{"id":43310,"date":"2018-01-01T01:14:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-01T08:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/the-faery-tale-adventure-a-personal-history\/"},"modified":"2018-01-01T01:14:50","modified_gmt":"2018-01-01T08:14:50","slug":"the-faery-tale-adventure-a-personal-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/the-faery-tale-adventure-a-personal-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Faery Tale Adventure: A personal history"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/figure>\n

The Faery Tale Adventure<\/em> was a computer game that I created for the Amiga in 1987. It was moderately popular for it\u2019s day, and was ported to a number of platforms, including the Sega\u00a0Genesis.<\/p>\n

I decided to write this history because, much to my surprise, there is still interest in the game?\u2014?I occasionally get fan email or inquiries as to whether there will ever be a sequel. And so I thought it might be interesting to tell the story of how the game came to be, and what happened afterwards.<\/p>\n

I think the best place to start would be the day I met Jim Steinert, who would go on to become the founder of MicroIllusions.<\/p>\n

It was 1985, a few days after I had been let go from my job at DataSoft. I had worked on a number of programs for the Radio Shack Color Computer, but the company was going into bankruptcy and had laid off the entire engineering staff.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t sure what I was going to do next?\u2014?I didn\u2019t have a job lined up, I was living out of a sleeping bag in a corner of a friend\u2019s house, and I didn\u2019t have a long track record in the industry or even a bachelor\u2019s degree. (All of my programming knowledge had been learned in the Air Force, working at SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.)<\/p>\n

However, my friends Ken Jordan and Jim Ratcliff (former DataSoft co-workers, and the ones in whose house I was staying) were very excited about the Amiga and we spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas for what we would do if we ever got a chance to lay our hands on one. Imagine what you could do with 32\u00a0colors!<\/p>\n

So one of the ways I spent my time was hanging around at KJ computers, the local computer store in Northridge, CA. The Amiga 1000 had just arrived and everyone was\u00a0excited.<\/p>\n

Jim Steinert, who ran the store, knew that I had a talent for programming, and came over to me. He said \u201cHey, we\u2019ve been told that the Amiga can talk, but we can\u2019t figure out how to make it work. Can you do\u00a0it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me see the manual.\u201d I replied. It was pretty simple, really?\u2014?the BASIC language interpreter had a \u201cSPEAK\u201d command which would take a line of text and process it through the built-in speech synthesizer. I spent about 30 minutes writing an interactive program that would accept input from the user and then speak\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

They were very impressed. \u201cTell you what.\u201d said Jim. \u201cIf you can polish this up and turn it into a product, I\u2019ll sell it and give you half the\u00a0money.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I did. Jim named the product \u201cTalk to Me\u201d and sold it for 30 dollars a copy (each unit consisting of a plastic baggie with a floppy disk and some printed instructions). I think we sold only 20\u201330 copies but that was enough to whet Jim\u2019s appetite.<\/p>\n

Let me take a moment to describe Jim Steinert. Jim was a sandy-haired \u201cvalley dude\u201d (seriously, that was how he talked), about 30 years old, whose father owned an auto wrecking yard. Jim had a lot of dreams about making it big, but not a lot of experience in running a complex business.<\/p>\n

Jim also fancied himself a \u201cwheeler and dealer\u201d, someone who could, through clever tricks, avoid doing all those things that businesses have to put up with. During the years I worked with him, he boasted to me how it was easier to drag things out and settle in court rather than to pay bills on\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

I should mention that at this point in my life, just about every employer that I had worked with had engaged in practices that I thought were shady, and Jim was far from the worst; I was uncomfortable with all this, but I was too young and insecure at the time to say anything about\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

In any case, Jim wanted a new program that he could sell. He showed me an educational program on the C-64 called \u201cCave of the Word Wizard\u201d, in which a boy is lost in a maze-like series of caverns and has to answer various spelling challenges (using synthesized speech to speak the word to be spelled) in order to proceed. \u201cI want something just like that.\u201d he\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Well, I didn\u2019t want to make an exact copy of someone else\u2019s game idea, but I said I could come up with something similar. Instead of a cave, I set the game in the corridors of a crashed space ship, and I would add math and other types of quizzes as well as spelling.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Instead of a wizard, the challenger would be the ship\u2019s computer, and I wanted a choice of protagonists?\u2014?a boy, a girl, a robot and an\u00a0alien.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

