Mac History

The Computer History Museum has an article (and the source code) for MacPaint and QuickDraw up on their site.

Looking at the pictures, I can't help but feel a little old knowing that the artwork I did on the Apple Macintosh computer back then wasn't in fact the first computer I worked on professionally. The first professional computer art I did was on the Commodore 64, but it couldn't have been too much farther back than the Mac stuff. I've always listed my computer career as starting in 1985 but I had been going to "The Computer Learning Center for Children," which was also the home of the newly created "Unicorn Software," for a little while before they asked me to do some work for them. Trying to match my memories of how long they were in their original offices before moving to the new building, how that matches up with me spending my senior year of high school (Class of '86) in California, etc.

I had thought that once I got back from California, summer of 1986, that I had only done Amiga and Atari ST work for Unicorn before going to Westwood in 1988. But now that I really think about it, not only do I remember doing a few things on the Mac, but I also did several more titles on the Apple II.

Trying to look for a picture from one of the Mac games I drew on MacPaint I found it funny how back then every program for the Mac had to be named MacWhatever (MacPaint, MacRobots, MacEtc and so on) just like when the iPod/iPhone first launched and everybody was naming their Apps iThis and iThat.

I also found this page that appears to be some sort of Unicorn Software holding page. I've never seen that slogan before, that wasn't their logo, and although I have no idea when the company shut down they were publishing games before 1986.

Anyway, I didn't find anything that I hadn't posted before. So if you really want to see a picture, use the blog's search feature and look for "Unicorn software."

Into the Deep, Dark, Burning Depths I Ventured...

I went dumpster diving today... okay, not in a dumpster but rather my storage bin here in Las Vegas. Half of the stuff in there is what I kept after moving out of my house before moving to San Diego and onto Australia about six years ago. The rest is the stuff I put in there after moving back from Australia.

There was one point, while climbing around in 400 degree heat at the very back of the "air cooled" storage bin, when a number boxes started to shift behind me, that I suddenly felt like I was going to pass out. I had a thought about how long it would take them to notice I was missing, find my dead and crushed body, and figure out how to get it out. Luckily, I had my 100 FL OZ, insulated, Rebel Convenience store cup full of diet Dr. Pepper within reach to provide some much need refreshment. That's right one HUNDRED fluid ounces!!! And it only costs me .99 cents to refill. Thats one dollar and seven cents if you include tax. Compare that to the cost of a normal, 12 fluid ounce, can of soda. To be fair it isn't quite as big as it looks; because, it has a very thick, foam insulated core. I can fill it in the morning and it still has ice left in it in the evening.

I was looking for some specific stuff, but also found some other cool stuff.

First up is a self-portrait that Neil Gaiman drew on the back of his name page at a 1993 (I think, though I might be off by a year either way) San Diego Comic-Con panel on Horror Fiction. During the panel another author started to drone on about some artsie-fartsie stuff and pretty much everybody else in the room started to nod off. I noticed that Neil had begun to doodle on the back of his name page; which was really just a folded piece of paper with his name printed on it so you knew who was who on the panel. After the panel was over the entire audience swarmed around him at the exit as he was leaving. I, however, went to see what he had been doodling and claimed this prize.

I also found some of my old Unicorn Software educational games. Pictured are "Animal Kingdom" (later renamed "Wonders of the Animal Kingdom"), "Kinderama" on the Amiga, and "MacRobots."I really only found the slipcover for "MacRobots." When I left Unicorn Software back in 1988 I wasn't allowed to take my copies of the games I had worked on so that is all I got. If I mess with the sidebar art anymore, I'll add these in along with "Adventures of Sinbad" and "Magical Myths" which I also have cover scans of. Though now that I look at them I see that they are photographs taken of the boxes lying on a table which puts them at odd angle.

I also found two other Unicorn related items. Both of these my Mother had been keeping. She gave them back to me just in time for me to bury them in storage with the rest of the junk I was keeping. The first thing pictured above is the Amiga advertisement on the inside back cover of the August 1987 Commodore magazine. That is the Amiga version of "Animal Kingdom" on the right-hand computer. The funny thing is, as I just took the magazine out of the scanner, I noticed the advertisement on the outside back cover is for the Amiga versions of SSI's "Phantasie III, The Wrath of Nikademus" and "Realms of Darkness." I'm not sure about Realms, but I know Westwood did the port of Wrath to the Amiga. It was an omen!

