GameTechGuy

How did you come up with the idea to include digitized speech in Ghostbusters? (If I remember correctly the speech was done by Electronic Speech Systems?) Considering that memory was at a premium did adding speech prevent you from doing anything else? (Or to put it another way, did you have to remove anything to fit the speech in?).

I just want to say thanks for the great games back in the day. Like many my first "console" was an Atari 2600 and one of the things that was great about it were games from Activision. I had Pitfall 1/2, Gran Prix etc. Later on I had a C64 and games like Ghostbusters were truly great. (I still have some Activision Pitfall badges around here somewhere!)

Questions (answer whatever you have time for):

• What was your/Activision's take on piracy back in those days? (For those that don't know Atari 2600 cartridges were simply ROMs and there was no copy protection/DRM. It was easy for bootleggers to clone carts/packaging/manuals). What about computers and piracy? (The C64 had rampant piracy despite disk-based copy protection, probably same for other computers).

• What was your development method like for mid-80s computers/game systems (say C64 onwards)? Did you continue to manually draw graphics on graph paper or use drawing tools? Did you use cross-compilers or other fancy systems where you would code on a "powerful" IBM PC and cross-assemble/compile and download to a native system/console? At what point did you make the switch to C?

• What are your thoughts on the collapse of video game market in 1983-5? Did you think the market would recover at the time? Anything memorable stands out from this period?

• Do you think there are similarities between the crash of 83-85 and today? There are a myriad of PCs, tablets, game systems, smart phones, etc and more software (including games) available now than people can use. Do you think it is more difficult as a developer nowadays with so much choice and competition from other developers, not to mention the high video/audio production standards nowadays as compared to the 80s/90s?

Thank you again for the games - I want you to know that your games really made a difference when I was young.

1. Do you know who did the copy protection for the c64 version of Karateka? (That thing was super tricky and had serious checksums to detect code tampering).

2. What did you think of the recent c64 conversion of PoP? - http://popc64.blogspot.com/

I would like to say thanks for not only your great games, but also for your blog and the absolutely fascinating videos of (your brother I think?) running/jumping etc for Prince of Persia.