Aug 9, 2017
Robert Anschuetz, Eric Anschuetz, John Weisgberber,
Antic magazine games
Robert Anschuetz, Eric Anschuetz, and John Weisgberber are
childhood friends who published three games in Antic magazine:
Kooky's Quest was published in the February 1985 issue; Overflow in
July 1985; and Robot Dungeon was the "disk bonus" in the November
1985 issue. They also wrote several other games in Atari BASIC —
some of which they submitted to Compute! and A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing
magazines - that went unpublished.
Fast forward to August 2017, when the three posted on the
AtariAge forum: "We are now releasing all of these games to the
Public Domain ... These are not new games, but they are new
to the Atari 8-Bit community. Many of these games really pushed the
envelope at the time for what could be done in Atari BASIC,
including bi-directional smooth scrolling, assembly language
subroutines, parallax scrolling, cut scenes, attract modes,
display-list tricks, interleaved-displays, etc."
In addition to releasing their games — some for the first time
— the group wrote a new article describing how they got together as
a team to write these programs, along with game instructions and
development notes.
I wanted to find out more, so we got together for a four-way
interview over Skype.
This interview took place on August 4, 2017. The first voice
you'll hear after mine is Robert Anschuetz.
Teaser quotes:
"It was just a small little corner of the page that says 'Disk
Bonus — Robot Dungeon'. We didn't subscribe to the disk bonus of
Antic. So luckily we saw that or else we never would have known it
was published."
“One thing about this experience of working together on these
games, it's very multi-disciplinary, and it's all about
collaboration."