Rob Fulop interview

By Scott Stilphen
(1993, 2000)

Back in 1993, I had the privilege to speak with Rob Fulop - an accomplished 2600 game designer with both Atari and Imagic, and then the Creative Director and co-partner of P.F. Magic.  His work with the 2600 earned him several industry accolades, and the prestigious Game of the Year award in 1982 for his groundbreaking achievement with Demon Attack.

Q: Let's start with your educational background.

Rob Fulop: I have an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of California in Berkley (in 1978).  My summer job was at Atari.  I was hired by Nolan Bushnell and actually started working in the coin-op dvision, to make a sound effects editor and sounds for their coin operated pinball games, which was first used on their Superman pinball machine.  I returned the following year after leaving Cal, but they had no open positions in coin op, so they sent me upstairs to the consumer division where they hired me.  They gave me a VCS manual and told me to make any game I wanted.  I finally settled on Night Driver.  Since I had worked the prior summer in the coin-op group, I knew the guys there and I could go to their labs whenever I felt like it, which turned out to be extraordinary useful when porting their work to the VCS.  There was some tension between the two divisions, and I was the only programmer who felt welcome hanging around the coin-op team.

Q: Eugene Jarvis is often credited for writing all the sounds for Superman...

Rob Fulop: He probably made better ones after my summer gig ended!

Q: Besides Night Driver and Missile Command, did you do any other games?

Rob Fulop: I also did Space Invaders for the 400/800 computers.  That was also around the same time when Atari's home computers were released.  I remember goofing off with a text adventure engine on the Atari 800 over a long weekend and some teasing reference to Dennis Koble's office being littered with racing forms since he sometimes went to the race track at lunch time.  The game was called Marketing Adventure.

Q: I'm guessing you had access to the original arcade machines when you were doing your home versions of those?

Rob Fulop: When I started at Atari I went to that very game room every single day at lunch.  I was 20 years young and didn’t know a single person there and i had nobody to have lunch with.  I remember that after month one, I was the only person who had signed in for the previous 20 days.  I found it remarkable that nobody ever was there.

Q: How many machines did they have in there? I  recall reading an article about Atari when Nolan still owned it where he or the author mentioned there was an arcade and that every game that Atari ever released was in it.  Dave Joly has some photos of it circa 1982.

Rob Fulop: Yes, every Atari released coin op was there as well as a handful of finished Atari arcade games that didn’t field test well and thus were killed along the way.  They had rectangular room, with a full bank of machines on the two long walls.  The far wall had an oversized Atari pinball game and a regular Superman pinball.

Q: Your method of hiding your initials in Space Invaders and Missile Command was very ingenious!

Rob Fulop: My initials are in Missile Command, but I think it was later taken out in some versions of cartridges.  That really upset me because I thought it was neat that when it was found, people could tell their friends.  Atari was mad because I had left to go work at Imagic, so they went back into the code and took it out.  As far as I'm concerned, that just made it a collector's item.

Q: Exactly, because not that many have them.

Rob Fulop: Right.  But then, of course, games like Super Mario Bros. came out.  Those games are just filled with Easter eggs.

Q: So after Atari, you went to Imagic.

Rob Fulop: I had first worked on some stuff that was never released, and them I went to Imagic.  There was about four months after finishing Missile Command before I was awarded the “turkey bonus”.  During that time, I developed an original 2600 game.  It was a planetary fly-over pseudo first-person display, sort of like Missile Command from the perspective of the bombers.  Players would fire shots that would drop on the planet they were flying over, trying to take out the cities that sometimes fired back at you.  The game was focus-tested and it didn't do that well.  I was in the middle of improving it when I was approached to be a founder of Imagic.  I was advised strongly to take nothing with me so sadly I don't have the game in EPROM form, or even a source listing.  The assembly code was probably archived somewhere.  I don't even remember the working name, maybe "Death From Above 3", but I'm not really sure.  The finished game existed, though.  4K EPROMs were used for focus tests, circa 1980-81 perhaps.

