Readers’ Questions

Retrobob: Tell us some Penn and Teller stories!

They were wonderful chaps. I remember one meeting when Penn said, ‘I want to make the most boring videogame ever. You’re driving a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas in real time. Can you guys do that?’ And so the minigame Desert Bus was born. Fucking brilliant! The game was finished but never got released. I asked them in 2015 if I could release it on mobile to mark the 20th anniversary, and we talked for six months until Penn and Teller said they liked the fact it was underground and off the radar.

Merman: What was your worst experience of ‘crunch’ to get a game finished?

Ghostbusters for the Atari 2600. I had to write that game in 12 weeks from beginning to end. I was almost hospitalised at the end I was so exhausted. I got mono and was totally wiped out… but I did it!

Cafeman: What do you think is missing from today’s popular console games, if anything?

The ability to plug in and play. With modern games, you’ve always got load times. Gameplay-wise, in some cases it can feel like you’re playing prerendered movies. Your character has beautiful animation but then you have to stop and press a button for them to perform an action and that can disconnect the player.

Learnedrobb: Of all the systems you worked on, which do you feel forced you to be most creative?

Definitely the Atari 2600. I had no graphic chip, minimal memory, nothing to help me control what is on-screen, just the television raster and some registers.

Fgasking: Any games that you worked on that were pretty much finished but never got released?

Hyper Space Delivery Boy. It was an incredible adventure game full of such detail. John Romero created it with Tom Hall and it has so much love built into it. They created a GBA version of it for us but the retailers said they couldn’t sell it so it never got released, which was sad because it was such fun.