September 11, 1986
Visited Danny Gorlin. He’s sunk more money into developing the development system to end all development systems. Saw the final version of Airheart. It’s got some staggering special effects and it’s no fun at all to play.
Danny thinks spending a million bucks on a development system will give him an edge. He might be right. But the best Apple games have been developed on a plain Apple II with two disk drives. Lucasfilm spent a million bucks to make Rescue on Fractalus and Ball Blazer, and those games aren’t significantly better than, or different from, the competition. The real strides forward – Raster Blaster, Choplifter, (what the hell) Karateka – were the work of solo programmers with no special resources.
Maybe Danny is leading game design into the 21st century. Maybe he’s just flushing money down the toilet.
I’ll stick with my Apple II.