At Imagic, I did Demon Attack, Cosmic Ark, and Fathom.  Right after Demon Attack, I did a game called Cubicolor.  It's a two-player puzzle game based on Rubik's Cube (the handheld puzzle). This was when Rubik's Cube was very popular.  It wasn't released because Imagic wanted an action game at the time.  It got put aside, and after Imagic folded, I ended up with about 50 prototype carts.  If there's a market for 2600 games, this will be a collector's item.  People who have played it seemed to like it; it's a fun game.

Q: Demon Attack was probably your biggest seller.  

Rob Fulop: Yes, that was the best one.

Q: What was it based on?  What was your inspiration for it?

Rob Fulop: Galaxian. That's pretty obvious!  The idea was to have a game where there was a lot to see.  The farther you got, the more there was.  There are basically seven different monsters, and we colored them eight different ways.  This led to 56 variations.  Actually, there are 84 waves.  It's a big game to see everything (Note: the graphics and play mechanic more closely resemble Phoenix, obviously).

Q: The manual mentions that after 84 waves, the game stops.

Rob Fulop: That's an interesting story.  The "game over" bug in Demon Attack sprung from a sloppy bad idea, hatched literally two days before the code freeze, after which the game would officially leave Development and enter Production.

I had spent prior two weeks desperately crunching what had started as 4,500+ bytes of compiled DA 6502 assembly into the 4,096 available on the ROM chip.  So I spent two weeks trying to take out 9% of the Demon Attack code/data without losing game functionality or introducing any new bugs.  It's the kind of work that is fun for awhile, and gets increasingly less fun the closer one gets to the end.  Getting to 4,200 was easy, getting to 4150 was much less so.  The next 30 bytes come out one at a time, using byte-saving techniques that no dignified programmer would ever admit to.  And then the final 25 bytes are pure examples of guerilla street coding in its most raw form.  In the case of Demon Attack, I ended up stumbling across a pot of gold right at the end - finding a seven byte color data table that was originally intended to add more color variation to each game level, but never been used.  So after deleting the unused table, the game was actually UNDER 4090 bytes, with six glorious bytes left over to spare!  I remember walking into lunch that day feeling like a true 2600 Code BOSS, and bragging about my six unused bytes, so the challenge now became, "What can be done in six bytes to improve the game?"

So I thought, "Hey I could have the game END!"  If somebody beat these angry demons, how would they respond?  Maybe they would just shut the game off and go away - the equivalent of beating a five-year-old child at checkers, whose shame of being defeated combined with their immaturity results in them turning over the checkerboard and running away, thus taking the victory "away" from their opponent.  So that was it!  Turns out six extra bytes did the deed:

------ next level initiation - run this code to set stuff up for the next level

LDA game_level. ; Retrieve current game level number
CMP #MAX_LEVELS ; Check if the last level of the has been completed
Loop. BGT Loop. ; If the new level number has bumped up over the maximum levels (84) then go into an endless loop

So the game essentially "froze" after beating level 84.  Ship it.

And yeah, so like three days later the game is shipped to Sears and Toys R Us, we started getting the, "WTF, the screen goes black after my kid played DA for two days straight." calls.  Whoops.  My bad.  Two minutes later, the "stewpid" game over feature is gone - but obviously not forgotten.  I don't know how many units shipped in the first run - lots and lots of them, probably 100k - but I really don't know.

Q: Cosmic Ark was a pretty hard game.

Rob Fulop: That was difficult?

Q: I thought so.

Rob Fulop: You see, that's the problem with making a video game.  If it's more difficult than the designer can play, then how do you test it?  I don't know if it's possible at the higher levels.

Q: I've gotten up to these "Pac-Man"-type beasties, at which point it gets so fast, it's unbelievable.

Rob Fulop: We actually had a promotion at Imagic to try to name all the creatures.

Q: Is there some kind of connection with Cosmic Ark and Dennis Koble's Atlantis?

