The basic premise for Arch Rivals was to allow for "real" basketball strategy by allowing the Player to interact with his teammate ... passing, calling for a pass, Blocking, telling him to shoot, etc... As simple as it sounds, this had never been done in a Game before, and the idea that the Player would not always be holding the ball had a number of Operators skeptical. The game was a huge success in the arcades however, and virtually every Basketball game since was built on the principals pioneered by programmer Jeff Nauman in this game. I like to think that my main contribution was the signature PUNCHING that we allowed in the game. This was our first game after Rampage, and I felt that the act of slamming one's fist into an opponent's face was too good to pass up.

ARCTIC STUD POKER RUN is my first real game as an INDY. I've been designing as an independent developer with my own company for over 15 years now, but ASPR is the first game that we've ever done completely on our own, in our spare time, without a client, publisher, manufacturer or investor to foot the bills. (for more on this, check out my BLOG on the Garage Games site.) I'm really proud of this Game; it looks like a mindless clusterfudge but has an incredible amount of strategy and depth... it really is an amazing, addictive, Multiplayer Gaming Experience.

This was our first game, designed for EA under our newly formed independent game development company, GAME REFUGE INC. My computer had an enormous 40MB hard drive that was the size of a small file cabinet, and I remember being excited about the fact that I could now use a whopping 256 colors in a game! ( At Bally/Midway we we're limited to four palettes of 16 colors each.) The Squad control that we toyed with in both Arch Rivals and Pigskin came into it's own in this game. It was somewhat confusing & definitely not for everyone, but the CHAOS fans are among the vocal... still stopping us to this day to ask us when SONS OF CHAOS is coming out!

After the success of Arch Rivals, this squad-based football version was the next logical step. The game is really well-tuned; I think it's my favorite two-player arcade sports game. (Named "Sports Simulation of the Year" by Video games magazine... tho I'm not sure that I would call a game that featured sword-wielding Ogres a "simulation")

The inspiration for this game was, quite simply, the fact that someone told me I couldn't animate the Background Plane on the Bally Midway Hardware because all art was on large, low-rez rectangular blocks. I decided that a building being demolished would fall straight down, (on block boundaries) and RAMPAGE was born. My immediate supervisor didn't like the concept, however, so I went over the heads of my boss and my boss's boss to the new president of Bally/Midway at the time, Maury Ferchen, who not only green-lighted the game, but also gave me shiny new Cross Pen as a reward for my initiative. The notion of visiting & destroying dozens of different American cities gave me the excuse to send press releases to those cities informing them that their town was "about to be destroyed". The game did incredibly well, and I still have over 50 newspaper articles, headlines and features from around the U.S.

It's ten years after the first Rampage and we're back at Midway as designers for Game Refuge. Joe Dillon, head of Sales, said that they were looking for a game that appealed to a "broader audience" and asked us for ideas. Jeff & I looked at each other and said "Rampage!" and we started the next day. I've never really been a big fan of sequels; much the fun of designing a game, for me, is coming up with innovative solutions... and sequels rarely offer any new challenges. But this was ten years later, on a completely different hardware, and we realized that we could have a lot of fun with it. And we did. ..............It should be noted that after the success of RWT, Midway asked us to do another one... so we designed an epic 3D First-person mass destruction game in which the Player started tiny (like at the end of RWT) and dynamically changed size throughout the course of the game. Midway said: "Cool, but, can you just, like, leave everything the same and add a new character?" We said we'd rather not, and suggested they find someone else. So only RAMPAGE and RAMPAGE WORLD TOUR are ours.

We were approached by someone who owned an option on certain rights to the Star Trek Voyager TV series. "Could we do an Arcade-style Gun game?" Sure. The project was plagued by hardware development and supply problems form the start, but the software side ran as smooth as anything we ever did. The game is essentially "on Rails" that is, where the player goes is pre-rendered, but we deliberately created dozens of different paths that would become available depending on the circumstances. You'd have to play the hour-long game all the way through dozens of times to see everything. This is my wife's favorite Game Refuge game.

XENOPHOBE started out as a pyramid exploration game that I intended to do with Jeff Nauman, but he was assigned to another project and I created the game with Howard Schere instead. Once again, The gameplay was inspired by the limitations of the Bally/Midway non-scrolling hardware, the fake side-scrolling as the player moves from area to area meant that we could squeeze 3 Players on a single screen. Virtually everything in the game was designed to be picked up and used somewhere or other, I think this was a holdover from my ZORK days. The mutation of the Aliens from Facehuggers to Armored Bowling-ball-like Larvae to Giant Worms to Big-headed snaggle-toothed telepaths was fun to animate.