I, personally, am a huge Douglas Adams fan and when I discovered that he was used as a sort of script consultant, I was very excited. The game, Labyrinth, started as a text adventure and then went 'gotcha' and became a graphical adventure. That was Adams' idea in the first place. That kind of thing was not expected; I didn't realize who had been tapped to discuss these things. Another great story is the history of Habitat [an early attempt at a massively multiplayer online game] which is another game created for the Commodore 64 and the 300-baud modem. The ambition of these games is incredible. Even the use of the word 'avatar' came from Lucas during development of Habitat. Those kinds of creative ideas going on in that company were fascinating.
It's astounding, really, the stories that came from the early days. What was it like to deal with the creators of such famous games and titles?
It was great to try to capture the spirit of creativity that was there. Steve Arnolds, I believe, ran the studio in the first place, navigating the waters of these creative guys coming in and working alongside established people. They are doing the graphics for [the movie] Wrath of Khan, and then applying that technology to the Atari 5600. That is the kind of thing that was going on back then. Then you have such characters like Tim Schafer who, in his job interview with the company referenced playing Ball Blaster -- the pirated version of Ball Blazer. He was talking about playing that during the interview and got caught! (Editor's note: He still got the job, by the way.)
