A Moment With
Activision legends tell Paul Drury about their new venture
Paul Drury spoke to David Crane, Garry Kitchen and Dan Kitchen about their brandnew venture: Audacity Games
David Crane left Atari in 1979 to cofound Activision, kickstarting the whole thirdparty software business, and created the best-selling original title for the Atari 2600, Pitfall!. Garry and Dan Kitchen were key players in Activision’s East Coast studio, producing Keystone Kapers and Crackpots, respectively. The trio launched Audacity Games earlier this year, a company dedicated to creating new games for old consoles.
Let’s start with the name. Do you see this venture as a bold move? David Crane: Yes, it’s audacious to make new games for a 40-year-old console. People say, “I never go backwards”, but we love those old consoles and love the retro gaming people. They’re always so pleasant when we visit shows. We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think we could do it right. And the company name had to start with the letter A because of Atari, Activision, Absolute… and now Audacity!
Garry Kitchen: David and I had been discussing for a while the idea of collaborating on a new 2600 title, with the discussions seemingly occurring every time we came back from a retro gaming conference. The enthusiasm of the community was infectious and the question [of whether we would ever make 2600 games again] inevitably came up at each show. The most amazing part of this three-year journey to me is the fact that we made the game in a complete ‘cone of silence’. We were never tempted to even hint at what we were doing because we knew from experience that it wasn’t a real product until it was done. The last thing we wanted to do was become vapourware.
Tell us about your first release, Circus Convoy. GK: From the get-go, David had ambitious ideas about the scale of what he wanted to do. His stated goal to me was to make one of the top-five games ever released on the platform. Anything less and it wasn’t worth it. With that in mind, David quickly embarked on building the technologies necessary for a large scale, adventure style game, including his impressive resource management system. We toyed with the idea of a road convoy of 18-wheelers, but it didn’t take hold until I was able to prove that we could make an impressive-looking truck cab.
The game is remarkable for something created on hardware over 40 years old.
DC: Yes but it would absolutely be possible to have made Circus Convoy in the Eighties – there’s no hardware acceleration or anything like that. It would have been an expensive game because the ROM is larger than the ones we used back then but that’s because it’s the smallest one we could buy these days!
GK: We knew that we had to do our best to raise the bar in all areas, including the graphics. Making graphics on the 2600 requires much more than just artistic talent. There’s an enormous amount of technical knowledge needed to create an impressive 2600 art asset. Very early on, David created a powerful graphics editor which allowed us to take the graphics to the next level. With that tool, I was able to experiment and try out a number of different techniques to see if we could do more than we’d done in the past. I remember delivering the giraffe object, to David… we both stepped back and looked at it and said, “Wow, for the system, that’s really something special.”
The game also manages to include some very modern features, like QR codes.
DC: When you design a game, you design it for the hardware. This is done on hardware from the Seventies but then you use techniques you developed over the years. I wanted players to be able to submit scores, so why not get them to point their phones at the screen and it automatically enters your high score? You can get gameplay tips, too – the QR code on-screen takes you straight to the bit you want to know about.
There’s also been a movement around speedrunning over the last 20 years so all of our games will have an elapsed timer that shows up in your score and that determines your rank. We wanted to put all these things into our game that just weren’t there in the Eighties.
Your second game, Casey’s Gold, pushes the hardware, too.
Dan Kitchen: When I started working again on the 2600 in 2018, I knew that I wanted to recreate a game I had begun in 1983 which had been shelved due to the great videogame crash that year. It was supposed to be the spiritual sequel to my brother Garry’s hit, Keystone Kapers. It placed the main character, Keystone Kelly, on an Oldwest steam train, this time chasing bandits instead of Harry Hooligan. I started to reconstruct the game from memory and I was about a year into the programming when to my surprise, I » found the original 1983 prototype cartridge of Keystone Kannonball while cleaning out my off-site storage! In the last year, it’s evolved into Casey’s Gold, which is a different game but I’m very happy my original concept of a train adventure game will finally be in the hands of players.
What has the reception been like to Audacity Games?
DK: It’s been amazing! I knew our fans would be excited that we were designing new games for the 2600, but I never imagined the overwhelming enthusiasm I’ve seen these last few months. We’re delighted to have returned to our roots and are very grateful that the fans are happy, too. I’m certain Casey’s Gold won’t be our last 2600 release.
DC: We had no idea how many we would sell. Pricing was tricky, too. In the early Eighties, games like Pitfall! and Keystone Kapers had a suggested retail price of $39.99 – that would be $107 today. So we’re well under that! We knew there were some collectors – you know who you are – who must have the best, so we produced a VIP edition full of cool stuff. People were clamouring for that. We wanted it to be an exclusive thing so we settled on a 100 copies but we could have sold three times as many!
Are you considering producing games for other retro machines?
DC: We love the retro gaming community and the Atari 2600 was our first love so we went in that direction. We still have more to do on that but there are lots of other retro consoles, too. We will be a cartridgebased business, starting with the 2600, and then try to work with Nintendo to publish on the NES and SNES. We’ll only do it if we can work out a licensing agreement and do it right – and high quality, like we did in the Eighties.
Visit www.audacitygames.com for more on current and future releases.