March 13, 1986
I have to get out of here. This isn’t even half a life. It’s like living under house arrest. Moving to California is no longer a career move, it’s an escape hatch.
March 20, 1986
This negotiation with Broderbund has dragged on so long and gotten so frustrating, it’s pretty much cured me of any lingering sentimental feelings of being part of the “Broderbund family.” I still feel affection for Doug and Gary, but the reality is, it’s a corporation. To the people I’m actually dealing with, it’s just business.
Mom just showed me an article in Venture magazine about how Electronic Arts gave Timothy Leary a $100,000 advance for his new game. Why am I still talking to Broderbund?
March 28, 1986
Bill McDonagh called to tell me that Karateka has sold a quarter of a million units in its first month of release in Japan.
April 15, 1986
Got a new contract draft from Broderbund. They’re still offering $0 advance, but I think it’ll be OK.
April 29, 1986
The digitizer arrived. I fired it up and quickly determined that the tape I shot in October is useless.
Basically, the digitizer recognizes two shades: black and white. The background needs to be dark enough to be perceived as black even when the brightness is turned up high enough to make David’s arms and face and feet visible.
Second, it can’t reduce or enlarge.
Maybe if I paint his skin white and give him a white turban and shoot it against a black wall?
I still think this can work. The key is not to clean up the frames too much. The figure will be tiny and messy and look like crap… but I have faith that, when the frames are run in sequence at 15 fps, it’ll create an illusion of life that’s more amazing than anything that’s ever been seen on an Apple II screen. The little guy will be wiggling and jittering like a Ralph Bakshi rotoscope job… but he’ll be alive. He’ll be this little shimmering beacon of life in the static Apple-graphics Persian world I’ll build for him to run around in.
April 30, 1986
Spent the day getting DRAY to pack and unpack, load and save. Another couple of days and it’ll be doing everything DRAX should’ve done all along.
This is the utility I should have had for Karateka. It seems like a lot of work now, but it’ll pay for itself many times over when it comes time to cut out all those frames and put them in order.
