© Copyright 2010 by Entropy Enigneering
Shortly after, another new innovation called CD-ROMs came out and there was a lack of content on the things.
Great technology, but nothing to see. Since I had some friends in the space community at that point, we thought
that we could use good old Video Show Assistant to put out a slideshow. The project grew. It eventually became
Return to the Moon and included a lunar landing simulator, and a lunar atlas among other entertaining programs
for exploring and learning about the Moon. It even had a slideshow of Moon footage and some rather unique
audio clips. Did you know that the first words from the Moon from one of the Apollo crews was “Bam!” Guess the
ground crept up and got em.
The follow up to this was Mission: Planet Earth, which looked down on home. It was similar to Return to the
Moon with good pictures and games, but most importantly, it brought me back as the narrator for another one of
my voiceover credits. For Planet Earth, we even went into a real recording studio instead of my room after
everyone was in bed. Much cooler place to record, except for the price.
By this time I had also started the practice of having a few of my guitar licks built into the setup programs. I had
learned years ago that everyone lies when on the phone to tech support. I’d tell someone to type DIR, and all I
heard was fkajhfkjhgdjhagjhajfghpiaudfgpiuydfugadufhg. It was a few too many characters. Getting someone to
tell you what the status was on a Windows install was flat out impossible, so I stuck in some music for each
major step. This way I could hear where the program was in spite of the customer. I know, bad attitude, but It
worked flawlessly. Over the years my music has made it out in over a million CDs.
I continued working with the space guys, but that is for another section, except that it led to the release of Lunar
Defense. A 6 Degree of Freedom motion platform based arcade game. This was a really cool game, and one of
the first arcade games to make use of the high performance graphics that we could get using an AGP bus. We
actually hit the 30 frames per second we needed to keep up with the big TVs.
Lunar Defense featured the art of renowned space artist Mark Maxwell. Due to system performance issues, we
rendered out 3D graphics as series of bitmaps. This let the game be programmed as a 2D game while retaining
absolute control over the art. It was programmed using the Intel RDX graphics library, which was a very powerful
gaming engine. Shame that Microsoft didn’t want it in existence.
Using the same motion technology, we built a Lunar Driving simulator for LunaCorp. This simulator used a real
time voxel engine to create the landscapes. This was an outgrowth of an earlier direct 3D simulator that we
debuted at Carnegie Melon’s Field Robotics Center. NASA’s administrator Dan Goldin even stopped by to see it.
It’s great to hear words of encouragement from such an enlightened leader, such as “We didn’t pay for it, did
we? No? Then it’s pretty good.” The part he couldn’t wrap his head around was that we had a perfectly functional
simulator showing terrain from the robotics center running on a Pentium PRO ($1,000) in the days when NASA
would have used a Silicon Graphics workstation ($70,000). Yeah, we thought it was pretty good too, and the
public could actually run the thing.
So what games are next? Dan and I are going over some of the options. We have some strong designs for
Massive games and we have patents pending and modern technology for a new generation of pinball machines.
It’ll be interesting whichever way we go.