Desert Island Disks: Dan Kitchen
What cherished games would you take to the island?
The classic coder explores his fascinating career in videogames
In a career stretching across four decades, Dan Kitchen has worked on over 180 games, as a coder, designer and producer. Join us on a journey from the Atari 2600 to the Xbox and back again
With such a staggering number of titles to his name, we have taken inspiration from Jacques’ ‘seven ages of man’ speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It to discuss Dan Kitchen’s gigantic back catalogue. Here, we present the ‘seven ages of Dan’… We begin with the age of the infant. Dan was born and raised in New Jersey, USA, and spent his formative years surrounded by technology. His father loved tinkering with electronics, and in the late Sixties, his older brother Steve constructed a desk-sized computer from component parts in their basement. “He’s the one who got me interested in electronics,” says Dan. “After high school, I was all set to go to university but Steve had gone to work for a local company, Wickstead Design Associates, making electronic gadgets for cars. They got into making toys and games and my other brother Garry ended up working there, too.”
Garry created the hugely popular handheld game Bank Shot for Parker Brothers, and in 1979 Dan joined his siblings at the company. “How could I not,” smiles Dan. “I loved them both. The age difference negated any rivalry. I looked up to them.”
The second age of man is the whining schoolboy, reluctantly dragging himself to class, but Dan’s enthusiasm for electronics and programming made him a very willing student. He collaborated with Garry on the handheld LED pinball game Wildfire, released in
1979, and in the same year, he acquired an Apple II. “I was a big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games,” he grins. “I fell in love with text adventures instantly and knew I wanted to make my own.”
By this time, Steve had departed from Wickstead and moved west, and with their eldest brother gone, Garry and Dan decided to set up their own company, ISS (Imaginative Systems Software). They secured a contract with Hayden Software, a local book publisher wanting a slice of the growing computer games market, to write six Apple II games. Having taught himself assembly language, Dan released his first text adventure, Crystal Caverns, in 1982, earning the tidy sum of $6,000 for his efforts. The game was a fairly traditional treasure hunt set beneath a spooky mansion, but for his second title Dan cast the player as private investigator Al Clubs, grandson of ‘a famous detective of another era and another suit’, on the trail of an abducted heiress.
“The idea for Crime Stopper came from one of my brother’s friends, Barry Marx, a writer and a brilliant chap. He suggested he write the story and I would make it interactive using my Crystal Caverns engine. And he’s responsible for the Sam Spade pun,” Dan assures us.
As Dan created his adventure games, his brother Garry sat on an adjacent desk in their basement studio, also using an Apple II but, having exploited the open architecture of the machine, he was using it to code games not for home computers but for consoles. The brothers were about to play with the big boys. And so we come to the age of the lover. Dan’s great paramour was the Atari 2600, but in 1981 it was hard for anyone outside Atari and the newly formed Activision to even get a first date with the wood-veneered beauty.
“I was only able to code for the 2600 because Garry reverse-engineered the machine and created a 4K board we could plug into a slot at the back of the Apple II,” he explains. “Garry wrote the game Space Jockey [published by US Games] and then got the deal to convert Donkey Kong. Once I’d finished Crime Stopper, I started learning about coding for the 2600 and began to make a game with flowerpots and called it Flower Power…”
It was the seed of an idea which would eventually grow into Crackpots, his first 2600 game (see RG203 for
in and Garry Dan (left) already had 1969. They in computer homemade a built by basement their Steve. brother elder
“We had a photo of the four Activision founders with our faces drawn over theirs. We would say, ‘One day, we will be those guys’”
Dan Kitchen
the full ‘Making Of’ article), but first Dan and
Garry – who had been joined at ISS by Garry’s brother-in-law, Kevin Calcutt, and John Van Ryzin – were courted by both Atari and Activision. “We visited Atari first and walked through the lab where games were being developed,” Dan recalls. “Garry and I were talking about our skillset and how we’d like to be credited for our work. The guy showing us around said, ‘Credited? I could get towel designers to do what you do.’”