Then there is the Unicorn Software Educational Catalogue. It looked much better on the Amiga monitor I assure you. A lot better than you see it here where it is a picture (with flash) taken of the monitor, that was then printed out on the manual which then sat in a box for the last 20+ years only then to be rescanned into the computer. It is actually a fold out catalog and has two screen shots for each game. I'm looking at a few of them thinking, "Did I draw that... I think I drew that... Okay yeah, I remember drawing that!" The fox for Aesop's Fables looks especially good. If you look real closely at the bottom left of the cover, you can see some yellow pixels. That is where I signed my name, but it got cut off when they trimmed the picture to account for the curve of the monitor photo.

I also found my pillow which I am very happy about. It is one of those nice memory foam ones that is thicker along the top and bottom making it less likely that my arm will fall asleep if I rest it under the pillow while sleeping. Arm falling asleep is actually loss of blood circulation which isn't the same as me falling asleep. I probably didn't have to explain that, but the sentence felt odd.

My Vectrex video game console was in there too, but I figured it was safer to leave it there. Especially since I had booby-trapped it to kill off any other tomb raiders who dared disturb my "Temple of Junk!"

The two cartridges I have for the Vectrex, a 'mega' cartridge with every game officially published and the unreleased prototype cartridge of "Dark Tower" are buried in one of the other boxes that I brought back from Australia. I had accidentally had them in with my desk supplies and moved them downunder with me. I was always afraid I was going to loose them, but I distinctly remember putting them in a box when I packed up in Perth.

Bob Jones, one of the very talented artist I worked with at Auran, also had a Vectrex in Australia. He had actually bought his new back when he was a kid. Unfortunately, it no longer worked and he just had it sitting on his desk as a show piece.

I never had any of the color overlays as I bought my system used from a guy who's name I believe is Sean Kelly. He used to have a newsletter that he would publish with antique video games for sale. I also think he was one of the guys who founded the classic video game convention that they used(?) to host here in Las Vegas. I was able to find links to Sean's website but it appears the site is no longer there.

One thing I didn't find was my Westwood jacket. We all had letterman's jackets made with the year we started on the sleeve. I know I didn't take it with me to Australia, so I hope it is in there somewhere.

Little of this, little of that

I was showing my blog to some people today via Internet Explorer 8 on a giant TV screen in some ungodly resolution, and the layout was broken. The right-hand sidebar was wrapped under the posts. It may have been because somebody had increased the text size, but it was still pretty embarrassing. I think everybody realized that this was a Blogger thing and not something I really have control over. I am a bit worried that I am still not using the new blogger templates, though at this point 'new' is a relative term.

If you didn't know I am in Scotland at the moment. I count myself lucky that after five years in Australia, I at least know which way to look when I cross the street. It is a lot like Australia in that they roll the sidewalks up pretty early, not counting the pubs and the lone Kebab shop.

It has been quite the two weeks though. Took my dad down to the VA hospital for his eye operation. That all appeared to have turned out quite well.

Then a few days in Disneyland with the Niece, Nephew and other assorted relatives. Kids are still pretty young and hyper while my elders are starting to get up there. Being caught in-between that was almost an event unto itself. I did get away the first night because Eric#3 and Kristina had wagon-trained up with us. She had an appointment in LA the next morning. The upshot of that is that I got to have a grown up dinner with them in Downtown Disney the night before, fireworks included.

I did get my Monte Cristo sandwich (don't look at the picture on that wiki link, it is horrible and very unappetizing) but I missed riding Space Mountain while I was making reservations for the Blue Bayou restaurant in the morning. Alex went back to get us a fastpass for it later on, but they closed it for a few hours to fix something. When we went back by it, the Fastpass time had a return of much later that night and we had dinner reservations at the Pirate's Dinner Adventure. I thought there was too much singing and a tad too much slapstick, but the kids really liked it. Next time I think I'll go back to the old tradition of Medieval Times which is next door.

Now I'm in Scotland and managed to chip my other front tooth veneer. I got in at 12:00 local time and took a small nap. When I got up I was spying around the local area on Google Earth when I kinda nodded off again. I awoke with start for no reason I can remember, bit down too hard and off comes a big chip. I had to have the Lovely Kristina call my dentist back in Vegas to extend my Wednesday appointment to get the actual new veneer on the previous one installed (I'm wearing a temporary on that one that I've been afraid would pop off during this trip) to now include starting the process to fix the next one. Anybody got a spare $1300 dollars lying around?

