Atari User #4

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http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/

Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers was released in March 1997. It was one of the first retrogaming projects to focus on lost history rather than game collecting and certainly the first entirely devoted to the game authors themselves. Now a good number of the interviewees have their own web sites, but none of them did when I started contacting them in 1995. And it was an early experiment in digital publishing: though the book used HTML for formatting, it was shipped to readers on a 3 ½" diskette for a price of $20. In 1997 this seemed odd and gutsy, but the little collection of interviews found an audience and sold a good many copies for the next five years. It was twice written up in Wired News, and was quoted or mentioned in The Dallas Morning News, The Austin Chronicle, and other major newspapers. It was paired with Susan Lammers's wonderful Programmers at Work in the Dr. Dobb's CD-ROM library. It is now 2002 and Halcyon Days has run its commercial course. I'm putting it on the web because I still think the information in the book is fantastic and inspiring, and because much of it cannot be found elsewhere. The contents and HTML have been minimally edited from the original, which is why the filenames are in all capitals, for example. But enough rambling. If you have any of the giddy anticipation that I did whenever I picked up a magazine containing an interview with Mark Turmell or Dan Bunten, then you want to start reading.