They returned to New Jersey disheartened, but the next week they were flown out to Activision’s HQ in California and had a very different experience. “I remember the only other person on the upper deck of the plane was Marty Feldman,” chuckles Dan. “They wined and dined us. We were already enamoured by Activision before we visited them. We actually had a photo of the four founders up on our wall at ISS with our faces drawn over theirs. Garry would say, ‘One day, we will be those guys.”
And now, they were. Sort of. They joined Activision but rather than move to the West Coast, they became the company’s East Coast design division, staying in New Jersey, deliberately kept separate from the original quartet of game creators in California, with the hope they would bring a different perspective to making 2600 titles. They were installed in a plush office and paid handsomely – Dan’s starting salary in 1981 was $17,000 with a bonus of up to $30,000. “We felt like we had arrived,” beams Dan. “We were given the freedom to create. It was like The Beatles, the four of us coming together, like a band. It was a magical time.”
The fab four produced some magical games, including Dan’s aforementioned Crackpots, Garry’s Keystone Kapers and the brilliant HERO by John Van Ryzin, until the infamous videogame crash in the US broke the spell.
The fourth age of man is the soldier and Dan was on the frontline during the 2600 civil war, which would see the superpowers of Atari and Activision attacked from all sides. “My brother saw it coming,” sighs Dan. “One evening in 1983, Garry and I stopped off at a Video Shack store. We often did to see how our games were doing, and we saw a game not by Atari or Activision. It was Skeet Shoot by Games By Apollo. Garry looked at the screenshot on the box and said, ‘The industry is dead.’ He knew that if people could make games for the 2600 but with no willingness to make them good, everyone would jump in and flood the market with poorly designed games. And he was right.”
The influx of substandard titles, as well as some questionable financial decisions by the management at
Atari, led to a collapse in confidence in the whole console business. All was not lost, however. The home computer market remained largely unaffected, so Activision redirected its developers to produce games for an array of home micros. Dan stopped work on the sequel to Keystone Kapers and began working on a number of Commodore 64 titles, including The Rocky Horror Show. Did he go full ‘method coder’ and program in fishnet stockings and a basque, we wonder?
“Almost,” he smirks. “I loved the Commodore 64. I was one of many programmers on that game. It had actually been designed in England but I coded here in New Jersey and I was pleased with how it came out. Though I still can’t do the Time Warp.”
By 1986, it was time for the Kitchen boys to do a jump to the left. Activision closed its East Coast division and with their hand rather forced, the brothers established their own game development studio, Imagineering. “Frankly, we were happy to leave,” says Dan. “It wasn’t the same Activision and we’d become disillusioned with it. The NES was out and we didn’t think they were focusing on the right areas. We were itching to do our own thing.”
So we arrive at the age of the justice, characterised by wisdom and experience, and the brothers applied both to
“I fell in love with text adventures instantly and knew I wanted to make my own”
Dan Kitchen
their new venture. Dan worked on such games as Destroyer Escort, Flight Of The Intruder and the Apple II conversion of Little Computer People for a variety of publishers, including his former employer. He also collaborated with his sibling on Garry Kitchen’s Gamemaker, helping with the bulk of the demos that came with the package to showcase its potential. “It was such a brilliant tool,” enthuses Dan. “I used it to convert Dave Crane’s Pitfall! for the C64 in just two weeks. You could do amazing things with it! As I was producing the demos, I would say, ‘Hey Garry, can I have an instruction that does this?’ and he’d add in new tools to give you more power.”
Imagineering built up a strong relationship with Nintendo, producing many titles for the NES and later the SNES, including a string of Simpsons games. “We were big fans of the show,” says Dan. “Matt Groening would send us reference material and it was all very exciting. Games like Bart Vs The Space Mutants and Bart Vs The World were so big, we each took a world or two to code, and I liked putting Bart in fantasy places, like on a pirate ship or in Ancient Egypt. We were given a lot of creative freedom.”
