John Marvin interview

By Cyberroach
(1999)

A while ago I sat down with John Marvin, now a Software Development Manager at Microsoft.  By accident I found his name when I tried to sell an old Atari 2600 on an internal newsgroup.  John was looking for a console that he could use to show his son 'Crypts Of Chaos', a game which John had programmed a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away...).  He got the console for free, I asked him for an interview, and he agreed!  So here we go.

Q: Hi John, first of all thanks a lot for doing this, I know people at Microsoft are always very busy and it's hard to find some spare time around here for stuff like this.

John Marvin: No problem - I kind of miss these days of Assembly language programming and 1 Megahertz 6502s.

Q: Tell me, how did you get started with all of this?

John Marvin: Well, I was a big gamer, not just computer games, but also Dungeons & Dragons, board games, war games, Monopoly, Risk, and I played adventure games and what not.  And actually I answered an ad in the paper and it just said "Must have experience with Atari computers".  I had some experience with Atari computers and I went in, interviewed and thought I blew it.  Then they got me back a second time and they had a mainframe guy interview me and all I wanted to do was talk about Assembly language and he wanted to talk about Job Control Language and thought I really blew it.  But then they had me back for a third time so I said, "'I've gotta get it" and so I went in with a bunch of storyboards for games, for what become Crypts Of Chaos.

Q: So you designed that game?

John Marvin: Oh yeah, back then everybody did everything.  I even wrote the manual, so you can blame me for that, too.  I didn't do the artwork, the beautiful painting on the label, but I did the manual, the sound - everything.  It's only 4K in these ROMs; it would be hard for somebody who didn't understand programming to really do that, to be an effective designer.  Not like the teams we have now.

Q: A lot of the 20th Century Fox games are based on movies.  Is Crypts Of Chaos based on a motion picture?

John Marvin: No, this was one of the first games there; I was working for them before they were sold to 20th Century Fox.  It was a little startup, and it was created really to be sold to a larger company.

Q: Do you remember the name of the startup?

John Marvin: Abacus Systems!  There were two venture capitalists from Los Gatos, California who saw some of their neighbors getting rich out of Atari and Activision, and they wanted to do the same thing.  When they hired me, I was pretty cheap, and that was one of the reasons they hired me :)  And the ex-Atari programmers asked for stock options and I didn't even know what they were, so...

Q: You were a bargain.

John Marvin: Yes, a bargain!  They put me to work, and I was developing this before we were sold to 20th Century Fox.  Being part of Fox was weird.  Your company newsletter was all 20th Century Fox motion pictures and yes, there was a lot of pressure doing games that were based on movie titles.  I don't know if you ever saw the version of Alien that was basically Pac-Man.  And we had M*A*S*H, and I actually worked on a Planet Of The Apes game that never shipped.

Q: So was that done/completed?

John Marvin: Yes, but they decided not to market it and that was about the time I decided to leave to Epyx and work on big machines - Commodore 64s.

Q: What happened to the Planet Of The Apes?

John Marvin: I don't have the source code.  I don't know, it may not exist anymore.  We burned some ROMs, we had some test games, and had kids in to play it.  It actually still needed some work, as far as gameplay went, but management obviously had lost interest in it and I left, and three months later they closed the doors on 20th Century Fox games, so I think they lost interest in the entire unit.

Q: Was it based on the movies?

John Marvin: Yes, you had this human and you were chased by apes, and the only way to win the game was you had to find the Statue of Liberty like in the first movie.  There were different kinds of apes - the orangutans, the chimpanzees, and the gorillas - but like any VCS-thing, they were big and blocky.  It was a jump and run, and it never saw the light of day.  I remember there was a Porky's game that never came out as well.

Q: Oh, it did come out; they released it!

John Marvin: It did come out?

Q: Yeah, it's sort of related to the movie...

John Marvin: No, actually, you are talking about the second one.  There was a first one that was developed that didn't come out, and it had very little to do with the movie, just the name.  Remember the sign of the place, 'Porky's', was based on pigs, and the games was based on pigs, too.  In fact, it made no sense at all.

Working on these games was very tedious and exacting - you had only 76 machine cycles on a scan line.  Every scan line we could change what was going on on the screen.  The machine was really invented to do Tank and Pong, and by moving it beyond that you had to trick a lot; you had to use the same sprite and change the size, and it was supposed to be square; things were pretty squarish, but if you went over 76 machine cycles, your user screen started to roll, and you couldn't do too much.  The VCS had only 128 bytes of RAM, and when you put your code into the 4K ROM, you had only 128 bytes for variables which included your stack, and that was somewhat limited :)  A good thing was there was no stupid operating system to get in your way :)

Q: What kind of development systems did you guys use?

