It was two or three days before my birthday when I received that wonderful box. The events of the last few days reminded me of the end of the last century. It’s quite likely that as soon as I had access to the internet, I searched for information about my beloved Odyssey² on a thing called Metaminer, I think! I then came across the Odyssey 2000 website, from my friend Marcelo Ribeiro, and there I discovered several surprises, new games being discovered, new games being created, and even the existence of a third-generation “Odyssey².”
Today, I realize that nature doesn’t thank me for this, but I used to print out a lot of that information. Back then, we used dial-up internet, it wasn’t so easy to be online all the time. The fact is, I wasn’t just browsing the site, I was reading all that paperwork, and the game list was one of my favorite reads. This list contained the releases known at the time, as well as their respective rarities, something that helped me choose my first acquisition of the virtual era: Chinese Logic! In addition to old acquaintances like Attack of The Timelord, Killer Bees, and Turtles, the list contained some unreleased titles and rumors, it was the beginning of everything!
The years went by and revealed a lot from that list. Time brought us Tutankham, Spiderman, Sherlock Holmes, Flashpoint, and even information about the possible Turma da Mônica can be read in our friend Garret’s book, 1984: When Video Games Arrived! In other words, if my memory serves me right, every unknown item on that list was presented to the community, except one. But what would be the origin of that rumor? I still visited Odyssey 2000 quite frequently, but I started sailing even more distant seas.
I discovered equally incredible sites like the O2 Homepage, from my friend William Cassidy, and in grandma’s lands, Dieter Koenig’s CCC. And it was in the latter that I found the origin of that rumor, an interview with Bob Harris, author of the fantastic Killer Bees, brought fascinating stories, but from there came the first mentions of the mythical Clean Up Yer Act! The fact is, this title always fascinated me, and even though I knew it wasn’t a complete game, I would like to know more about this project, what was the idea of the brilliant mind that conceived Killer Bees? It would have been incredible to have had another game from Bob in those days, don’t you think?
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Bob Harris, among other things, I discovered that we have another passion in common, board games! Currently, we even play some games online, Azul, Kingdomino, or Patchwork, most of the time, Bob wins! But sometimes he lets me win! While we play, Bob tells his feats on two wheels, game strategies, and a bit about Odyssey². Below, I will tell a little about what I discovered in our conversations. The most important thing, however, is that I met a very helpful and friendly person! Have fun with the news!
Front of a promotional sticker for Bob Harris’s Killer Bees
WOW, Bob, it’s a great pleasure to be able to talk to you. Killer Bees was definitely one of our favorite games in the 80s, have you been playing KilleBees lately? No, I haven’t played it in a long time. I remember finding it online in some emulation package over a decade ago. I tried it, but the bug zapper didn’t work, so I didn’t play much. That was the last time I played. Last year I played War Room online, this was one of my last online games. I was at a small party and the host found out that I had written some games and found this one on some emulator he had. It took me a while to figure out which controls corresponded to which button on the ColecoVision joystick, but other than that it worked fine. I have an O2 in a box in the closet, but it’s been a long time since I tried to turn it on. I don’t think I have any TVs that accept NTSC input, so I can’t think of any way to test it. The only real-time computer game I play currently is agario (although community strategies have evolved to the point where it’s impossible to succeed as a solo player). I haven’t played Plants vs Zombies in a while, but not recently. If you want to remember Killer Bees, you can play it here on the Odyssey Vault, by the way, we have news about the Killer Bees game, our friends René Van den Enden from the Netherlands and Marc Verraes from Belgium made a version of the game with improved graphics, based on the Odyssey3 commercial image and some screenshots published in specialized magazines of the time, since the prototype of this version was never found. Yes, I will try to play it. If it’s the graphics I’m thinking of, they bring a honeycomb to the playing field. This art was designed by our in-house artist, Ed Hensley. The O3 presented many challenges for game design. What is the best way to use the additional graphics capability and still have a game that works well on the O2? If any game element requires the O3, how to solve this problem for O2 players? We had a similar problem with the voice module, which is why in Killer Bees it was only used for sound effects.
video presented at the 1983 Winter CES about the Odyssey 3
About the version that brings the “Honeycombs,” it was officially released in Europe for the G7400. Since you mentioned Ed Hensley, I had searched for him some time ago, but unfortunately, it seems he passed away. Right, Ed died a few years ago (2020 or 2021, I think). I usually talked to him every five years or so. We both recognized that we learned a lot from each other.
As far as I know, Ed Hensley was an artist, not a progrmmer. Was there any software to do this work? That’s right. He was a graphic artist who, after Odyssey², had his own commercial art studio in Knoxville. I don’t remember what software he might have been using at that time. I remember some early small-scale things, like character avatars, that were designed on graph paper pixel by pixel and then manually transcribed into a digital file using a 2D editor I wrote. But I don’t really remember what was used for large-scale art, like the honeycomb, for example.
I don’t know if my memories are betraying me, but I think I read somewhere that Ed Hensley created the honeycomb background for Killer Bees and later realized that this background interfered with the gameplay (something I fully agree with), so this background was created that we saw in the O3 commercials. Do you remember anything about this?
