So I came home and showed my girlfriend, now my wife, and was like, “look, it’s really official, they got a letterhead and everything!” I went in, and we must have all been about 22 at the time, something like that, and they gave me a little piece of paper with the letterhead which had “Dynamix” on it. So I came by, and Damon had done Stellar 7 at the time – I knew about that. It was published by Earthware Computer Services, which was a really small company, and I don’t know, maybe it sold eight copies total or whatever! (laughs)īut yeah, Jeff had a computer store in town and somehow Jeff and Damon had heard about me, so in ‘84 I got a call out of the blue from Damon to come by to their office. I graduated from the university and had written a program while I was there. Jeff and Damon both grew up here in Eugene. After that I went to the University of Oregon to get my computer science degree. So in high school for a couple of years I was writing a whole bunch of games on that little computer. 3k was the operating system, so you had 5k to write basic programs. Well, I looked around and the only thing you could get was the Altair, which was on of those old 8-bit ones where you programmed it by flipping switches and all it did was it have lights – and it was a lot more than a junior high guy could afford! But the high school I went to had a Wang computer. They had a mainframe computer in one of their labs, where you could play Guess The Animal – a little text thing where you’d ask, “is it bigger than this? Is it smaller than this?” and I thought, oh, this is really cool! Computers! I grew up in Fresno, California, and we did a field trip to Berkeley. Kevin: Sure – well, it was in junior high, in 1976. So, to kick it off maybe you can give me a little bit of a background of how you got into programming? Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me. Kevin’s other credits while at Jeff Tunnel Productions / Dynamix include the likes of Skyfox II, Sword of Kadash, Heart of China, Rise of the Dragon, The Adventures of Willy Beamish and many more. To kick things off, I spoke to Kevin Ryan, creator of The Incredible Machine back in 1993. After plenty of time off interviewing and focusing on Hash Rush, I’m back in the game and ready to go with what I intend to be more regular interviews again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |