EB: Where did you get the idea for the game?
KK: ToD? D&D in college, Alkabeth, Wizardry, Infocom... The other games [Hunt the Wumpus, A-Maze-Ing] were items that were partially completed, and had been put on the shelf: I pulled them off the shelf and came up with the ways to make them into viable stand-alone products. (A-maze-ing, Hunt the Wumpus, and Blasto originally were planned to be combined as a single 6K cartridge, without most of each game's features.)
EB: Can you take us through the whole process of building Tunnels of Doom? How many people worked on it? Was ToD the first game to use a 3D gaming display, as in Quake? How much time from conception to shipping was required for Tunnels of Doom?
KK: Total time: 18 months, mainly by me (except for testing). Alkabeth or Wizardry on the Apple or Tandy might have been there with vector-style graphics first, but I colored in the walls and randomly built the dungeon.
EB: So you were working full time on ToD during that time?
KK:I'm unsure. There we're probably firefights and minor tasks throughout the period, and I think it overlapped my work with TIRK. [See below]
EB: What do you feel is the reason it took that long?
KK: I was designing it as well as programming it, shooting high, and trying to get the things I wanted into it. I think it took over a month to design and balance the maze digging routines. Then there was extensive testing and review by the artistic types in Dallas.
EB: Yeah, the production design of ToD is really great. Did you know it would take that long when you started?
KK: Close. At the start, I probably expected six months, but as my desired features list grew, so did the project.
EB: Ah, the creepy feature creature strikes again! Did you do the game in a breadth first or depth first implementation? That is, did you start out with a little bit of bootstrapping to make the basic app runnable, and then add features; or did you code for a long time, and *then* run the game?
KK: By your definitions, I've always worked 'breadth first' I'd argue the term. Development was one section at a time: Data structures (continually expanding), base graphics, dungeon digger, '3D' graphics engine & movement, dungeon stocker, game save/load, combat, 'magic' items, graphics effects. Expansion, polishing, and tweaking of 'completed' sections continued as needed.
EB: How much does time does each aspect of the game take?
KK: Polishing and balancing, in parallel to testing, takes the largest chunk. Hard to find bugs seem to take forever. The graphics and music back then were simple enough to not take particularly long.
EB: Did you do your own scheduling and milestone setting for the development of the game? If so, do you remember what were some of the milestones
KK: The milestones were the section beaks above, and I did have scheduling control (better termed 'targeting'). The only drop-dead dates were for CES's, and the school (for educational products) and Xmas shopping starts. Though I'm a poor scheduler (too optimistic), I make up for it by being able to lower the targets for products as a drop-dead date approaches, in order to provide a good salable product when desired. ToD was a bit of an exception to this, since making it fit in 30k took a bit of work. Some things that we're locked into it to get it out were the requirement for precisely two stairwells between floors, and hand combat damage being locked in at 2 points.
(CES: Consumer Electronics show, in Vegas in Jan, Chicago in June, occurring to this day. Before E3, they included video game systems. An unrelated CES story: The year before I got to TI, CES still had adult video vendors on the same floor as the mainstream exhibits. (They later went to a separate hall, and then a separate show.) The TI booth had access problems (though a captive audience for demos) due to an adjoining booth having signings by Marilyn Chambers's)
EB: Who came up with the default names of the characters: Forrestal Grimm, Eric Seablade, and Mauve d'Orm Mul mean? Are there any stories behind these names? What does Mauve d'Orm Mul mean anyway?
KK:Marketing in Dallas I believe, with the names representative of the characters' colors. Mauve = purple.
EB: Who composed the excellent music?
KK: I'm not sure. They had a musician on staff in Dallas [Probably Hank Mishkoff, see interview], who probably did the main theme, which I may have tweaked. There's one note we didn't agree on in the theme: he won. I did most of the music for the smaller games, including the slowly speeding theme for The Attack. Being unschooled in such things, my attempts at sound effects sometimes got comical. I tried an attenuating tone for an implosion song for the eggs hatching in The Attack, and ended up with Christmas chimes...
EB: The TI produced games had excellent documentation. I even recall seeing some marketing material from TI that listed quality documentation as a selling point. How much contact did you as the game author have with the people who wrote the manuals for your games?
KK: A reasonable amount. They too were in Dallas, but spent time with me to learn the game, and then always sent the manuals my way for revision, and usually took whatever suggestions I had.
