Category: Interviews
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Joe Reiss, creator of the “Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary”
In 1992, Joe Reiss began the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary, an effort to collect ratings for each week’s episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” from fans on Usenet. The “S.O.S.” caught on and remained popular for years, moving to the web in 1995. Ultimately, Reiss collected nearly 300,000 individual ratings.
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Paul Witte and Herb Flower, creators of Thieves’ Guild
Paul Witte and Herb Flower were friends who collaborated from 1988-93 to create the BBS door game Thieves’ Guild and its graphical front-end client for the Atari ST under the “Mythyn Software” banner. Flower went on to found the Rewolf Entertainment studio, which produced Gunman Chronicles. Witte and Flower teamed up again in 2001 as…
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Gary Martin, creator of “TradeWars 2002”
Gary Martin created TradeWars 2002, “the granddaddy of all BBS games” which has been played by tens of thousands of enthusiasts around the world. In this interview, Martin discusses rocking the University of Kansas campus as a DJ, founding Martech Software, and running one of the biggest bulletin board systems. He also describes two tantalizing…
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Jon Radoff, creator of “Space Empire Elite” and “Final Frontier”
Jon Radoff is an internet entrepreneur whose career has gone from dial-up to “Beam me up.” Radoff broke into the gaming business as a teen, writing the BBS door games Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier for the Atari ST in the late 1980s. He built one of the original commercial games on the internet,…
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Shooter Jennings, creator of “From Here to Eternity”
Not many folks are developing new BBS door games these days. But one of the few is Shooter Jennings, who is currently beta testing his game, “From Here to Eternity” on his BBS, Bit Sunrise (Web, Telnet). Make sure you visit his board and try the game! Jennings is best known for his musical career.…
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Hollie Satterfield, creator of “Space Dynasty”
What does it take to get published? How about a deranged TRS-80 Model I that has taken over a lunar colony? That did the trick for Hollie Satterfield in 1983, when 80 Micro magazine published his computer program “Attack of the TRS-80.” Afterward, he embarked on a career as a programmer analyst — and along…