Rob Fulop: Oh, right, the little space ship!  At the end of Cosmic Ark, this little space ship flew away, and we wound up putting it in Atlantis.  We were going to put the ship in a bunch of games.

Q: I noticed on some versions of Cosmic Ark, the TV Type switch flips the star background on and off. Were you aware of this?

Rob Fulop: No.  The star field was done because of a bug in the 2600 hardware (Ed.: The starfield pattern is the result of two different clock timings beating against each other INFO).  Later models don't have this, so there may be some differences there.

The year Ark was introduced, if I recall, we actually rented a big motor home so that we could put our dev system in the back and get two extra days of programming time driving across the country instead of flying so we could be editing code right up to the MOMENT before the show launched.  It was all about trading off time vs. quality.

Q: Getting back to Demon Attack, what was the lawsuit with Atari all about?

Rob Fulop: Atari sued us (Imagic) over the Demon Attack version for the Intellivision.  It looked like a game that Atari did (Ed.: Phoenix), but the suit was later dropped (Ed.: According to this New York Times article, the case was settled).

Q: Were there any games in your 2600 career that you never finished?

Rob Fulop: I worked on an Egyptian-themed game at Atari before I left.  It never quite worked out, and we didn't like it so it never got finished.  Later on, it became Riddle of the Sphinx (Ed.: Not sure why Atari wouldn't have sued over that).  About half the games that got started were never completed.  Bob Polaro did a neat Road Runner game.  Was that ever released?

Q: Yes, it actually came out about four years ago.  I think it was done very well.

Rob Fulop: He started that game about eight years before.  I think the best cart of all time was Douglas Neubauer's game...

Q: Solaris?

Rob Fulop: Yes.  That was the best thing when I left and he spent two years "in the dark" just doing that game.  But there was no market for it when he was done.

Q: That's a fantastic game.

Rob Fulop: What do you think is the best 2600 game?

Q: Probably Solaris.  It's definitely one of my favorites.

Rob Fulop: I also have a GameLine unit from back then.  It let you load carts over the phone...

Q: That's definitely a collector's item!  I remember seeing the ads for it when they were trying to get people to sign up.  Did you ever use it?

Rob Fulop: No, it never worked (Ed.: The GameLine service was active for several months).

Q: With your Imagic games, were there any little tricks that you put in?  In Fathom, the company's address is shown at the end of the game...

Rob Fulop: I never liked Fathom.

Q: Really?  I thought it was a good game.  The layout is quite big.

Rob Fulop: It was an 8K game.  That was the last game I did.  I never knew what it was when I started.  For all the other games, I had a vision for what they were going to be.  Fathom started with a neat picture that Michael Becker drew of a dolphin jumping out of the water.  He drew this graphic and we made a game out of it.  There was never any vision of what the game was.  It was this kind of "epic" where you're underwater, and then you fly in the air.  There are mermaids, too.  It just never felt like a game.  The best games are simple with a real vision of what it is, like Pitfall (by Activision).

I never really liked how the dolphin jumping out of the water never really seamlessly segued from the dolphin swimming up from under the water.  It's a real cheat, obviously, because at some point I take away joystick control from the user and just smash the animation up on the screen, letting the user control the dolphin again when it lands.  The "right" way to do it would be to actually move the dolphin itself OUT of the water and either morph it into a seagull right in front of your eyes, or, have the dolphin arc and dive back in to the water, with a little splash animation.  Such is how I wanted it to work, anyway.

But nobody could bare the thought of tossing out the little dolphin jump animation; after all, such had been the genesis of the whole game.  That animation was truly a "precious little child", and my wanting to "kill it" was quickly shot down by Dennis Koble; when we disagreed, Dennis brought in the Marketing people, and Bill Grubb, the CEO, and they beat me up pretty bad that it was fine as it is.  So that little animation remained, and to this day, I can't look at Fathom because of it; it's just so annoying knowing that another week or so would have made the dolphin jump sequence so much cooler.  Ever since then, I make it a point to kill my children a LOT earlier in the dev cycle, tossing out our early first efforts that looked great the first time, but as we got better at the task at hand, quickly became "second rate", until if left in the whole, becomes a true eyesore.