I called this game \u201cDiscovery\u201d.<\/p>\n

I asked Jim for an advance of a couple of thousand dollars so that I could get a place to stay?\u2014?I ended up renting a room from the mother of someone I knew from LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society). The most vivid thing I remember about this place was the swarms of june bugs, and having to gently shoo the ochre-colored insects off of my Amiga keyboard when I wanted to\u00a0type.<\/p>\n

The game was written in 4 months, using the Manx C computer. I used the very first released version of Deluxe Paint to do all the background and character art.<\/p>\n

For the music, I wrote a very rudimentary music editor which I called \u201cMusica\u201d. This let you place notes on a piano-roll style grid with the mouse, and you could construct sounds using drawbars (similar to a Hammond organ, which I was very familiar with), and modify the dynamics of the notes using ADSR (Attack\/Decay\/Sustain\/Release) envelopes.<\/p>\n

Jim hired a graphic artist to do the packaging. Unfortunately, the guy he hired wasn\u2019t very good at spelling?\u2014?there were several glaring spelling errors on the front and back covers of the package! This was rather embarrassing for a game that is supposed to be about spelling things correctly. Unfortunately, no one showed me the package until it had already been printed, so it was too\u00a0late.<\/p>\n

At this point, Jim decided that rather than selling this product through KJ computers?\u2014?which was a retail store?\u2014?he would split off a separate software publishing company which he called MicroIllusions.<\/p>\n

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Initially, it was just him as CEO, and his girlfriend Sherry which did all the accounting. I wasn\u2019t an employee?\u2014?all of the programmers would be contractors and earn a royalty, so that Jim could avoid things like payroll tax. (My take for Discovery was 3% of gross I think.) The contracts I signed handed over all intellectual property to MicroIllusions?\u2014?however, the contracts were so badly written as to be essentially unenforceable (as I later learned).<\/p>\n

(Years later I bought the rights back, but that\u2019s another long\u00a0story.)<\/p>\n

Discovery did fairly well, although because it was an educational game it didn\u2019t have a big sales spike at the beginning. Jim informed me that educational games tend to be \u2018evergreen\u2019, that is they aren\u2019t hits but they sell for a long\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

Jim wanted me to start on another game, and gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted. I took a few weeks off to work on non-programming projects while I thought about what I wanted to do. I spent this time creating the \u201cDream Knight\u201d costume, a black, vacuum-formed suit of fantasy\u00a0armor:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

My roommate at the time, Greg Hemsath, made a plaster body-cast of me, which I then started sculpting into the shape you see in the photo, using bondo and lots of sandpaper. The plastic was ABS, and I built a vacuum-forming machine from an old shop-vac and oven heating elements.<\/p>\n

So what kind of game did I want to make? I had two basic ideas: the first was something that came out of my brainstorm sessions with Ken and Jim: the idea of using fairy tales, rather than High Fantasy (such as Tolkien) or Swords and Sorcery (such as Conan) as the informing genre of the\u00a0game.<\/p>\n

This meant that fairy-tale tropes such as talking animals and rustic characters would be a significant part of the game. It also meant that the character attributes would be \u201cspiritual\u201d: rather than having strength, intelligence, and other Dungeons & Dragons<\/em>-style attributes, the main attributes would be \u201cbravery\u201d, \u201cluck\u201d and \u201ckindness\u201d.<\/p>\n

Also along with the fairy-tale theme there would be a narration track?\u2014?a region below the main play field which showed a parchment scroll depicting the player\u2019s deeds and challenges. \u201cJulian was getting hungry!\u201d.<\/p>\n

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The second idea was that the game world would be huge, and would be contiguous?\u2014?instead of loading each map in chunks whenever you crossed a map boundary (like Ultima), I would load pieces of the map in the background as you walked. Thus, the game would never have to pause while waiting for the terrain to be loaded from\u00a0disk.<\/p>\n

