Tech blogger Josh Renaud has rescued some of the earliest entertainment software for the Atari ST, snatched directly out of the jaws of the bit-bucket. Back in 1985, Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen’s released “Murray and Me” and “Mom and Me” for the Atari ST. The program(s) were billed as interactive cartoons and were published by the dedicated Atari “Antic” Magazine. A bit like an interactive chatbot, the programs featured beautiful cartoon images and non-sense audio language to highlight the conversations.
Renaud discovered the programs on disks five years ago but was unable to archive them at the time. Surprisingly, the programs had also slipped through the cracks of fairly comprehensive Atari ST archives like Atari Mania and the Automation Disk Catalog. Yesterday, Renaud posted the newly archived ST disk images for download on his web site along with a fully detailed and fascinating history of their origins.
Personally, I recall seeing these programs advertised back into 1985 and they helped build excitement for the 16-bit platforms. The graphics were crisp and looked like they were taken directly from newspaper. Today, thanks to work of Josh Renaud, I tested out “Murray and Me” in the Steem emulator, and it worked very well.
According to Josh “I had the color versions of Mom and Murray on copied disks since I was a kid but didn’t become aware they were unarchived until ~2014. In 2017, I imaged Mom, but my Murray disk was unrecoverable. Years later, Kevin Ng imaged his original Antic mono and color Murray disks.”
You can read Josh’s entire story, and get the disk images to try out yourself here: Unearthed: Kirschen’s Atari ST projects – Break Into Chat