Thinking about it in recent days, I remember that we saw problems with the use of Honeycombs and changed it. But it’s not a clear memory. I don’t remember seeing the background of that promotional Odyssey 3 commercial. I’m starting to doubt some of my own memories, especially regarding the O3. I don’t remember the O3 being heavily promoted in the US. Maybe it had more strength in Europe or other markets? It’s not hard to imagine that any background inside the KB “arena” would interfere with the game. The swarm of bees is probably hard to see on anything other than black. I also remember that the vertical edges were always confusing on an O2 – at least that was true on TV sets in the US. I think this was related to the fact that the system clock cycle was not an integral divisor of the ≈1 per 60 field rate. I think it took four fields for the clock to “align” with the field rate. This would mean that the moving pixels in the swarm would not appear with sharp edges. I don’t know if the O3 had this problem or not.
The improved graphics of the Odyssey3 (left) and +G7400 (right) prototype version of ‘Killer Bees!’
Tell us, what was it like to develop for the Odyssey² back then? How laborious was it to develop Killer Bees? The O2 architecture was not the easiest system to program. It was quite weak, even for the time. If I remember correctly, the RAM was limited to something like 64 bytes (not 64K). I remember the first experiments for KB that had 7 (maybe 8 robots). This would have been a novelty, since each one used two of the 12 available character sprites. I was multiplexing things so that each robot would appear for 6 frames and then disappear for one frame. This had an unexpected and cool pulsing effect on the robots. Unfortunately, I ran out of RAM and had to sacrifice the extra robots, since each one required four bytes to track their position (I used a fixed-point representation for positions to be able to get finer speed gradations than you would see in most other games of that time). So, in the end, I could only afford 5 robots.
Still, Killer Bees brought many new ideas, both in terms of gameplay and graphical concepts. The creation of the BeeBots, for example, using different character parts, brought an air of novelty and, at the same time, familiarity. The demo mode was also, for the first time, introduced by Killer Bees. However, the aspect I consider most brilliant is using the background color as a weapon. I have read a lot about Killer Bees, especially in your interview with our friend Dieter Koenig, but if you want to talk a little more about it, how did the idea come about, did you draw something on paper, did you start testing new forms? The fact that you can combine characters was due to Sam Overton. Sam worked on many of the early Odyssey² games, while operations were in (I believe) Fort. Wayne. I think Sam also suggested using this effect with the walking feet parts. After Sam told me about it, I think I wrote a simple program that would allow me to choose two parts and see how they would look together. There are a few other things in this game that I consider innovative. I mentioned the use of fixed point to be able to have more subtle changes in speeds. But also the way the characters’ death worked is new, as you are losing individual bees from your swarm. Therefore, death is technically more gradual than in most games. But I think most players stop as soon as they come into contact with the bad swarm, staying in contact and losing the rest of their bees. I also set up the scoring to use ideas I saw in pinball games. I think I received some kind of bonus that increased if you leveled up with all your bees intact. I’m possibly wrong about this because many things like that changed during development. I remember originally having 26 different difficulty levels, labeled A through Z, until a big marketing wig said “we’re not going to teach people to count in base 26.” I know I changed things to accommodate that feeling, but I honestly don’t remember the end result.
The initial idea for the game came from the visuals of bees in a random swarm. And I wanted to do something that, conceptually, borrowed from Centipede. What I mean by that is that I thought one of the main features of the game in Centipede is that you can identify patterns in the enemy’s movement through the obstacles on the playing field. And you can arrange these obstacles based on how you killed the enemies. It was the inspiration for the beebots to move in predictable patterns, with those who always turn left of one color and the others of another color. Whether this was a success in relation to my original intention, who knows? Another change during development was the behavior of the enemy swarm. I initially used the entire screen as an arena. And the enemy swarm would simply appear somewhere at a certain time. Rex was testing the game and happened to be exactly where the enemy swarm appeared. He died instantly while shouting angrily “screw”. My first reaction was “well, hey, don’t stand where the swarm is coming out.” But after thinking about it, I moved three walls away from the edge and made square cells where you would see the enemy emerge before it could hurt you.
Another exclusive Killer Bees promotional flyer, never before published.
Interesting, it became clear why Killer Bees talks about 26 challenge levels, the idea was to use the 26 letters of the alphabet! It’s also cool to know that you developed a tool to combine character parts. A friend, Mark Guttenbrunner, created a similar tool, I’ve used it a lot in my projects. Do you remember creating other game development tools?
I don’t remember any specifically, but I was certainly doing that. If there was a tool to be written, I was usually the one to do it. This has been true throughout my career.
Inside part of the previous flyer
Still on the innovations brought by Killer Bees, there is something very interesting, regarding the use of The Voice: at the end of each phase “The Voice” counted how many white bees had survived and, if the player had not lost any of them, a “shot” sound warned the player. This is something I only discovered after I acquired the Voice and it is very interesting, because before that we always wondered if we had passed the level with all the bees! I thought it was amazing! I think this is the only time the Voice was used as a game element. I remember that, now that you mentioned it. This was also inspired by mechanical pinball games, which made a loud noise if you got some bonus. Another innovation that is probably on the cartridge is a score checker. The idea is that if someone claims to have a certain high score, how can they prove it? Photos could be tampered with. So, there is a key combination that you can press at the end of the game that will display a three-character verification code. We never announced this and it is possible that I removed it before the final ROM was shipped, but I doubt it.