John Marvin: Development was on these 6502 emulators from a company called GenRad (Ed.: General Radio Company in Westford, Massachusetts); that's burned into my mind.  They were very expensive machines.  We hooked them up to a real VCS and they had a bunch of cables coming out off the back of them, and we had something that was the connection of a cartridge that would connect to the cables of the GenRad.  We could do breakpoints and could debug the code, all in Assembly language of course, and it was hooked up to the VCS.  There were five machines and they were expensive, but 20th Century Fox could afford them.

Q: So it was pretty decent to develop with?

John Marvin: Well, it was a pain, but that wasn't their fault.  The pain was you had 4K to fit Assembly into it. If you wanted bit patterns, that was in the 4K.  It wasn't only code - all your graphics had to be in there.  And when you have 128 bytes of RAM, I often looked at one byte as eight one bit flags.  There were really eight variables there.  And you'll see a lot of reuse.  If you look at my game Crypts Of Chaos, I used eight colors and eight monster shapes to generate what the game thought of as 64 monsters.  That meant I could reuse the graphics, just with different colors, and if you look at how they approached, there was a hardware pixel doubling that was part of the VCS.  First they start at a pixel, and as they come closer you get two pixels, and then they get a little bigger and then they get into an 8x8 sprite, and then I could double that without actually putting more graphics into the cartridge.  Of course I've could have make it look better.  I could have fit an extra shape in there, but I couldn't, so I used the doubling.

Q: A lot of other companies had 8K byte cartridges by bank-switching 4K blocks.  Was 20th Century Fox ever thinking of that?

John Marvin: I don't think we ever released a bank-switched game.  No wait, that's not true, we had M*A*S*H - M*A*S*H was an 8K game - there is like 4K for the operation game and 4K for the helicopter game.  Yeah, the bank-switching was one way of doing it, but once you switched, it was a different world.  You couldn't transfer any knowledge across. That's why often it was in games where you had different areas or levels.  And of course they were more expensive to produce and Fox was concerned with making money.  Fox got into it at the same time everybody else was getting into it.  Even Quaker Oats was putting out games.  We would go to CES shows and the amount of people doing VCS games grew phenomenally - there were even people doing pornographic VCS games which, if you consider how blocky things were, that was disturbing on many levels :)

Q: After your were finished with Crypts Of Chaos and Planet Of The Apes, what was next?

John Marvin: Well, I finished Planet of The Apes, and there wasn't a lot of interest in either fixing that up or in developing the gameplay.  At that time, Epyx was looking for Assembly language programmers, and I was interested in the very large machines going into people's houses called Commode 64 that actually had 64K of RAM.  Of course you couldn't use all that until you shut off the operating system, so all good games would do that, because operating systems as we know are inherently evil to all games.  We would use the operating system to load ourselves into memory, switch the OS off, and have the entire RAM.  Epyx are still around, and I actually saw some Nintendo cartridges from Epyx.

Q: Any other programs you wrote for the Atari 2600?

John Marvin: Yes, I had to write a Pong as my first program, that was to see if I could actually hack it.  We hired some ex-Atari programmers, and there was all this material and we had some reverse-engineered documentation about where to poke things and what memory addresses to use to get sprites rolling.  And so the idea was to get Pong going because it was designed to do Pong.  That was really easy to do because everything was rectangles and the hit-detection was done by the hardware.  I got Pong working in about a week-and-a-half to two weeks, and they were pretty impressed with that.  It was about half a K of code.  The early games before Crypts of Chaos, before I was involved in games, were 2K games, and the old programmers looked down on us kids for using 4K because only a wimp would need 4K :)  Basically, I had my storyboards, and the president of the company saw my enthusiasm and let me go.  There is good and bad things about that I think.  When it's your first real game job, it's really good to get a lot of feedback from other people, and we really didn't have that.  Everybody worked on their own, and so there are things that... you know... sometimes I wish I could redo Crypts Of Chaos, the right way.

Q: The right way as in...?

