He ported Donkey Kong and lived to tell about it

Growing up I jumped from computer to computer for a number of years. At times working on multiple systems at once. In no particular order I was on computers from Apple, Atari, Commodore, Colecovision Adam, TI 99/4A* and oh yeah the Trash 80 for dos. In that time I wrote some basic programs (and played some in Assembler making my screen flash and blink) and had some fun.  But I never could imagine squeezing all that Landon Dyer did into Donkey Kong in as little space as he had too…

The Atari Program Exchange (a captive publishing house) was holding a contest. The grand prize for the winning game was $25,000. I’d spent a semester of college blowing off most of my courses and doing almost nothing except work on Myriapede. I finished it with a week or two to spare and submitted to the contest.

A few weeks after I mailed Myriapede off to the contest, I got a letter from Atari that said (1) they were very impressed with the work, but (2) it looked to them like a substantial copy of Centipede (well, it was) and that they’d rejected it for that reason. The subtext was they would probably sue me if I tried to sell it anywhere else, too. I was crushed. I wound up going to a local user group and giving a couple copies of it away; I assume that it spread from there. I hear that people liked it (”best download of 1982″ or something like that).

A few weeks later I got a call from Atari; they wanted to know if I was interested in interviewing for a job. I was practically vibrating with excitement. I flew out and did a loop, and made sure to show Myriapede to each interviewer; it was a conversation stopper every time. Until they saw it they kind of humored me (”yeah, okay, you wrote a game”), then when the game started up they started playing it, got distracted and (”ahem!”) had to be reminded that they were doing an interview! One of the guys I talked to was the author of Atari’s “official” Centipede cartridge. He said on the spot that my version was better than his.
[Read the complete story at DadHacker]

Not only is he a extraordinary programmer with a great story. But he is also a gifted writer telling a great story.

Tags: Computers, Gaming, History, Interesting, Irony, Programming