Back part of the promotional flyer
Probable release sent to stores
Since we talked about The Voice, in its manual we find the screenshots of the Voice Series games: Type and Tell, Nimble Numbers Ned, and SID the Spellbinder, but behind the happy family, there is a screenshot of an unknown game. Do you remember anyone on the team working on something like that? The game seems to be some kind of submarine hunt, but I don’t remember anything like that.
The mystery of the screenshot behind the happy family in The Voice manual
Exclusive games are the ones that best tell the story of a console. What I mean is that Odyssey² is rarely remembered for its versions of Atlantis or Demon Attack. In this sense, Killer Bees has become one of the most celebrated games on the console and the proof of this is that several ports of the game have recently appeared for other consoles and computers, among them we have versions of Killer Bees for VCS 2600, Intellivision, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum, have you been following the retro gaming scene? No, I haven’t been following the scene currently. About every ten years I take a brief dive into it.
Tell us what the Odyssey² team’s daily life was like? Was it a normal 9 to 5 job, did everyone share the same room, who was the team? I joined the O2 group in Knoxville on 11/30/1981. This was a new group that Sam Overton was putting together. I was working with/for Sam at Milton Bradley when he left to start the group. I’m not sure when he left, but it probably wasn’t before August 1981. When I arrived I was the third member of the group, after Sam and Bob Cheezem. Jim Butler joined shortly after me, in January/1982. Jim also worked in the same group at Milton Bradley. I’m not sure who came on board next. We had a technician, Alan Pearson. It’s possible he was on board before me. The next game creator must have been Rex Battenberg. I’m not sure if Rex arrived in 82 or early 83. And I’m not sure when Ed Hensley was hired. He may have been with us before Rex. Until that moment, we were in a small office in west Knoxville. Looking at the satellite image now, I think it was in the small office park south of Cross Park Drive. There were two offices with doors and a common area with four cubicles. The hours were supposed to be from 8 am to 5 pm, but frankly, as long as you were doing your things, you could set your own hours.
The next one would be Ken Shaver, who, if I remember correctly, was hired to make Atari 2600 cartridges. Around the same time, we hired Randy Green, Ken Bourque, and Jim Schwaiger. We expanded to an adjacent office space with more cubicles. We also hired Jack Davis (from the same group at MB) to manage a new VAX computer setup (more on that in a moment). After that it must have been Carlos Daniel*. It’s possible I have some order wrong in this paragraph. Sam also left during this period. At some point we hired a secretary, Lea Adkins. I hope I’m not forgetting anyone.
When I arrived, development was done using some kind of Tetronix emulator, probably PC-based. This was soon replaced by some HP emulator workstations. A serious flaw of HP was that we had no direct means to write the kind of auxiliary tools you usually need. I found a workaround for this in some module that simulated a standalone CPU and HP had a Pascal compiler for that. For example, there was some difference between the part of the address space you had to build your program to and the part the emulator wanted it to be. So I wrote something in Pascal to take the assembler output and do that translation. Another example is a rudimentary editor I wrote that allows you to design a sprite pattern using @signs and spaces and then convert it into an assembly language snippet. At some point we got the VAX. And I think of emulators, at that time we just rented some small 8048 emulators. I remember we also had some ROM emulators that you could download and that presented themselves as a ROM for the game machine. …searching online… I found one here (search ROMAID): https://www.ebay.com/b/Link-Embedded-Processors-Controllers/159680/bn_27536327
Some of the souvenirs given to Rafael Cardoso by Bob Harris
In addition to creating new games, this team was adapting some European games for NTSC as is the case with some of the last games released on the American market: Acrobats and Medieval Battle, did you work on any of these projects? Do you have any memories of working on titles like Pharaoh’s Secret, Cat and Mouse, or Super Bee? I ask about these last titles, because, here in Brazil, different versions of the European versions were released, so I thought that maybe these games were planned to be released on the American market and modified there. Bob Cheezem did the work on Smitherieens (Medieval Battle). My only contribution was to find a brick wall that he had encountered. Bob’s initial attempts didn’t work because the game didn’t always finish everything it needed for a frame before the first line was displayed. I don’t remember what we did to fix that. We must have done something to speed up the code or we set up an interrupt on the last line displayed and used that instead of vertical sync. I remember Acrobats as a title, but I don’t really remember anything else about it. I wonder if it was Jim Butler or Bob Cheezem who worked on it. I don’t know. The other three titles you mention, I don’t recognize.
Do you keep in touch with anyone on the team, Sam, Jim Butler, etc? I exchange Christmas cards with Jim every year, but I haven’t had direct contact with him for at least a decade. I talked to Sam on the phone several years ago, but I don’t remember how long it took. Probably more than a decade.
What did you do after the Odyssey2 group disbanded? I went back to graduate school in 2003, got my doctorate, and made a small but notable contribution to the field of bioinformatics. The DNA sequence aligner I developed for my 2007 thesis is still widely used and has about 1,600 citations. You can see my profile here (warning: many of these manuscripts to which I made only a small contribution): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4NG_QEkAAAAJ (Google still hasn’t realized that I’m retired, so it still lists me as a professor at Penn State)
Issue number 5 of the American magazine Odyssey² Adventure said that Bob Cheezam was working on the 4th game of the Master Strategies Series, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes. However, it was recently discovered that the game was programmed by someone else, do you know if Bob Cheezam had any involvement in the development of Sherlock Holmes? I remember seeing a board game and a video game concept on Odyssey², but I thought it was on the O2, before anything on the O3. It’s hard to trust my memory on this at this point. I remember being very “in favor” of board/video combinations (since I played a lot of board games), but I remember being somewhat disappointed with the game I saw (from a gameplay point of view). Maybe it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, maybe it had some other theme. …searching… it was probably “Quest For the Rings”. I also remember that Bob Cheezam was a Holmes fan. I have a vague memory of him bringing a Holmes-themed board game (no video) that we played as a group. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was involved in the project you mentioned.
Page of the American Odyssey² Adventure 5 mentioned in the previous question
And from what I understand, the idea for the Master Strategy Series games came from Ron Bradford and Steve Lehner’s heads and they even had a concept for a 5th Strategic Series game, did you have any contact with Bradford and Lehner?
I don’t remember having any contact. They worked at the Chicago-based advertising agency.
From what I’ve read in other interviews, you were a fan of games like QIX, Robotron, and Centipede? Why was your first game for the Odyssey² Nimble Numbers Ned? Was someone guiding the team on which way to go?
You’re right in saying that Ned wouldn’t have been my first choice. I was assigned to make a math game. The marketing department felt that the O2’s advantage in the market was the keyboard and that educational games could take advantage of that. They may have also felt that educational games had a larger market (!).
More about Ned. My internal name for the game was “Math Potatoes”. But the marketing group wanted consumers (or maybe buyers) to think of spelling and math games as part of a group, and so they became Sid the Spellbinder and Ned the Nimble Numbers. The target audience for the game was, if I remember correctly, students in 1st to 3rd grade. I don’t remember anyone giving me any advice on how children of that age learn. They may have assumed that, since my degree was in mathematics, I should know something about early math education. They probably suggested several topics – I only remember three (number line, addition, and shape recognition). There must have been a few others. The way to present the themes was up to me. The only one I really liked was the number line one, because it’s the only one that had any real-time component. To some extent, this project was a test to see if I could create a game from start to finish. At MB I implemented two games, but both were licensed (albeit obscure) arcade titles, and I took over both of them after someone else started them (Elaine Hensohn).
Why Math Potatoes?
It’s a pun. Mashed Potatoes is a common side dish here in the US. Maybe it’s not common in other parts of the world (at least not by that name)? And one of the mini-games in NED makes you jump over rolling potatoes.
Cool, I was going to ask what the acronym N.E.D. means, but I ended up finding it in one of those memos you sent. N.E.D (Number Education Dialogue), I also ended up finding the meaning of S.I.D. (Spelling Interactive Dialogue). Very interesting, I don’t think there’s any reference about this on the internet!
At the time, they (Magnavox) were trying to highlight the idea that the O2 had a competitive advantage over Atari and Mattel. This advantage was the keyboard and it was thought that educational games were an untapped market. So they wanted to unite SID and NED in the minds of customers (I think).
Flyer promocional dos cartuchos da The Voice Series
In my opinion, the decision to introduce The Voice with educational titles was a mistake, I always thought it would have been a good idea if The Voice came, for example, with a version of the game Sinistar, with the Arcade voices. What is your opinion on this?
Sinistar was a great game. One of the guys on that creative team was my friend and former colleague at Milton Bradley, Noah Falstein. I found an article about it here (on page 6): https://issuu.com/gamesauce/docs/2009fallgamesauce Noah tried to get me to work for Williams, which was downtown Chicago. I was interviewed. They made me an offer, but it was about 10% less than I was making at the O2 group. The offer was communicated to me by a headhunter, and my response was that, given that the cost of living in the Chicago area was much higher than in Knoxville, I felt that I would need at least some increase over what I was currently making. I never received a response. Later, Noah asked me why I hadn’t responded — I think either the headhunter didn’t communicate my request, or the Williams superiors dismissed me and didn’t want to admit it to Noah. Either way, about six months later, Williams closed that development group. So I was lucky I didn’t take that job.
If I remember correctly, the chip in the Voice had some canned phrases, and anything else had to be done by putting phonemes together. I don’t think you could transfer a waveform from the cartridge to the Voice (and even if you could, the cartridge ROM limitations would make that very impractical). So, the only way to put John Doremus’s Sinistar voice there would be to use it for the canned phrases. Which would have been interesting — EVERY game that used the voice would have that voice.
Also, I think the O2 voice module came out before Sinistar was released. I remember seeing it in development when I interviewed at Magnavox, which would have been in October 1981. It’s a very cool idea, though. Nowadays, many speech products have recognizable/iconic voices.
Do you ever regret not going [to work for Williams]?
Yes and no. The “no” is mainly because they dissolved their game development group 4 or 5 months after I interviewed. It’s quite likely that, when that happened, I would have bought a house in the Chicago area and then I would have been stuck looking for a new job in Chicago or stuck with the expenses of moving again. The “yes” is that arcade games were the pinnacle of game development. You weren’t constrained by the console’s (lack of) capabilities.
Do you remember anything about the development of the Pink Panther game for Odyssey²?
Pink Panther had the potential to be a major turning point in sales. This was the first (and only) big-name license that Magnavox bought. Before that, the only license that comes to mind was Turtles — an existing arcade game with above-average popularity. Maybe there were other licensed titles, but I don’t remember them. At that time, the video game market had shifted to big-name licensed titles, and it was harder to get sales for games without well-known titles.
