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Fun Stuff! Man, do we have some great stories to tell. ANALOG was a fun place in general because just about everybody there was: 1) A science fiction/fantasy fan Well, maybe not number 4. Anyway, here are some tales of ANALOG, dredged from the horrifying depths of our brains... Livewire! ANALOG was a great place to work if you were a programmer, because one of the mandates of the magazine was that we publish "Lots Of Games". Unlike many other programming jobs, at ANALOG you could do just about anything you wanted, as long as it filled magazine pages, was fun to play and fit into a 16K Atari machine. And ANALOG had made a decision early on, because we had several experienced assembly-language programmers, to produce games that were as close to arcade quality as possible using assembly language. Later in the life of the magazine, we started making 32K games because people wanted more, but we really tried to make the software usable by every Atari owner. So here comes a little
background. Publisher Lee Pappas and I were video game junkies. When we
had spare time, we were stuffing quarters non-stop into arcade machines.
When out in California for Anyway, we loved that game. There was something very appealing in the basic wireframe forms and the 3-D effect of zooming down the tube. I liked the game so much that I bought one while at ANALOG and kept it at the ANALOG offices on "Free Play" for all of us to play. I have a smaller "cabaret"-style case Tempest in my office right now. Like I said, we loved that game. So here we are at the
1983 West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco - Lee, Brian Moriarty and
me - And we had a The next thing I knew,
the kid I had been talking to about doing Back at the hotel, I grabbed my yellow note pad and started diagramming the game. It was always easiest to do tables in computers using base 2, so my Tempest-knockoff game grids would have 16 divisions. I couldn't just copy the Tempest game grids, so I made up a new backstory for the game based around electronics and called it "Livewire", with each level being one of the letters in the name "Livewire". 8 letters was also a handy base 2 number, incidentally. The game tables would be very easy to work up. On the plane home, I was
writing blocks of code that would run the This is one of my favorite memories of ANALOG. Being able to do just about anything you wanted to do as long as people wanted to buy the magazine to get it. When you got up in the morning, you couldn't wait to get to work and get started. How many people can say that about their job? SASE Madness! Occasionally, ANALOG would have some special offer that asked readers to send in a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE). Seems innocent enough, right? Think again. Many of our readers were kids, without a lot of spare postage stamps burning holes in their pockets. One day, Pat Kelly walks back into Mike's office and holds out an envelope that's been stamped up and sent in by a reader. We all gasped. The stamps were all a minimum of 25 years old, all something like 3- or 4-cent denominations. They had obviously been a part of their parents' stamp collection and some kid had grabbed them and slapped them onto an envelope! This, of course, absolutely ruined the stamps for any kind of collector value. We were all horrified that we had been the instigators of this destruction. I remember Jon and Pat joking that the next envelope would come in with one of the incredibly rare "upside down" airplane stamps (1918 24-cent "Inverted Jenny" airmail stamp).