However, I knew that I would not be able to draw a world that huge. So I came up with the idea of \u2018meta-tiles\u2019 or \u2018super-tiles\u2019. You see, most games in that era used \u2018tiled\u2019 artwork?\u2014?that is, the background consists of 2-dimensional bitmaps which could be re-used many times within a single scene. I hit on the idea of creating \u2018super-tiles\u2019 which were made up of smaller tiles. Each tile was 16 x 32 pixels, and each super-tile was 16 x 8 tiles, for a total of 256 x 256 pixels. This allowed me to create vast amounts of terrain with only modest amounts of\u00a0memory.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, as many people have noted over the years, the problem with this approach is that the terrain is very repetitive. I was aware of this at the time, and I sought to overcome this by creating variety?\u2014?special tiles representing towns or dungeons, different regions with different terrain types (swamps, deserts, forests and so on). However, there is only so much variety that a single person can create, especially when you consider that the entire project took only 7\u00a0months.<\/p>\n

Loading the data in the background was a challenge, and I could not figure how how to get the Amiga filesystem layer (AmigaDOS) to load data without pausing the program. So instead, I cheated: instead of writing out the terrain as files on disk, I wrote them directly to the floppy tracks as raw data blocks. I could then use the low-level floppy device driver to load the data in the background while the game was\u00a0running.<\/p>\n

This meant that when you put the Faery Tale disk into the computer and listed the files on it, all you would see was a few files needed to \u2018bootstrap\u2019 the game?\u2014?most of the game content was hidden from\u00a0view.<\/p>\n

During this period I also created some additional development tools. I already had Musica which I had created for Discovery. To this was added Anima (my character animation editor) and Tiled (the tile\/map editor). These were essentially specialized bit-mapped paint programs, with a full suite of drawing tools (lines, dots, circles, rectangles) plus special key commands to flip between animation frames or place tiles and super-tiles on the\u00a0map.<\/p>\n

One other decision I had to make was: what to call it? A lot of my friends were into fantasy artwork depicting fairies such as the work of Brian Froud. And I knew that the word \u201cfairy\u201d has many archaic spellings: fairy, faerie, faery, and so on. I basically picked one at random. If I were to make the choice today, I probably would pick \u201cfaerie\u201d.<\/p>\n

Another thing I wanted for Faery Tale Adventure was that the box would contain not only fantasy artwork, but an actual photo shoot of people in costume. My idea was that I wanted to give the player the sense that not only could this game transport him into another world?\u2014?but that somewhere in the real world, there were people living lifestyles that were as exciting as their\u00a0dreams.<\/p>\n

For this purpose I hired my friend (and notable science fiction writer) William Rotsler to do the shoot. We got Terry Karney, a friend of Greg\u2019s from Renaissance Faire, to play Kevin?\u2014?he dyed his normally sandy hair red for the shoot. For the location, we spent an afternoon driving around upper Beverly Hills looking at all the ridiculously pretentious homes, until we found one place that was a pastiche of about 5 different medieval castle architectural styles. We knocked on their door and asked them if we could take pictures on their property, and they said we could?\u2014?but we had to be \u201ccareful of the\u00a0emus\u201d.<\/p>\n

I used the Dream Knight costume in the shoot, and then added a version of the same character into the game, mainly as a justification for having him in the\u00a0photos.<\/p>\n

The covert art for the box (depicting a dragon) was done by my friend Ed Kline, who also was a science-fiction prop maker whose ray-guns and other works have appeared on numerous movies and television shows. Ed also did work for other MicroIllusions games, and helped me out on some later projects. I should also say that of all the artists and creative people I have met in my life, Ed is the most \u201calien\u201d?\u2014?and he would consider that a compliment.<\/p>\n

As I was putting the last touches on Faery Tale Adventure, Jim was busy expanding MicroIllusions at break-neck pace. This was a growth period in the games industry, where just about any fool could, with a little bit of luck, create a successful game\u00a0company.<\/p>\n

(For those of you who have watched the series Halt and Catch Fire<\/em>, it was very much like that. Each of the four seasons of the show depicts a different era of the personal computer industry, and I recognize each of them from my own personal experience. I was there<\/em>?\u2014?not a central figure by any means, but I lived on that bleeding\u00a0edge.)<\/p>\n

