Old School Gamer staff members have had the privilege of meeting many programmers from the heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, notably, David Crane, Garry Kitchen and Dan Kitchen, all of whom were influential during the Atari 2600 Generation and also the founding of Activision.
While at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, we got to spend some time with Dan Kitchen to find out about his gaming history and how he has taken a game he started back in 1983 to finishing development on it now, in 2019. Dan Kitchen is one of the original Activision developers and is one of the few that still actively programs. He developed classic games such as Crackpots, Ghostbusters, Crossbow, Double Dragon, Kung-Fu Master, along with F-14 Tomcat for the Atari 2600. As discussed elsewhere in this issue, F-14 Tomcat went on to make many other appearances on later consoles. It was then that he was able to capitalize on the additional power and memory beyond the Atari 2600’s 1.19 MHz, 128 bytes of RAM and up to 4kB of ROM (64kB with bank switch), and finally make the games that he had envisioned. Read the rest of the article here from Old School Gamer!
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