We figured this was just an anomaly and life went on at the office, then more SASE's showed up in the days to follow - And a lot of them had pilfered stamp-collection stamps! Uh-oh… Rats! The building that housed ANALOG was incredibly old, and had been many things in its time. The rumor was that it had started out as a dairy barn, and at some point it had been converted into an automotive repair shop. Then it became Bob Deschenes' (Mike's father) art studio (below) and home (above). Being an old structure, there were a lot of strange things about the place. There were all sorts of old walls that you could tell had just been plastered over, and one really oddball corner with a shelf that dead-ended into nothing. According to Lee, when they did the initial remodeling that set up the ANALOG retail store, they discovered a set of overhead doors (apparently part of the old auto repair shop) that had simply been rolled up into the ceiling and drywalled over! Another "charming" aspect of this old building was that it must have had a zillion little hidden passageways that were just the right size for vermin of various sizes. This includes mice, cute little chipmunks, and yes, rats. It wasn't really a surprise to have "issues" with small creatures in ANALOG. One day in early winter, we were working away when we realized that something really smelled bad, and it wasn't one of the computer geeks. This was the kind of smell that you know is associated with real, honest-to-god death. Bob had a not-so-pleasant habit of using rat poison to deal with the vermin population in the building. Rat poison is kind of bad in that the creatures that eat the stuff have an unfortunate tendency to crawl off somewhere and die. The theory is that they will crawl outside, where they can get water, and die there but the reality is that oftentimes, they will crawl somewhere inside the building, where you can't get at them, and die. Most places in the world, they probably went outside and died 90% of the time. At ANALOG, I'd bet they stayed inside and died 90% of the time. This was the case on this particular winter day - The rat (or whatever) had croaked inside the south wall of the place and was really starting to reek. There was no way we could get to the rotting corpse to get rid of it. It was all we could do to continue working - I can't begin to describe the smell, and it was pretty cold outside so we really didn't want to open the window. Oh well, we survived it. On another occasion, after we had reworked the rear of the building into some pretty slick offices for the programmers, complete with a suspended ceiling and (oooh!!!) carpet, I was working at my desk. We had temporarily removed one of the suspended ceiling panels so that I could run a phone line to my desk. As I was typing away on my Atari 800, some movement above caught my eye. I slowly looked up and saw it - the cutest little chipmunk you've ever seen, peering over the edge of the suspended ceiling frame. We tried a bit to catch him and get him outside, but eventually gave up. I don't recall if we ever got him, I think we just figured he'd get out the same way he got in, and that he wouldn't do that much damage anyway… By far the worst incident I ever had with vermin happened one morning when I walked into the programmer's office and when I got to my desk, I looked up and the Snickers candy bar I had left on top of my monitor was gone. Thinking someone in the office had taken it, I started to yell and demand to know who took it. Then I saw them - scraps of plastic wrapper on the desktop and on the floor. My candy bar had been taken, all right, but not by any human. A quick survey of the office revealed some additional damage: Something had gnawed a two-inch hole in the bottom corner of the big wastebasket next to my desk! It didn't take long to figure out what was up - The waste basket had burger and French fry wrappers from Burger King, one of the high-quality establishments where the ANALOG gang got their noontime "nutrition" - That is, when they weren't eating "old man mush meat" (direct quote from Brian Moriarty) from Arby's. Apparently, there was a rat in the building and it had a hankerin' for candy bars and fast food wrappers. It had eaten my candy bar. This was war. Later that morning, I drove down to Cherry Valley Hardware and bought several rat traps. I had never bought rat traps before, and was amazed. It looked like these things could take down a small dog! And there was this really interesting metal loop, like a big staple, sticking out of one end of the trap. I had no idea what that was for, but I would soon find out. So I set the trap up and baited it with - What else? - A chunk of Snickers bar. I set it inside a closet where we suspected the little creep had come from and left the door open a bit. The next morning I strolled into ANALOG, confident that I had whacked the thing. I opened the closet and the trap was gone. No dead rat, no blood - NOTHING. A quick conference with the ANALOG crew and Bob (puffing on his pipe, as always) revealed the purpose of the metal loop on a rat trap: You're supposed to tie the darn thing down so that the stinking rat can't CARRY IT AWAY!!! This was now officially creeping me out. I set up another trap, tied it down and baited it with more Snickers. This HAD to work. Well, it did. The next day I had a pretty nice-sized trophy to show for my efforts. Pat Kelly was kind enough to pose with the little monster (see photo). I don't recall catching any other rats - Maybe we had struck fear into their filthy little hearts. Yeah, right. I think it was because after that we stopped leaving fast-food wrappers and other stuff lying around the office…
Cover Story One of the most fun jobs around ANALOG (besides writing whatever video games we wanted) was creating the cover photos for the magazine. Jon Bell was in charge of this process, and would come up with the general design and approach, and I'd do the actual photography. Many times, these covers required multiple exposures, time exposures and other tricks to pull off. Note that in the ANALOG days, there was no such thing as Photoshop, high-resolution video monitors cost $5,000, and computers with high-res truecolor video cost many times that. Our approach to doing covers was generally to use tried-and-true techniques from movie special effects, which, being sci-fi movie geeks, we were totally familiar with. The first cover I worked on with Jon was the one for 1982's issue #5. I wasn't working at ANALOG yet, but Jon needed some help and it looked like it would be fun, so we dug in. The basis of the image was a hand-drawn image that looked like computer "wireframe" graphics. Jon drew the elements separately and pasted them up, then had the final photo-printed as a negative on acetate (what we referred to as a "stat"). We backlit the stat, which now had white lines on a black background, and did a second photo exposure with backlit pinholes and a four-point cross-star filter. As usual with such things, we shot a large number of exposures with various settings so we'd get just what we wanted. The final image was tinted green for the cover.