The plan was to release it on a few platforms. Certainly for the Atari 2600, probably ColecoVision, and also for the O2/O3. The O2/O3 developer was Randy Green. The Atari project was outsourced, to a group in Indianapolis, I think. When that group missed the delivery date, management shut down our group. That’s how I remember it.
A related story: At some point during the game’s development, I was sent to a studio in Los Angeles that was doing the animation for a commercial. Memory says it was Marvel Studios, but I could be wrong. This was a hastily scheduled trip, arranged the day before I went there. Apparently, they wanted to see the current state of the game cartridge. I had the foresight to ask my boss if I would need to bring any TV signal conversion devices with me. I was told “no, they will have what they need.” So, when I got there, of course they didn’t have what they needed (digital TV in a studio environment is a different format, so they didn’t have any NTSC TV sets). So, I had to scour Los Angeles trying to find a store that had what they needed. This was before the internet, so it involved flipping through the business ad pages of the phone book and making a lot of phone calls. It didn’t help that I wasn’t sure what they needed.
I think I either found what they needed or they decided they didn’t need to see the unfinished game in action. I don’t remember.
I found it quite interesting to participate in the discussion between the animation producer and our company’s advertising representative. We want to be able to show the same commercial on TV programming and in theaters. But the animation guy pointed out that, since the two screen ratios are different, you need more time for the Pink Panther to appear on the side of a film frame than on a TV frame.
Read the full article about the Pink Panther.
“One of the gifts you kindly sent me contains the Atari 2600 version of the Power Lords game. Perhaps it would be ideal to send this question to Sam, but I never find him (laughs), so maybe your good memory can help us: here in Brazil, on the label of this game, its authorship is attributed to Ed Averett. Ed himself, however, told me some time ago that the game was Sam’s (Editor’s Note: sometimes Ed Averett refers to Sam meaning Sam’s team). The fact is that since I was a child I suspected that the game seemed unfinished. Over time, and with the emergence of the Internet, I found, through Odyssey² Adventure magazine 7, that I was right, in a way. The aforementioned magazine describes a second part of the game, which takes place inside the volcano. Years later, to further confirm my suspicions, the ColecoVision and 2600 prototypes emerged and these versions brought the battle inside the volcano. Do you know anything about the development history of this game?
Your intuition about Power Lords being unfinished is right. What happened was that the game developer who was working on it left before it was completed (his name and more details in a moment). (I’m talking about the ColecoVision version.) This game had a deadline approaching to fill a manufacturing slot, but it had MANY bugs). So, I finished War Room earlier to fill that manufacturing slot, then moved on and finished Power Lords. Basically, I just fixed all the bugs I could find. I don’t remember changing the gameplay at all.
The developer of Power Lords was a guy named Carlos Daniel. Carlos Daniel was the last guy Sam hired, a month or so before he left. Carlos Daniel had an abrasive personality. On the first day, I introduced him to each member of the team, Carlos Daniel would ask where they were from, and then Carlos Daniel would make some insulting statement about it. For example, one guy was from Dallas, and Carlos Daniel told the guy “the only thing they have in Texas is steers and queers.” This scenario was repeated with everyone Carlos Daniel met.
Carlos Daniel also had a habit of telling lies. And not just little lies. On his resume, he had stated that he had 12 years of microprocessor programming experience. This was in 1983, which means
Carlos Daniel must have been on Ted Hoff’s team at Intel when they invented the 4004. We all knew that was bullshit. But it really came to a head when Carlos Daniel started programming and asked me “how does the Z80 know it has a negative number?”
Shortly after Carlos Daniel started, Sam left, Jim Butler was promoted to take Sam’s place (a good choice), and I was promoted to Jim’s place, in charge of the six game programmers (not a good choice). So Carlos Daniel now reported to me. After a while, Carlos Daniel and I established a weekly routine where I would review Power Lords’ progress. We would identify a list of about a dozen bugs. The following week, we would review those bugs again, and usually about half were fixed, the other half remained, but in the process of running the game to review the previous week’s bugs, we would discover as many new bugs as the number that had been fixed. It was a frustrating experience.
As an example of the type of bug, I remember one where if the character moved left or down, he moved twice as fast as when he moved right or up. Carlos Daniel claimed this was an optical illusion. So, to prove it, we had to record it on a VCR and then play back a set number of frames and measure it with a ruler. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t an optical illusion). Eventually, Carlos Daniel fixed it, but then he blamed me for the error because when he asked how the Z80 knew it had a negative number, I gave him the wrong answer. And so it went.
Meanwhile, Carlos Daniel’s abrasive personality made him an outsider in the group. He was the only smoker and started smoking at work. So, when he asked if he could work hours that didn’t overlap much with the rest of us, I thought it was worth the risk. He was supposed to work from 1 am to 9 am; in retrospect, he probably wouldn’t arrive before 6 am, before anyone else arrived (and would still leave at 8 am or 9 am).
That’s the background. Now I can connect the story to the trip to Los Angeles I mentioned above. That trip was on a Wednesday. On Monday and Tuesday of that week, Carlos Daniel didn’t show up for work and didn’t call. On Tuesday, one of the other guys mentioned that on the previous Friday, Carlos Daniel had told him it was his last day (Carlos Daniel’s).