From the late Eighties right through to the mid-nineties, Dan worked on an array of licensed games, from Ren & Stimpy to Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes. His approach was always to immerse himself in the source material, once spending ten hours straight watching Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons in preparation for a Game Boy title, and endeavoured to include little ‘Easter eggs’ for fans of the show. Did he ever worry that a licence might not actually provide a viable videogame scenario, we ask?
“Oh yeah – Home Improvement,” he laughs, rolling his eyes. “We got a deal to do a Goofy game for the Sega Genesis, and after that, Disney started showing us other licences they had and one of those was Home Improvement. It was going for a song! It was a hit
TV show and they wanted to expand the brand. I codesigned [the game]. We met Tim Allen and the team on the set, and of course, it was a Hollywood sound stage – so any other sound stage could be right next door…”
Dan’s ingenious approach meant players could dispatch dinosaurs and mummies with blowtorches and staple guns in a game described as, ‘Pitfall! with power tools’. He took a similarly imaginative approach to tie-in games as diverse as Casper The Interactive Adventure and Kristi Yamaguchi Fantasy Ice Skating, and his ability to secure big-name licences would prepare him for the new millennium.
Now we step into the age of the pantaloon. No, this is not the age when men wear ridiculous trousers. In commedia dell’arte, a popular form of theatre in the 16th century, the ‘pantaloon’ is a principal character, synonymous with wealth and status. And money was certainly coming Dan’s way. “In the late Nineties, I was introduced to Majesco, a little company that needed games,” he recalls. “Morris Sutton, the founder and CEO, had found a niche remaking old titles at a budget price. He asked me if I knew the game Frogger. I replied, ‘Sure, I love it.’ He said, ‘Here’s £100,000. Make it for the Game Boy. And do you know this game…?’ By the time I walked out of there, I had a deal worth half a million dollars to write five games. He literally threw money at me.”
Dan put his team together, which included old Imagineering employees such as Dave Lubar, and delivered the quintet in six months. That was enough to get him hired as VP of handheld development for Majesco and he oversaw a myriad titles across both Nintendo and Sony handhelds, including many old Atari titles via a deal with Hasbro. “In that first year, we brought in around $22 million dollars in revenue. I made Morris a disgusting amount of money.”
If you needed more evidence that Dan was at the top table when it came to videogame deals, listen to his tale of licensing Taxi Driver for the PS2. “We’d paid $250,000 for the licence and paid the developers $1.25 million upfront to get the game completed. The game was about three quarters complete when I get a call from Sony telling me we had a problem. I asked what the issue was and they replied, ‘Marty doesn’t want you to do the game.’ I was like, ‘Marty who… wait, you mean Martin Scorsese? Holy shit!’ I reminded them we’d already paid out $1.5 million on this game and we couldn’t just kill it. They said, ‘Marty says if you go ahead, he’ll make sure you never licence another fucking movie again.’ We cancelled it. Just like that. And I’d spent the last six months securing a deal to get Robert De Niro to do the voiceover for Travis Bickle, too!”
Though Shakespeare views the final age of man as a descent into senility, Dan has managed to revisit his childhood with his cognitive abilities intact. Spurred on by the discovery of the prototype of his unfinished sequel to Keystone Kapers in his off-site storage facility, he decided to rewrite the game from scratch and plans a Kickstarter campaign to facilitate a physical release of the game later this year. “It’s a better game now than it was back in 1983 because I’m a better coder now,” he grins. “It was the game I started after Crackpots and I did seven more VCS games after that. I’ve learned a lot more.”
The process has rekindled his love for developing for the Atari 2600 and Dan has already begun a second game. “I was sitting in a tiki bar in California and I thought, ‘What kind of game would Steve Cartwright do?’ I’ve always admired his games, like Barnstorming, and I love those Cunard posters of transatlantic liners. I imagined the Activision rainbow coming out of the smokestacks as you cross the ocean from New York to Southampton, dodging icebergs and picking up shipwrecked stragglers. The title came to me in an instant – Bon Voyage!”
Long may your journey continue, Dan.
“Martin Scorsese said, ‘If you go ahead with the Taxi Driver game, I’ll make sure you never license another fucking movie again”
Dan Kitchen