John Marvin: The gameplay.  I was too enamored with the model that you had to die sometime.  For one thing, there is no place to save your character, there was no disk; you could get extra energy, but you'd never get it as fast as you were losing it, and I did get some feedback from my office mate on when you're moving your cursor at the bottom of the screen to choose different weapons.  He said why force people to go from left to right, why not wrap around?  And so I changed that.  I got some small tweaks from people, but as far as the bigger gameplay, I drew the maps on graph paper like I learned as a good dungeon master.  I decided what the frequencies of monsters would be.  I also think I could have done a better job with the hardware doing the background.  I was very ambitious doing a first person 3-D game on the VCS, a lot of chutzpa, and it certainly doesn't look like Doom :)

I think the best thing we could have had was an atmosphere where people sat down and critiqued each other's games because, really what we had was an atmosphere of competition between the developers.  We got royalties for the games, and if somebody else's game did better than yours, they just made more money, so there was an 'every man for himself' atmosphere.  I mean, I had friends and we helped each other, but it was only at later companies that I got into environments where it was more collaborative, and so all this do-it-yourself-gung-ho mode is really nice and it's very romantic to think about it, but everybody has blind spots and nobody could tell you to change direction when you were obviously wrong.

Q: You just mentioned being a dungeon master.  Is that where Crypts Of Chaos came from?

John Marvin: Oh yes, I started playing TSR's original Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, so I had been a dungeon master forever and ever.  For me, that was my dream job!  If I could get paid for making games and make people run around in dungeons slaying monsters, I just couldn't think of a better way to make money.  I would go "ka-ching!" sometimes when I realized I was cashing a paycheck for doing basically my hobby.

Q: Sounds good to me!

John Marvin: I published some articles in the Dragon Magazine, the magazine from the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, and I was very into that hobby.  I'm still playing role-playing games like all the massively multiplayer fantasy role playing games, like Ultima Online, Everquest, and so.  It's just really starting and I'm really excited about it, and I'm jealous of the people doing it.

Q: What other games from 20th Century Fox or the start-up do you recall that never made it?

John Marvin: There was a game called Bank Heist.  I'm not sure if that got out.  It was supposed to be a Bonnie & Clyde.  As I said ,there was a lot of pressure to use movies, and this was a bank robbing game, a maze game.  I thought it was a lot of fun, but I think that they found out that Bonnie & Clyde was a bigger license than they could afford to put on this game, and 20th Century Fox didn't seem to have total ownership of the license even so they had made the movie and... I don't know all the details, what happened to the game.  There was also Alligator People.  Alligator People was a really bad 1950s movie about people that are being injected with a drug by a mad scientist, and they are slowly turning into alligators.  It takes place in the swamps in Florida and it was a perfect Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie!  A developer found out that Fox owned it, and so he worked on it.  It was almost like a Frogger where you have to run through a moving maze and all these alligators.  But there were also syringes that you had to dodge, and if a syringe touched you, you slowly turned into an alligator.  Now, this was the VCS, so we're not talking too graphic, but I was quite amazed by it.  I think I still have an Alligator People T-shirt somewhere.  It doesn't fit me anymore.  My son wears it as a night shirt.  I really miss that game :)

Q: So that one never made it out?

John Marvin: No, it never made it.  Nobody seemed to be interested.  We would play-test games, and sometimes they wouldn't make it out because of the play-test, and that one didn't make it out because it was a little bit too slow moving for the kids that played it, too easy for them.  And the developer had left a switch in, for one of the switches on the back of the VCS for unlimited lives, and management was pretty irritated.  There was another game, a surfing game, where you surfed a rainbow.  That was taking advantages of something you could do cheaply with the VCS - each scan line you could change the color and you got this great rolling rainbow on the screen.  It was more a screensaver than a game, as the problem was there wasn't a lot of gameplay in it.

Q: Do you remember the title of that one?

John Marvin: Candyland Surfing was the title.

Q: Any other games?

John Marvin: Some of the games we published were actually done by Sirius Software, like Beany Bopper.

Q: Sirius?  The company that wrote a lot of software for the Commodore VIC-20?

John Marvin: Yes, we licensed some games from them.  Beany Bopper was one, and there was another one, with crabs.  I forgot the name of it.  There were these flying bricks and crabs...

Q: Deadly Duck?

John Marvin: Yeah!  I still remember the Beany Bopper radio ads.  They had this jingle, "Beany Bopper, Beanye Bopper, so much fun you cannot stop it!", or something like that!  I guess overall about half the games never made it out, which was very expensive.

Q: It wasn't attempted to salvage them or fix them up?

John Marvin: No, and what was very interesting is, there wasn't any code sharing, not only between developers but also between two games of the same developer.  There was the routine for the score keeping, but that was pretty much it; a lot of duplicated efforts.  And with this form of code, structured programming was right out.  You didn't want to call subroutines, because that would put stuff on the stack, and you only had a few bytes for your stack and variables, and so we just jumped around in the code to here and there.  Nobody said you couldn't share your code, but of course the fact that we didn't use any subroutines made it hard to share, you know, little code-snippets, and jump in and jump out.

