ANTIC Interview 174 - Tod Frye, Asteroids

May 18, 2016

Tod Frye, Asteroids

Hi, there!  Welcome to the next in the series of Atari-related interviews being produced by Antic, the Atari 8-bit computer podcast.  My name is Randy Kindig and I’ll be leading this interview.  Most notably, while working at Atari, Tod Frye developed the 400/800 version of Asteroids and the 2600 version of Pac-Man, converting them from the coin-op version.  He has many other games to his credit.  He later worked for Axlon, Nolan Bushnell’s company.

This interview was conducted on January 3, 2016.

Teaser Quotes

• “While I was at Atari, it went from a pretty big company, to a huge company, to a complete flop.”
• “I didn’t work at Atari; I LIVED at Atari; and I loved it.”
• “Because of the CTIA and GTIA and Antic, the sprite hardware was WAY better than the sprite hardware on the Commodore.”
• “The hard parts were: writing code that was fast enough, writing code that was small enough to fit in the cartridge, and writing code that would fit in the RAM.  Basically everything was hard.”

Links

• Tod Frye at Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tod_Frye
• Tod Frye at PRGE 2015 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLoJ5jcccPU