ferocity of the competition for that, bumping each other and then, at the last moment, one of those rewards courses might pop up and change the outcome of the game at the very last moment. So, it would be more exciting if I just put the minimum number of biscuits in the maze but, of course, to do that, I need that source code and a very simple matter to, probably just 10 or 20 lines of code to reduce the number of biscuits.
Kevin: Do you have enough assembly language in your head that you can do it?
Gray: Oh yeah, I'm sure. I used a send assembler, by the way. Anybody out there, if you want to program assembly language, forget the Atari Assembler editor cartridge, use [inaudible 00:40:21]. That's a Synapse assembler. It runs about a 100 times faster. When I would compile an assemble game like Dog Daze, it might take five minutes to assemble it with the Atari Assembler Editor but with the [inaudible 00:40:39], it would take like five seconds. It was just that big a difference.
Kevin: It's a whole other world, now.
Gray: There's a slight difference in syntax between the Atari assembler editor and the Synapse [inaudible 00:40:55]. So, if you're going to learn one, learn the [inaudible 00:41:00]. I think you can download it for free nowadays. I don't know. Are there people still programming games for the Atari?
Kevin: Yeah, there are. There certainly are. New games come out semi-frequently. There's a user group in Germany that has programming contests, game programming contests and, every year, there's 20 entries of really high quality games. So, absolutely.
Gray: That's surprising. I mean, computers have advanced so much and yet people are still doing this, by modern standards, a very simple, crude computer system. And yet, the games are fun. I think the amount of fun you can get from Atari is no less than what you can get from today's computers. Today, you have fine graphics and all kinds of sound capabilities and so on, but are the games any more fun? I don't think so.
Kevin: Sometimes, they're super less fun 'cause there's no playability there. They're pretty and they sound good but there's no there there.
Gray: Yes. Yes. I'm glad the people are still programming on Atari and using their creative juices and creating new things. So, it was a great time for me, being more of a technical person than artistic or creative. It was a way for me to be artistic, in a way, and have people enjoy it. That was a very satisfying thing.
Kevin: So, I'll e-mail you my address and you'll lend me those disk and I can get the source code out to you and the world.
Gray: Okay, and you're a collector of Atari memorabilia, is that correct?
Kevin: Yes, I am.
Gray: I can give you couple of Claim Jumper posters and an APX instruction book for Dog Daze.
Kevin: That would be awesome. Thank you. I'll get those scanned too, the instructions.
Gray: Okay.
Kevin: I'd appreciate that very much. Would you sign a poster for me?
Gray: Oh, sure. Yeah, sure. I'll sign a poster for you.
Kevin: Awesome. It'll go up on my wall. That'll be great, thank you. I've really been on a quest to try to find source code that's not out there and get it online for the world before all the disks rot away and they're starting to do it. I mean sometimes, the disks are old and they're sad. So, it's exciting that you kept them. Did you keep the letters? You said back on the day you got a couple letter from people who used the software. Do you still have that?
Gray: Yeah, I probably have those letters. I have those stashed away somewhere.
Kevin: If you find them, scan them please or send them to me and I'll scan it if you're willing to share them.
Gray: They're not that exciting. The stuff I got 10 years ago, when I first set up my website, they were more exciting.
Kevin: Right.
Gray: But I have to look. Because it's paper, I've got stacks of paper, so it might be hard to find, or it might not. I'll have to look.
Kevin: Great, cool. Anything else?
Gray: That's all I can think of.
Kevin: All right, me too. Thank you so much, Gray.
Gray: Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Okay, bye.
Kevin: Have a great one. Bye.