ANALOG #8's cover was pretty fun and quick, and looking back on it, we could have done a lot better. This was a simple multiple-exposure setup with an Atari 800 and monitor and a hand (I don't remember whose - Jon?) We too an exposure of the entire setup as normal, but then did a series of additional exposures with a small grain-of-wheat light bulb on the end of a stick that was painted black. While the owner of the hand held it more-or-less still, Jon took the stick and traced out random paths from the fingertips to the computer. Additional exposures with the bulb placed at the fingertips with a cross-star filter completed the work. When the final image was developed, it looked like the hand was shooting out lightning bolts. To me, the hand always looked a bit blurry, but this was the nature of the game back then - You took a lot of exposures and prayed that one would come out OK. Usually one did; I think this was a case where we picked the best of the bunch!
Issue 9's cover was one of the most fun we ever did, drawing on the total-sci-fi geekiness of several staff members. Before coming to ANALOG, Jon and I had been massive Space:1999 fans and had created a Moonbase Alpha-like asteroid base model for our never-finished 8mm film, Buck Cosmo: Space Ranger. Drawing on that experience, we decided to create an "Atari spaceship" and have it sitting on a launch pad that was similar to one of Moonbase Alpha's, with a nifty space background. By god, if we weren't gonna finish Buck Cosmo, we'd do the next best thing. Jon got busy making the Atari-shaped spacecraft, starting out with an SR-71 "Blackbird" reconnaissance plane plastic model kit, and doing a hack job on it with a bandsaw. After drilling some windows and enhancing the Atari-shaped wings with some sheet styrene, he painted it silver. Next, we whipped up the pad itself using nothing more than a sheet of styrene and some red tape. The gantry was a beautiful balsa model our modelmaker friend Ed Miarecki had built years before for a model rocket. He graciously sacrificed it for the magazine. (Well, we borrowed it and painted it white -- he was not amused). The various buildings scattered around the lunar landscape were cobbled together from various plastic kit parts, notably bits of a Saturn V launch vehicle. Lee provided an HO slot-car tower with lights that can be seen in the background. If memory serves (and I'll ask Jon to help me out here if I'm misremembering), the lunar surface itself was made from styrofoam sheets that we simply spray-painted gray. When the solvents in spray paint hit styrofoam, they eat it away nicely, leaving a rough surface that'll pass for your typical moon. The background is one of our handy-dandy rear projection screens with an astronomical photo projected onto it. The real fun trick in this shot is that all those little lights on the launch pad and buildings aren't really there! That would have taken a fair bit of time to wire all those up, and frankly, we decided to work smarter, not harder. Instead of actually putting little grain-of-wheat bulbs in the shot, we had a single bulb on a black stick that we superimposed onto the image at various places using a multiple exposure technique. Jon had marked the pad with a pencil where the lights were supposed to be, and we just did a number of extra exposures, one for each little light. It worked like a charm. We did the shoot in the basement of Lee's parents' house in one night. Yeah, laugh all you want -- We didn't have dates, but we could kick butt at Tempest and put together cool special effects shots in just a few hours using little more than spit and baling wire! Check out the rare, behind-the-scenes photos here!
