ANTIC Interview 297 - Robert Anschuetz, Eric Anschuetz, John Weisgberber, Antic magazine games

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 and A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing magazines - that went unpublished.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. If you want to see our talking heads, there's a video version of this interview. 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." Video of this interview Anschuetz/Weisgberber games and article Eric and Robert Talk About Programming Atari 8Bit Computer Games in the 1980s