Mark Allen is an American software engineer, game programmer and game designer. As a student at the University of California, San Diego, Allen used UCSD Pascal to develop a 6502 interpreter for the Pascal language in 1978, along with Richard Gleaves. This work later became the basis for Apple Pascal in 1979. [1] [2] [3]
Later, Allen developed a number of well-received video games for the Apple II, including Stellar Invaders, [4] Sabotage , [5] [6] and Pest Patrol. [7] [8] Sabotage, in particular, became a classic Apple II game and sparked numerous clones such as Paratrooper . One such clone, Parachute , was preloaded software on early iPods that had displays.
The Apple II a personal computer released by Apple Inc. in June 1977. It was one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputer products and is widely regarded as one of the most important personal computers of all time due to its role in popularizing home computing and influencing later software development.
Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named after French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.
UCSD Pascal is a Pascal programming language system that runs on the UCSD p-System, a portable, highly machine-independent operating system. UCSD Pascal was first released in 1977. It was developed at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the programming language Pascal running on the operating systems CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS. It was originally developed by Anders Hejlsberg at Borland, and was notable for its very fast compiling. Turbo Pascal, and the later but similar Turbo C, made Borland a leader in PC-based development tools.
Wizardry is a series of role-playing video games, developed by Sir-Tech, that were highly influential in the evolution of modern role-playing video games. The original Wizardry was a significant influence on early console role-playing games such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Originally made for the Apple II, the games were later ported to other platforms. The last game in the original series by Sir-Tech was Wizardry 8, released in 2001. There have since been various spin-off titles developed for the Japanese market.
Michael Abrash is an American programmer and technical writer. He is best known for his magazine articles and books on code optimization and graphics for IBM PC compatibles and for working at id Software in the mid-1990s on the rendering technology for Quake. Since 2014, he has been the chief scientist of Oculus VR, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms.
Acornsoft was the software arm of Acorn Computers, and a major publisher of software for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. As well as games, it also produced a large number of educational titles, extra computer languages and business and utility packages – these included word processor VIEW and the spreadsheet ViewSheet supplied on ROM and cartridge for the BBC Micro/Acorn Electron and included as standard in the BBC Master and Acorn Business Computer.
Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) is a software development environment for the Classic Mac OS operating system, written by Apple Computer. For Macintosh developers, it was one of the primary tools for building applications for System 7.x and Mac OS 8.x and 9.x. Initially MPW was available for purchase as part of Apple's professional developers program, but Apple made it a free download after it was superseded by CodeWarrior. On Mac OS X it was replaced by the Project Builder IDE, which eventually became Xcode.
Jordan Mechner is an American video game designer, graphic novelist, author, screenwriter, filmmaker, and former video game programmer. A major figure in the development of cinematic video games and a pioneer in video game animation, he began his career designing and programming the 1984 martial arts game Karateka for the Apple II while a student at Yale University. The game was a bestseller. He followed it with the platform game Prince of Persia five years later; it was widely ported and became a hit. Both games used rotoscoping, where actors shot on film by Mechner were drawn over to create in-game animation. Prince of Persia has become the basis for a long-running franchise, including a 2010 live-action film released by Walt Disney Pictures and an ongoing series of video games, published by Ubisoft.
Object Pascal is an extension to the programming language Pascal that provides object-oriented programming (OOP) features such as classes and methods.
Anne Westfall is an American video game programmer and software developer, known for 1983's Archon: The Light and the Dark, originally written for the Atari 8-bit computers. Westfall and her spouse, fellow game developer Jon Freeman, together founded Free Fall Associates.
Softporn Adventure is a comedic, adult-oriented text adventure game produced for the Apple II in 1981. The game was created by Charles Benton and released by On-Line Systems, later renamed Sierra On-Line. Years later, Softporn Adventure was remade and expanded as Leisure Suit Larry series of adult-oriented video games, and the first entry in that series, 1987's Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, was a nearly direct graphical adaptation of Softporn Adventure. Another graphical version was released as Las Vegas for various Japanese computers in 1986 by Starcraft.
Bill Budge is a retired American video game programmer and designer. He is best known for the Apple II games Raster Blaster (1981) and Pinball Construction Set (1983).
Sabotage is a fixed shooter video game for the Apple II written by Mark Allen and published by On-Line Systems in 1981.
Nasir Gebelli is an Iranian-American programmer and video game designer usually credited in his games as simply Nasir. Gebelli wrote Apple II games for Sirius Software, created his own company Gebelli Software, and worked for Squaresoft. He became known in the early 1980s for producing fast action games for the Apple II, including 3D shooters.
Dan Gorlin is a video game programmer and designer best known for his 1982 Apple II game Choplifter, in which the player pilots a helicopter to rescue hostages. His next Apple II game, Airheart (1987), took three years to complete. While technically advanced, it was not as well received as Choplifter. He wrote the sequel to Airheart for the Atari ST: Typhoon Thompson in Search for the Sea Child (1988). All three games were published by Broderbund.
Atari Program Exchange (APX) was a division of Atari, Inc. that sold software via mail-order for Atari 8-bit computers from 1981 until 1984. Quarterly APX catalogs were sent to all registered Atari 8-bit owners. APX encouraged any programmer, not just professionals, to submit video games, educational software, applications, and utilities. A few internally developed Atari products were sold through APX, such as Atari Pascal, the developer handbook De Re Atari, and a port of the arcade video game Kangaroo.
Clascal is an object-oriented programming language developed in 1983 by the Personal Office Systems (POS) division of Apple Computer. Clascal was used to program applications for the Lisa Office System, the operating environment of the Lisa.
Global War is a 1979 video game published by Muse Software for the Apple II. It was written in Applesoft BASIC by Alan M. Boyd.