Q: I assume you were a real full-time employee and you got your regular paycheck or something.

John Marvin: Yeah, but we weren't allowed to get paychecks.  This is the way the story goes: the guys that started the startup and sold it to Fox were on the board of directors for Silicon Valley Bank, and they opened accounts in their own bank for each of us and then we would get direct deposits into our accounts.  So,we didn't get any paychecks because they wanted us to use their bank.  These guys were pretty clever.  The building that we worked in, they leased it to 20th Century Fox.  They knew what they were doing.  This whole deal between 20th Century Fox and them was very profitable.

Q: Did you get any royalties from sold games?

John Marvin: Yes, since we were salaried... I forget the details, but it was something like 25 cents a cartridge after a certain number had been sold.  So, for Crypts Of Chaos, they made like 50,000, and they cut me check right away, and I went out and bought a Jeep!

Q: So it was a big check!

John Marvin: Yes, it was, and I had a very small salary.  When you compared it to a programmer working for a non-game company, it was a very small salary, and all of a sudden not only was I doing stuff I liked, but I was paid for it too, so I was really happy!  Of course, for people who didn't get their stuff out the door, it was very difficult, and it made code sharing even more difficult.  When some code got shared in multiple games, how would you deal with that?  It was an idea... Activision was basically started by some Atari people that wanted royalties, and they wouldn't give them.  They were called 'The Gang Of Four', four programmers who decided we'll give ourselves royalties, and they started their own company.  And then the whole industry started paying royalties.  When the VCS died, this business model died too, and pretty soon it was, "If your game is a hit, you'll get a bigger bonus", but for a while you got a flat percentage.

Q: Were you allowed to put your initials into Crypts Of Chaos?

John Marvin: My name is on the rulebook and my name was in the magazine ads.

Q: So 20th Century Fox did advertising in magazines?

John Marvin: Yes!  I remember this one guy that sold Atari 400 games, and he would put four ads for four different games into the magazines, look which one got the best response, and then start programming.  And if people had sent in checks for the other games, he would just apologize and send them back.  I guess it was a cheap way to do market research :)

Q: So what happened after 20th Century Fox and Epyx?

John Marvin: At Epyx, I worked on Lunar Outpost (we called it "Lunar Outhouse"!) for the Commodore 64.  I had an Assembler that ran on a cassette tape drive, and an Assembly debugger plugged into the back of the C64.  I did the "3-D shoot at the saucers with your missile tank" part, and Randy Glover, who had a hit with the Jumpman game, did the "drive around the lunar map" part.  He would pass me in the number of spaceships to fight and what type, and I would do the battle.  It was pretty fun.  I reused the sprites from the attacking ships, turned them dark gray, and put them on the ground as shadows.  Each type of attack ship had different attack patterns, and they all wanted to bomb the moon base buildings at the bottom of the screen.  So, it was kind of a 3-D cross between Space Invaders and Missile Command, with lots better colors and noises.  The second Epyx game I did was supposed to be a "port" of Silicon Warrior from the Atari 800 to the Commodore 64.  But what I had to port was a hard copy printout of Atari Assembler.  I checked it and reinvented it by copying what it looked and played like.  It was Tic-Tac-Toe in outer space, on a five-by-five grid.  I used a pentatonic scale in five octaves, so it sounded very Japanese.  The president of the company, Michael Katz, didn't like that, and said it "Sounded like a Chinese whore house."  He made me change it to ugly buzzing, like the Atari version.  He was the same guy who told me to add the shadows to Lunar Outpost, so 50-50 I guess.  Can't say I miss him, but the rest of the company was filled with lots of great people.  Some went on to develop the Atari Lynx and the 3DO machines.

I was working on Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, based on the Anne McCaffrey book, when the board of directors laid off half the company, including me (Ed.: This was to be the sequel to Dragonriders of Pern.  John Marvin reached out to the webmaster for the since-defunct Epyx Shrine website LINK and said, "I was maybe 1/3 of the way through it. There were two aspects to it: thread fighting on dragon back, and plague containment.").  The only saving grace was the president got laid off, too!  That was it for me and games.  I went into robotics for a few years, and then to user interface, imaging, and video.  At Microsoft, I've worked on multimedia, video editing, and mapping software.  I love maps, so I love my job, but I still think about getting back into games...

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