Speaking of the adventures of me and my dentist; when I chipped the first tooth, I had tried to get a hold of Dr. Phelps who was pretty much Westwood's dentist back in the day. He was related to one of the programmers and played Everquest with us. I found out that he had moved away and somebody else had taken over his practice. They then in-turn moved to the other side of town. When I was tracking down their address, driving down Flamingo, when I had a big scare that they would be the dentist that had taken over the old Unicorn Software office. As it turns out they are in phase two of the office complex that Unicorn was in. It was being built during my time at Unicorn back in the late 80's. I went over there and the nice ladies at the accounting office that is now there, let me take a picture of the stained glass Unicorn window from the inside. I do think that had this new dentist been in the old Unicorn office that I would have had to find someplace else to fix my tooth.

I have been desperately trying to follow the Tour de France, but am not having much luck. I got to watch the first stage via the Australian SBS website, but they blocked out of the country viewing the next day. Since they I either haven't been around or able to find a site that lets me view the videos live from where I am. I have just been settling on reading about each stage, watching the standings and following a few of the team on Twitter. Even the TV here in my hotel room doesn't appear to be working.

New Sidebar Art

As you can see the new sidebar art is up with all the box covers from the various games I have worked on. Actually, I have only "Futuria" out of the Unicorn Software titles. I started to look for "Animal Kingdom" (later renamed "Wonders of the Animal Kingdom" because they didn't want to fight a lawsuit from Animal Kingdom magazine) but couldn't find it. The Commodore 64 version was the first professional game that I worked on.

I had actually wanted to do something like this for awhile, I just never felt like digging through the web to find all the box covers. It was a lot easier this time than it was back in 2003 when I last tried to find them all.

Anyway, I am not quite happy with the art and will make some adjustments later. I just spent an hour trying to get it working; because, Picasa Web Albums, which Blogger uses to host pictures you upload to the blog, wouldn't let me get at the actual, un-scaled down jpeg file to link to in the template. Finally got it working, but it is 4:30 AM already.

UPDATE: FYI. There are two things I am going to fix. First the boxes come over too far and you can't read the site in 1024x768. And second I need to rearrange some of the top level boxes.

Looking back on the last 24 years

I spent most of today updating my resume, recreating the HTML version and putting it all back up online. I finally split the list of published titles off into its own document, so I now have a more reasonable two-page resume with a separate two-page list of titles. Feels odd to look at those documents and take in that they represent the last 24 years of my life. It's all up now up if you follow the link over on the right-hand sidebar. Please shoot me an email if you notice any goofs or spelling mistakes. Wouldn't look good for Captain Attention to Detail to be caught with a typo. Drat, I just realized I forgot to create PDF versions. Bah I'll do that when I get back from Death Valley.

While I was doing all these I got an email from a gentlemen named Gaël, who is a classic Macintosh fan. He has been looking for a copy of two games I worked on back in 1986ish called "Utopia" and "Futuria." The story, as I remember it as it was told to me, was that these were two Scott Adams adventures redone by his former partner, William. Supposedly Scott and William had a falling out and William had the rights to these two games. I don't really know how much of that is true or not. To be honest, I don't really remember too many details about the games either. Unfortunately, I also don't have copies of them. Unicorn wasn't to good on keeping up with giving me copies of all the games I worked on.

It is interesting to think back on as these were some of the very first games I worked on. Working on them may have even been the first time I used a mouse to draw. Gaël sent this title screen for Utopia but I don't think it is something I drew. Jack, a programmer, used to paint some of the box covers and I think he may have painted this and then scanned it in. We used something called "Thunderscan" which replaced the printing head on the mac's printer and acted as a scanner. I drew a cartoon on the white board at the time that had a picture of the "sad mac" also knows as the "mad mac" shown when the Macintosh crashed. It was decked out post-holocaust style with the caption, "Mad Macs, Beyond the Thunderscan." Don't judge, it was a much simpler time.

I also in the middle of all this I found out that former Westwood-ian, Patrick Connelly, passed away. I don't have any of the details and I hadn't spoken to Patrick in many years. He was always an entertaining goofball and storyteller. I always though that they should have done a live action sitcom based on South Park, with Patrick playing a slightly older Cartman in college. He would have been perfect for the roll.

Patrick always had a bright and upbeat aptitude with a new tale you just had to hear. The world just won't be quite as bright a place tomorrow as it was yesterday. Goodbye Patrick.