When I stopped by the office at 5:30 am on Wednesday, on my way to the airport (to pick something up), Carlos Daniel wasn’t there. So I wrote a note to our secretary saying “if Carlos Daniel doesn’t come in today, we need to call HR and find out how we can get his office key back.” I put that note on top of the middle drawer of her desk (and closed the drawer).
The next day, when I got back from Los Angeles, the secretary told me that Carlos Daniel was there when she arrived at 8 am on Wednesday. He read the note (which means he was rummaging through her desk drawer). And he told her to “tell that idiot Bob that I’m going to finish my game, and then he’ll never see me again,” and he left. That was the last time we saw him — he never came back to finish the game.
I never found out where he went after that. One of the guys said he saw him working at a Taco Bell. But I was never sure if the guy wasn’t just making a joke. The following spring, we received a letter from Carlos Daniel’s father asking why the company hadn’t sent Carlos Daniel’s tax information. I assume accounting sent them to his last known address.
Anyway, that was the story of what led to the unfinished nature of Power Lords.
Both Pink Panther and Power Lords were developed at the end of our game group’s existence. If I remember correctly, Sam had already left the group by then. I’m almost sure of that.
Revell Toys flyer to announce the Power Lords figures distributed at the Philips booth at the 1983 Winter CES
Power Lords advertisement from PROBE 2000, Odyssey² label for games on other platforms
*Carlos Daniel is a fictitious name to preserve the identity of the person in question.
What fascinating stories. Just to confirm, Carlos Daniel was working on the ColecoVision version of Power Lords, right?
Yes, Carlos Daniel was working on the ColecoVision version. I don’t remember the O2/O3 version, or who was working on it. Trying to think who was in the group and what they were working on. Randy Green was working on Pink Panther. Rex Battenberg was working on FlashPoint or Lord of the Dungeon. I don’t think Bob Cheezem was still with the group. The only other two guys there were Ken Bourque and Ken Shafer. Ken Shafer was probably working on something for Atari (maybe Power Lords Atari?). I’m not sure what Ken Bourque was working on, but I don’t really remember him working on any O2 games. Jim Schwaiger may still be with the group, but I don’t remember him doing anything with the O2 either.
After the advent of the Internet, the Easter Eggs present in your games became known through our friends Tom Beck and Jason Gohlke, I remember that, in Killer Bees, some team programmers were honored, I suppose there was no mention of Carlos Daniel, right?
Carlos Daniel was only hired after Killer Bees was released.
You saw the Odyssey3 up close and what do you think of it? My opinion is that the O3 had less chance in the market than the O2. What I mean is that games like Killer Bees, Turtles, Pick Axe Pete, matched the best 2600 games. Today, we also have programmers like Ted Foolery, Ivan Machado, Brad Leahy, among others creating fantastic things for the O2, further proving its competitiveness. The Odyssey3, on the other hand, seems much inferior to its contemporaries, like the ColecoVision, for example. Anyway, what is your opinion?
My memory is a little fuzzy, and I may get confused between that system and another system we were developing that never went anywhere. If the Odyssey3 is the system that ran O2 games, but also supported advanced graphics on newer cartridges, I agree that it didn’t have much promise in the market. Since the game also had to run on the O2, you couldn’t do much with the advanced graphics beyond backgrounds. It really couldn’t be part of the gameplay.
The other system we were working on would use a new graphics controller from Motorola. I know it was Motorola because I took a trip to Phoenix to visit their facilities. I remember there was a lot of friction between the hardware and software groups about whether the CPU should be a Z80 or a 68000. I think we spent a year working on that system and, if my memory serves me right, we never had a final design.
Funny story: during that project, at one point, we had two design proposals and we had a meeting to choose one as the winner. In the end, we left that meeting with four designs(!). The following week, we had a meeting to reduce that to two designs. We left that meeting with six designs(!). As I left the meeting, I told Jim Butler that I wanted to schedule a meeting to cut my salary in half — so I could leave with a higher salary. 8^D
Wait, if I understand correctly, there was a plan B for an O2 successor, right!?
Yes. But my memory is not clear on the timeline. After the ColecoVision came on the market, it was clear that the O2 would not survive. I think we initially thought about designing something using the same video chip as the ColecoVision, but we decided that we would just chase the market. It was decided that the new machine would use a state-of-the-art video chip from Motorola. One of Magnavox’s marketing professionals called this strategy “Operation Leapfrog” (i.e., that we would surpass our competition). I’m sure we never got to the point of having functional hardware.
This reminded me that, recently, some documents appeared mentioning the Odyssey4 project, does it look familiar?
Interesting document! I don’t remember hearing anything about Mattel’s involvement. But that’s probably the system I was thinking of, or the beginning of the project that turned into what I was thinking of. I remember now the idea of supporting videotex so that the machine could be used as a terminal on a telephone network. I also noticed the reference to VideoDisc in the diagram on page 27. I don’t remember any mention of videodisc support in the system. But that wouldn’t surprise me, since Philips was trying to sell movies on discs. Some time after Magnavox closed the game group, I interviewed for a game developer position at RCA’s Sarnoff Labs. That must have been around 1985/1986. RCA had a competing (incompatible) video disc system and wanted to create games that used it. This was (probably) spurred by the success of the arcade game Dragon’s Lair.
During the interview, I found out a few things that soured me on that job/position. First, they had already decided that the first game would be a balloon ride over New England during the colorful autumn foliage season. Why? Because they already had a video disc with that. I can understand their desire to use an existing film from the catalog, rather than invest money to create new content. But the idea of making an action game from a relaxing hot air balloon ride over a forest… well, it would certainly have been something different in the market.