For the cover of ANALOG #11, which featured a circuit board in the shape of an Atari logo, I got busy in the model shop. I started with pieces of styrene plastic sheet, cut them into an Atari logo shape and painted it a nice circuit-board green, then masked and sprayed a bunch of copper lines to look like circuit traces. Then I drilled holes and inserted various resistors, capacitors and other electronic components and super-glued a bunch of surplus integrated circuits onto the boards. This was mounted onto a sheet of Plexiglas that Jon had painted black with pin striping tape to make a perspective grid. When the grid was backlit with an acetate sheet to diffuse the light, it looked pretty good. We took this model with us to the 1983 West Coast Computer Faire for display in our booth.
The covers of ANALOG #16 and #26 were an acetate stat technique that was a lot of fun to do. I would use the Atari to create wireframe graphics of various shapes, print them out and Jon would do a paste-up of the elements and get it shot on acetate as a negative. He would then place colored acetate behind the stat with a piece of frosted acetate to diffuse the light. We'd backlight the piece and run different exposures for various elements, such as the "ATARI GRAPHICS" lettering on issue 16's cover. Fun Fact: On issue 26's cover, two buildings on the left look like a "T" and an "H", my initials, and there is a "J" building visible on the right. I'm pretty sure we also did a "B" building to have Jon's initials in there, but it may be obscured by the "Jack Tramiel" banner.
Probably our most elaborate and outlandish photo cover was the one for ANALOG #30. The Atari ST was coming out soon, but it was pretty much impossible to actually get your hands on one. What to do? Well, we called our good friend and expert modelmaker, Ed Miarecki and asked him to build us a mockup! We got him all the photos we could find of the ST for reference, and he got busy. The final result was a work of art - It looked almost perfect. When we photographed it, it didn't have an operational power LED so we did a simple multiple exposure and threw one in. Since we didn't have a real ST, we couldn't do a proper screenshot, so I used an 8-bit art program and created a mockup of an ST screen. Yes, it was a lot of effort, but we really wanted to get a scoop on Antic, our main competition. Ironically, some time after this issue came out, when we mentioned it to the Tramiels, they said that they would have happily provided an ST for us to use!
In today's world, all of these covers would have been a breeze to do with Photoshop and a good 3D modeling program, such as 3DS Max. But back then, we could only dream of the kinds of art technology available today. We made do with what we had, and it was a lot of fun to overcome the various challenges.
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Klanky the Robot® TM & Copyright 1975-2006 Tom Hudson |
computer
shows, most evenings were spent at the Malibu Fun Center south of San
Francisco Airport, and by far the game we played more than any other was
Atari's "Tempest". I remember walking into the arcade and seeing
something like 20 Tempest machines all lined up in a row. It was like a
gambler walking into a Vegas casino. We'd jump on those things with a
couple rolls of quarters and play until we were out of money. (Actually,
those machines used tokens, but you know what I mean). I still have some
of those tokens lying around here someplace. There was a great rush
when you got to put your initials in one of the top three slots (these
stayed in PROM memory even if the machine was turned off), and Lee and I
did that a lot. Heck, you may actually find an old Tempest machine
with "LEE" or "HUD" still sitting in the PROMs...
booth for
the magazine and our fledgling software company, ANALOG Software. I
remember talking to Atari owners who came up, and asking them what they
wanted to see in the magazine. They all liked the machine-language arcade
games, and I mentioned to one guy how much I'd like to do a
"Tempest" game. That got some good reaction, and I figured it
would be my next game. As is normal with the way I do things, I started
thinking about how I'd approach the game design right away, but in a
back-burner kind of way.
Tempest
was back. He had been over at the "Antic" booth (our primary
competition/sworn enemies) and mentioned to them that we were probably
going to do Tempest, to which they replied (paraphrasing), "There's
no way you can do Tempest on an Atari". The gauntlet was thrown
down. I then removed Tempest from the back burner and put it on the front
burner on "High". Nobody told me something I wanted to do was
impossible - I'd show those Antic bums…
game and drawing out the grids on graph paper. I was so totally into
getting this game written it was unbelievable. When I got back to
Massachusetts I was like a coding machine, and I had the game up and
running very quickly. Looking at it today, it's no masterpiece, but it
played relatively well on a machine with paddles - Nothing as good as the
original, but I think people liked it, and I showed those Antic guys…
