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→Moonmine
Bob Hendren and I had a falling out towards the end of the project. He wanted the same girl who did the [[Parsec]] speech (her name was Aubry) to do the [[Moonmine]] speech. I wanted someone else to do it. We ended up getting Aubry to record part of the speech and another TI Lubbock employee to record the voice of the Zygonaut. Bob and my relationship was never the same after that.
===[[Hopper]]===
While I was working on [[Moonmine]], my wife was working in the documentation group for TI (she wrote part of the [[Moonmine]] manual). There she met a man by the name of [[Mike Archuleta]], who was a Supervisor in the QA group. We all went to a party together and she introduced me to Mike. Mike was brilliant and really wanted to do some programming. He came up with the idea of doing a game together since he needed the technical guidance.
We went out to an arcade and found a coin-operated game called, "Pengo." It had a penguin who pushed big ice blocks around the screen. We liked the concept and decided to use it. Instead of a penguin, we chose a Kangaroo. Instead of ice blocks, we chose crates. We did a storyboard on the game and divided up the programming. We also chose the TI Mini Memory cartridge as our intended platform, since there were no quality games that would fit in the 3.5K of RAM it contained.
We coded for weeks and spent several late, late nights cutting code and optimizing code to get it to fit into the Mini Memory. Eventually, we did. I remember calling my parents at 4:00 am because I was so excited that we had finished it. We submitted to TI and they accepted it as a Class A submission. They liked the game so much, though, that they asked us to add more to it because they wanted to produce a standalone cartridge of the game. So, we added title screens, two players, more levels, a surprise level, etc. Hopper was produced and released just before TI announced they were killing the computer and both Mike and I received royalty payments for about a year and a half.
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