Second, their system didn’t have any good means of quickly jumping from scene to scene. What it had was similar to what a VHS video tape would do in fast forward mode. It was a little faster than that because the film was physically in a spiral on the disc (or circular tracks) and you could move the read head to the next “grove” — but then you ran the risk of being able to accurately predict where you would end up.
Third, I found out that the group had no one with game development experience. Six months earlier, the group had switched from missile guidance control software. Putting it all together, I felt that this was more about RCA exploring feasibility than making a long-term commitment to game production. (And I don’t think they ever produced any games on the market.)
The other aspect of this was that my father almost burst his suspenders with pride when he found out I was interviewing at Sarnoff Labs. He was an electrical engineer with a career focused on radio. During the height of his career, Sarnoff Labs was like it would be today to work on research teams at Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.
As soon as I found out that War Room was a creation, I wanted to know more about it. Since the ColecoVision was not released on a large scale here, I was able to get to know it thanks to emulation. Today I have a ColecoVision and I intend to acquire a copy of War Room, and speaking about this game, I have two questions about it. War Room is a very complex game, were you thinking about a port for Odyssey3? Also, there are rumors about a possible War Room release for the Atari 2600, was this possibility considered, would a War Room for the 2600 be possible?
I don’t remember thinking about ports or not. I remember that my motivation was to make something that seemed to have a lot going on, and something that had multiple levels of gameplay. I think the gameplay aspect was a success. At first glance, it’s just a shooting game and you just do your best to avoid the destruction of your cities until you run out of the initial fuel supply. The second level is that there is more fuel available for you to collect. The third level is to manage a kind of economy to produce more fuel. Honestly, I don’t know if players have ever discovered this third level – I think it was described in the manual. I wonder how many retro players have access to the descriptions that were originally in the manual. There are some weak parts in War Room. The development schedule was shortened to meet the production slot that Power Lords was not ready for. Many of the sound effects are horrible. A 2600 port seems difficult. I’m not sure about O3.
Did you keep anything related to the development of War Room or any of your other projects, things like maps, drawings, sketches?
Below is my initial article on what became War Room. Complete with typos and misspellings. View it in a monospace font. I also found the source code and documentation for the icon editor I mentioned a few weeks ago. I will send the documentation in a later email. This was called “The Starving Artist” and allowed you to define pixels as on or off in a square grid, on the type of 24×80 character computer terminal that was prevalent at the time. The output was a snippet of source code that you could include in your program.
I didn’t actually know I still had any of these files. I was actually looking for rules for a board game prototype I created in 1983 as part of a show-and-tell in my weekly board game group tonight. I wasn’t sure if I had those rules (I have the prototype), but I came across this, as well as some other board game ideas I had forgotten.
The first thing I found was from early 1980, a program involved in encoding digitized speech parameters for the Milton electronic game I worked on at Milton Bradley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_(jogo) My start date at MB was June/1979, so this is definitely the oldest program I have.
War Room for ColecoVision
One of the stories that fascinates me the most is knowing that you had one more trick up your sleeve: Clean Up Yer Act! Could you detail as much as possible what this game would be like? I know it had a sweeper, broom, trash. I know it had some elements related to Fantasia, a movie I saw with my mother in the cinema. It would be good if, at least, we could reconstruct what the game screens would be like. What would the sweeper be like? Sprites? The brooms? Characters? Anyway, I understand that a lot of time has passed, but who knows if there are any drawings or anything left?
I highly doubt there are any drawings left. I’ll dig up my Odyssey² box from the closet and see if there’s anything in there, possibly a ROM (but don’t get your hopes up). By the way, I have some O2 souvenirs that I would be happy to send you (Interviewer’s Note: Yay!!!!). One is a Killer Bees promotional pen (at least, I assume I still have some left). And maybe some promotional flyers that would have been distributed at trade shows.
Clean Up Yer Act was supposed to mock games where you run around to win points prizes. In this case the “prizes” would be all kinds of garbage. You would collect the garbage in one room and, when finished, move on to the next room. Rex suggested calling them “Act I”, “Act II”, and so on, instead of “Level 1”, Level 2”.
Your character would be a sweeper and your enemies would be walking brooms. In the live mockups I worked on, the sweeper was a sprite. The brooms were from the ROM character – the same track as the beebots, but here the walking feet would be attached to a bar forwards or backwards. The furthest I got was to make the main character move and the brooms chase him, with a bit of flocking behavior. (“flocking”, not “hunting pack”).
The novelty of this would be the way the opponents behaved. Initially you would only have one broom chasing you. And it would start moving slowly. But it would get faster and faster, until you couldn’t avoid it anymore and you would have to hit it with a dust ball. At that point it would become slow again, but now there would be two. And it would speed up, until you had to split one or both, and so on.
From a game design point of view, the brooms work like timers. To maximize your play, you will have to wait as long as possible before using a dust ball. I expected a player to initially use the dust balls early on, but after several plays they would eventually learn to wait. Hardware limitations would limit the number of brooms to 6 or 7 (7 using the multiplexing trick I experimented with in the early development of KB). Or maybe more if there was some logical way to have some broom handles stay in different vertical segments of the image. I also thought about having different levels of intelligence for the brooms. You can imagine that hunting pack behavior would be more deadly than flocking behavior. But I never got close to implementing them.