Q: Pitfall! had a similar beginning as well.  It started with a little demo of a running man.  David Crane just sat down and figured out the rest.

Rob Fulop: Well, we can't do that anymore!  Now, with CD games, it's like making a movie.  You have 10 people working on a project, and you can't just sit down and make it up as you go along.

Q: After Imagic, what did you end up doing?

Citizens' Voice 12-2-93

Citizens' Voice 12-18-93

Rob Fulop: I did some on-line games for Quantum, and then started making active video for Hasbro (Ed: for their NEMO system).  I did a few games for them, one of which is for the Sega Genesis CD called Night Trap.  It's basically a movie.  It's interesting - if you look back at Night Driver, it had 2K of code.  The last project we finished involved 650 megabytes of code.  Even though 12 years have gone by, and we have 2,000 times as many resources to use, the skills that make use of those resources to design a game are exactly the same.

Q: It's still the same process of approaching it?

Rob Fulop: I think so.  You're basically resource-constrained.  It's funny - I often call these CD players the "VCS" of video.  The 2600 VCS was really a horrible machine to program on.

Q: Other programmers have mentioned the same thing - it was really hard to get a good game out of it.

Rob Fulop: It took a year.

Q: How long does it take you to do a CD game?

Rob Fulop: A year, but now its 20 people and the budgets are half of a million dollars.  With games such as Night Driver, it was one guy sitting down for nine months, like writing a book.

Q: So after Hasbro, you went to PF. Magic?

Rob Fulop: Yes.  At PF. Magic, we do about five or six large projects a year

Q: Is this your own company?

Rob Fulop: I have a partner, John Scull.  There are 18 people in the company.

Q: May I ask what "PF." stands for?

Rob Fulop: We don't ever tell anyone - it's our secret! (Ed: See below for what it actually stands for.)

Q: I thought maybe there was something with the names - Imagic and PF. Magic.

Rob Fulop: I just like "magic" in the title of a company.  There's really no connection.

Q: What exactly are you working on?

Rob Fulop: We're working on games for the Sega Genesis CD, the 3DO platform, CDI, and the Super Nintendo.

Q: People in the industry are predicting the 3DO to be the next big thing.

Rob Fulop: We don't know.  At this point, I've worked on 15 platforms in my life.  To me, they're all the same.  It's the next "2600".  Whatever comes out next, they'll say it's wonderful, and it won't have enough memory!  The 3DO is definitely the next big thing to get excited about.  But it's all the same -  none of them have enough memory or processing power to do what you want, and they all take a year to do products for.  That's been the same for the last 12 years.

Q: What do you think about virtual reality?

Rob Fulop: Well, there's definitely no rush.  I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, not in the way it's being portrayed.  It's just not that exciting.  At the end of the day, I think Tetris is more fun!  I think something cool can come of it, but it won't be for a while.

Q: It will be interesting to see where they take it.  Right now, it's sort of a gimmick, or a toy.  Virtual Reality has been around for years.

Rob Fulop: Battlezone was a "virtual" game.

Q: What are some of your favorite games?

Rob Fulop: Tetris, Q*Bert, Pac-Man... I like puzzle-type games, and those that are abstract, rather than those that are more realistic or that try to imitate reality.

Rob Fulop: I particularly enjoyed attending one of the early "classic gaming" parties a few years ago, and being told by some woman that she heard that "Rob Fulop will be here later on!"   I wasn't sure if she was putting me on or not, so I asked her what she had heard about the guy.  She quickly confided in me that she had never met Mr. Fulop personally, but she had hear he talks rather fast, and was funny!  I'm not sure if she was more embarrassed than I was when she finally figured out who I was, but it was quite a memorable moment!
Another classic moment was during the time that Night Trap was getting a lot of negative publicity, with the primary "witch hunt" being led by Senator Joe Lieberman, who decided that "cleaning up video games" was as good a cause as any for him to get behind.  One day, my friend Michael (who wrote for the Washington Post at the time) called me up to announce that Senator Lieberman had gone out and recruited none other than CAPTAIN KANGAROO to show up in front of his "clean up video games committee" and talk about Night Trap, and for me to tune my television in to whatever channel was broadcasting this spectacle.  I still remember the chilling feeling of watching my childhood hero and friend, Captain Kangaroo, spout out some sort of rhetoric about how damaging a game Night Trap was, etc.  It was soooo clear that the old guy had never even seen the game, let alone play it.