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| Above: The title Screen for Tunnels of Doom |
EB: When I was preparing the banner for the title page of this site, I got up close and personal with your title screen for ToD. Getting down to a pixel level, I could see your graphics talents in each of the letters. My favorite is the S. I also like the F. Are there any stories behind the title letters or the title screen?
KK: The F was a nod to Wumpus, and I think I was running out of characters, which led to the repetitive T. The Outer Limits (original series) episode 'The Zanti Misfits' may have inspired the L. The rest were just the sort of things to be found in the dungeon.
A technical Graphics note, of possible use to the emulator writers, and a good example of thinking flexibly. The 99/4a had a 'bitmapped' graphics mode, that used 3 banks of 256 8x8 characters, one for each third of the screen (vertically). A similarly-sized set of banks of color data allowed you to have 2 colors per line of a character instead of 2 colors per character. Using this mode used up most of the space used for data by most programs, including ToD. The idea was to use each character once on the screen, sequentially. Sega realized that if you loaded each bank with the same characters, you could use any character anywhere on the screen (as you would in a non-bitmapped game) and get the extra colors for a relatively minor increase in program space. They used this approach for Zaxxon.
EB: Does Tunnels of Doom have any Easter eggs or secrets? If so, how does the player expose them?
KK: Nope. No room for eggs there. Near the end, I was limiting game features to make it all fit in 30K. (+15K database)
EB: What was your development environment back then?
KK: Mainframe via monochrome terminals downloading into water-heater sized emulators. The emulators had displays for viewing memory and setting breakpoints manually. An interpreted in-house language called GPL was used, though pure assembly was being phased in for the latter arcade games.
EB: What about code re-use? Did the programmers share code?
KK: Libraries were developed from people’s code, and saw some reuse. Then again, GPL gave us a lot of our standard needs.
EB: Did you use a source code control system? If so, how was it to use?
KK: Yes, on the mainframe. It wasn’t particularly onerous.
EB: What was your debugging process? Did you have a source level debugger?
KK: Originally, a keypad on the water heater to look at the current address and view or modify memory locations, shown via 7-segment LEDs. A source debugger was developed during my time there, but it took a bit of preparation, so for simpler bugs the keypad/LED was occasionally used.
EB: What makes a good video game for you?
KK: Fun, and play balance. A reasonable learning curve allowing you to get fairly far into a game. The ability to save frequently.
EB: What do you think of today's home video games?
KK: I'm mainly into 3D shooters, survival horror, and some RPG. The recent game I play most: Diablo II with LoD. An earlier game I still play: Empire Deluxe. I don't have the time for the longer RPGs, or games that only let you save if you complete a mission. I never got into sports or real-time strategy titles. Loved Serious Sam.
There's a lot of good stuff in today's, but too often the rush to the door shows. (Pool of Radiance, anyone?) I probably buy 5x the amount of games I'll ever get around to playing. (Also books, DVD's, board games, etc.) I'm still a solitary player: too many sharks online, though I was in the Diablo II beta.
EB: What are you doing now? Are you working on any games now?
KK: I went from chemical instrumentation, to modem and audio drivers for Windows at Rockwell, to PC diagnostics, to embedded systems now, with some management duties along the way. There's enough good, young, and cheaper game programmer's out there now, there's little way for me to get back into it. Then there's the boom/bust cycles, the way most of the work is in translation between systems, and the frequent manager that doesn't have a clue. I could see myself as a manager, or going core and utility algorithms, though I'd also like to get back into scientific programming someday.
Also, I finally got to apologize to Steve Jackson at an E3 a couple of years ago. You see, I mentioned to my boss one day that there was this non-computer game already called Car Wars
(To those that may not know, for years all the items for Steve Jackson's Games tabletop Car Wars products had to have a disclaimer on them about not being associated with out product because of this.)
EB: Did you work on TI Car Wars?
KK: This was another game by the guy that did Munch Man and TI Invaders (and Parsec). [Jim Dramis] I think my role was limited to testing and possibly making suggestions.
EB: I'm going to add a section on how to use MESS to play ToD on your PC. How do you feel about emulators for classic games?
KK: I'm generally anti-piracy, but have few problems personally if a game's out of print.
[1] Giant List of Classic Game Programmers http://dadgum.com/giantlist/list.html
[2] TI Timeline http://www.homecomputercentral.com/TImeline/default.html