The broom idea was definitely inspired by that segment of Fantasia.
(Editor’s Note: After rummaging through his things, Bob kindly sent me several treasures, including the prototype of the mythological Clean Up Yer Act!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course, I was very happy for the gifts and for the opportunity to preserve the history of Odyssey². I also leave here my thanks to my friend Victor Trucco for digitizing the prototype roms.
Boards and eproms given to Rafael Cardoso (Odyssey Brasil) by Bob Harris
Odyssey2 Legendary prototype created by Bob Harris Clean Up Yer Act! Successor to the fantastic Killer Bees!
It is a dice simulator for the Risk game.
It is a game inspired by the Rubik’s Cube, where the player orders the letters by controlling one of the six groups of letters on the screen.
Odyssey2 Prototype created by Bob Harris. Apparently, it is a test for creating multi-colored sprites/characters
Odyssey3 Prototype A gift from my friend Bob Harris, creator of the game Killer Bees The rom had the inscription hlm_O30MT_FIB5 dated 2-3-83. The illustration flashes intermittently. Would it be a project for an exclusive game for the Odyssey3
I’m sure you had other ideas for future games, can you remember anything?
There were some other game ideas that I thought of but never implemented. One of them was “DON’T WAKE THE BEARS!”. A two-player game, you would see two groups of caves. Each cave would have a sleeping bear coming out of it and a stick of dynamite with a fuse (or, for the non-violent version, and alarm clock). Think of the cartoon bears from some Disney cartoons. Now, one player runs around lighting the other guy’s bears’ fuses. The same goes for the other player. But they can also stop the fuses with their own bears. So your goal is to advance the fuses on the other guy’s bears the most. As soon as the fuse runs out, the dynamite explodes and wakes up the bear. He now runs after his guy (the guy is supposed to protect his cave).
I don’t think I ever talked about how you would avoid a bear that is chasing you. Maybe somehow you have some sleeping pills. But how the hell do you get a bear to take sleeping medicine? Anyway, it has to be funny.
I don’t think the O2 had the graphics capability to make that game.
Another idea was a mad scientist who manipulated genes and guarded his castle against the townspeople. (Think Dr. Frankenstein). You are the mad scientist and initially have a monster (in a way) there to help you. With just one monster, the mod will quickly overwhelm you. So you need to create more monsters. It turns out that you have a handy machine that, with a short DNA sequence, will create a monster (fully functional as soon as it comes out of the box).
Each monster has different capabilities depending on the DNA you entered into the machine. So part of the game is figuring out the code that associates DNA with capability (think fire spitting, strength, agility, etc.). And every time you play it may have a different code. The default code would be provided in the instruction book, so that the novice player would focus on understanding the machine and using the monsters. But once the player mastered that, he could choose a different code (for example, by entering a three-character sequence when starting the game). The same string would always produce the same code. This game would really need non-volatile memory because a single game could last for days.
DNA would be represented by a necklace of colored balls. You could manipulate the balls using a kind of flat version of a Rubik’s cube. In fact, this was a central idea of the game, to incorporate something like a physical puzzle into the game. Now, a player who wasn’t good at solving this puzzle could still just stick any old wire from the puzzle into the monster machine. But a player who figured out how to use the puzzle could fine-tune their monster army. I think this would have been an ambitious project, given the graphics capabilities of any machine at the time. And how to implement player control over the monsters during battle would have been difficult. It seems like each monster would have to have some simplistic, but predictable AI (a more recent game that exemplifies this would be Plants vs Zombies).
Original EPROMs from Bob Harris given to Rafael Cardoso (Odyssey Brasil)
It’s always good to know that your childhood heroes are good people. Last Christmas, Bob also sent me a Happy Holidays card that included a puzzle he developed. We’ve talked so much about Odyssey² in recent months that he even wrote to me telling me about a dream he had, it’s worth reading:
I had a strange dream last night and thought you might find it amusing. A company was creating an Odyssey 5 game system and called me in for an interview. I kept asking what hardware features it had, but they wouldn’t answer because it was a trade secret and they wouldn’t tell me unless I took the job. They showed me the logo, which was Odyssey25 in the same style as the Odyssey 2 logo. So, where the O2 logo had a superscript 2, this one had a superscript 25. I pointed out that most people would think this was version twenty-five, but they told me no, people will realize it’s Odyssey 2 raised to the 5th power. I must have taken the job because the next thing I know I’m working for them. They set me up in a large two-story barn with a gravel floor. I kept asking for specs for the system and got nowhere, just that the system was “almost ready to ship” and I should stop bothering them. I asked them to give me all the information they had and they sent me the box – the box where the system would be on store shelves. The box was almost the size of a coffin. On the front of the box was a picture of two children playing pong on a CRT TV. I looked all over the sides of the box hoping to find some useful information, but there was none. But on one side of the box there was a small square video screen, maybe 3 inches, that displayed video ads. I think it was the first time I dreamed about a new video game system.”
Original EPROMs from Bob Harris given to Rafael Cardoso (Odyssey Brasil)
Christmas card sent by Bob Harris to Rafael Cardoso
Bob Harris with his group of friends in a board game section
(Interviewer’s Note: A new Odyssey!!!! I think it’s a dream for all of us!!!!)