Q: Do you ever see any of your old fellow 2600 programmers?

Rob Fulop: Oh yeah.  I see Dennis Koble all the time, and David Crane.  Many of them are still active in the industry.  I think Warren Robinett went to work for the military, and Howard Scott Warshaw doesn't design games anymore, but most of them are still around today.

Right after the interview was done, Rob mentioned that he had several copies of an unreleased game that he was interested in selling.   For more information about Cubicolor, you can find a current list of Cubicolor owners HERE.

* Note: PF. Magic stands for “pure fucking magic”.  The following is a website quote from Fulop that I recently found:

In 1997 Fulop sold PF. Magic, Inc. to The Learning Company.  Currently it's owned by UbiSoft.

Q: I recently learned about the hidden initials in your game, Fathom.  Besides VCS Missile Command and 400/800 Space Invaders, do you know of any Easter eggs in your other games?

Rob Fulop: The little green saucer, which appears in Cosmic Ark, flies around somewhere in Fathom, but I don’t recall how to trigger it.  There were no other hidden things in any carts that I worked on, however Night Driver has a terrible screen glitch.  If you drive with the paddle hard left and then turn hard right at certain parts of the track, the screen will roll – there’s too much calculation going on in the processor and it misses a screen retrace (Ed. The graphics for the saucer aren't in the code, so it's unknown if this was removed in the released version).

The original version of Night Trap we did for Hasbro featured a hidden scene with a topless Dana Plato, but I don’t know if it was added into the Digital Pictures version that came out on the Sega and PC.  Dogz/Catz II and III contain a few hidden animation sequences, but I ain’t telling what they are nor how to trigger them!

Q: On your website you mention that when you left Atari, you no longer felt the need to “hide” your name in your work.  Why did you decide to hide them in Fathom?

Rob Fulop: Basically I first did the initials because programmers received no credit for our work.  Then after a few games at Imagic, with my name on the box, people could actually contact me.  I had a big bunch of responses to the earlier hidden initials.  I realized that people just plain LIKED the little, hidden treats, so I put them back in Fathom.

Q: Can you tell me anything about Reaction (the precursor to Cosmic Ark)?  Was Midway’s 1980 coin-op Space Zap an inspiration?

Rob Fulop: Cosmic Ark started with a bug discovered during Demon Attack that filled the screen with stars!  To this day, nobody has ever explained to me WHY the player/missile register in the chipset goes crazy if diddled with the wrong way, but the effect blew me away and I wrote down how to recreate it (Ed.: Someone has finally done a complete analysis of what causes it).  So then I started fooling around with trying to make Space Zap – a game I adored and thought perfect for the VCS.  I added the star field trick, and then I turned the cannon into a big space ship.  At that point the game could have shipped, but it didn’t feel done; it felt sort of boring, so the secondary game of flying to the planets took up about 6 months of trying different stuff.

Q: Being you're a former professional poker player, I’m surprised you never designed a poker game (before RabbitJack, under Advanced Program Technology, a company you co-founded with Dennis Koble.  Dan Peri did the sounds and Ernest Adams did the PC-end software).  Any reasons why?

Rob Fulop: I didn’t think it made any sense to play a game involving “secret information”, such as poker, with a computer player/dealer, as players would worry that the computer was “peeking”.  Let’s face it, if I deal the cards and also know what they are, how fair of a game is it?

News blurb from the May 1984 issue of Computer Entertainer.

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