Jim was finding all kinds of talent?\u2014?people like Reichart Von Wolfshield (the creator of Firepower<\/em>) and Robert McNally (Ebonstar<\/em> and many more), to name just a few. At the same time, however, his penchant for \u201cclever tricks\u201d was alienating the very talent he was trying to attract. The relationship between Reichart and Jim ended very badly?\u2014?I was called in to give a deposition in the resulting lawsuit several years\u00a0later.<\/p>\n

Jim launched over a dozen development projects, many of which deserve a Medium post of their own. Many of them, like Romantic Encounters at the Dome<\/em> or Star Travel<\/em>, I can barely remember.<\/p>\n

He hired my old friend Joe Pearce who I had met playing Champions<\/em> when I lived in San Diego. Jim had wanted Joe to create a dungeon-crawling epic named Land of Legends<\/em>. Unfortunately despite the fact that Joe was a very disciplined and talented coder, Jim\u2019s vision was simply too grandiose for anyone to accomplish, and the project was cancelled several years\u00a0later.<\/p>\n

Jim moved MicroIllusions down the street to the second-floor of a two-story office building in Granada Hills (the bottom floor was a real-estate company). As part of the rental deal, he gained access to a 3-bedroom residential home next door, so I moved in there, along with Allison Hershey (my girlfriend at the time), Greg Hemsath and his girlfriend Bonnie Long. All four of us were doing part-time contact work for MicroIllusions?\u2014?we had a disk duplicator moved into one of the garages and Greg worked on the machines making floppies.<\/p>\n

All four of us were active science fiction fans, attending all of the local conventions, and both Allison and I had exhibited our works at conventions. As a result, we knew many budding science fiction and fantasy artists who were curious about doing artwork on a computer.<\/p>\n

Thus was born the idea of \u201cAmiga art parties\u201d: We would borrow a half a dozen Amiga computers from the MicroIllusions office and set them up on folding tables at our house and hold a big potluck for all our artist friends. We would tutor anyone who wanted to sit down in front of a machine, and we also had computer animation veterans such as Brad Schenk showing off their latest\u00a0work.<\/p>\n

Quite a few of these attendees went on to work on game projects for MicroIllusions, and some of them had long and successful careers in the computer game industry (although some never made the transition from 2D to 3D asset creation).<\/p>\n

In the mean time, in the first year after publication of Faery Tale Adventure, I made $50k in royalties?\u2014?which may not seem like a lot today, but was more money than I had ever made in my life. I was ready to plunge into my next project?\u2014?Music-X.<\/p>\n

The apex of MicroIllusions came several years later, which was the Hanna-Barbera deal?\u2014?a licensing agreement allowing them to develop computer games based on The Flintstones<\/em>, The Jetsons<\/em>, Scooby-Doo<\/em> and Johnny Quest<\/em>. Most of these projects never got very far?\u2014?The Flintstones<\/em> demo was so painfully slow that Ken Jordan remarked \u201cVideogame or slideshow? You decide!\u201d Robert McNally and his brother Michael (who is now a director at Facebook) did a wonderful adaptation of The Jetsons<\/em>, but Hanna-Barbera cancelled the licensing deal before it had time to generate much revenue. I don\u2019t know exactly what happened, but lots of lawyers were involved.<\/p>\n

Years later I learned that just about every single royalty statement that I got from MicroIllusions contained arithmetic errors?\u2014?a few of which were in my\u00a0favor.<\/p>\n

The last time I saw Jim, he was working in his father\u2019s wrecking yard, and the assets of MicroIllusions had been sold off to another\u00a0party.<\/p>\n

One final note: I\u2019ve mentioned the names of many people in this article, and I want to stress how pivotal each of these people were?\u2014?I\u2019ve left out many parts of the story for the sake of brevity, but everyone I\u2019ve named deserves \u201clegendary\u201d status.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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The Faery Tale Adventure was a computer game that I created for the Amiga in 1987. It was moderately popular for it\u2019s day, and was ported to a number of platforms, including the Sega\u00a0Genesis. I decided to write this history because, much to my surprise, there is still interest in the game?\u2014?I occasionally get fan… Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":43311,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,377],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games-media","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t