Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution

by David L. Craddock

Around the world, millions of people hijack cars in Grand Theft Auto, role play fantastical heroes in World of WarCraft, and crush candy on phones as small as wallets yet nearly as powerful as desktop computers. But long before video games became a multi-billion-dollar industry, two hackers invented the Apple II, a PC that contained less memory than the average Microsoft Word document and bowled over consumers by displaying four colors at once. Some users tapped its resources to design productivity software. Others devised some of the most influential games of all time. From the perils along the Oregon Trail and the exploits of Carmen Sandiego to the shadowy dungeons of Wizardry and Prince of Persia's trap-filled labyrinth, Break Out recounts the making of some of the Apple II's most iconic games, illustrates how they informed the games we play today, and tells the stories of the pioneers who made them.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Technology, Games, Video Games, Computers

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 2017

About the author

David L. Craddock lives with his wife in Ohio. He is the bestselling author of Stay Awhile and Listen : How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - Book I, and Heritage : Book One of the Gairden Chronicles, an epic fantasy series for young adults. Please follow along with him on his website/blog at DavidLCraddock.com .

Reviews

[David]

I wrote this book, so I won't cheat by leaving a star-rating or critique. Instead, I'll talk a bit about the process of writing it. (I'm also counting it toward books read in 2017 since I revised and read it several times earlier this year to get it ready for publication by Schiffer Publishing later this summer.) If you played or wrote Apple II games during the computer's heyday, or if you have any degree of interest in how games are made, I hope you'll read BREAK OUT and share your thoughts in a review. What follows is the introduction to the book, wherein I share my motivation for, and the process of writing BREAK OUT.

**

On June 26th, 2002, Comedy Central aired an episode of its long-running South Park animated series titled "Simpsons Already Did It." The title refers to a repeated stumbling block for one of the main characters: every time he cooks up a plot to take over the world, someone else points out that his plan resembles a situation from an episode of The Simpsons.

That only stands to reason. First airing in 1989, The Simpsons comprises the backbone of animation in television. It was the first successful adult-oriented animation program to air during primetime hours since 1972's Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, dispelling the widely held acceptance that cartoons are inherently for children and paving the way for contemporaries like Family Guy and South Park.1 An entire sub-forum on Reddit, the world's largest social media and news network, exists to point out observations and trends that Simpsons pioneered or presaged. On March 19, 2000, the show aired an episode in which Donald Trump ran for president of the United States.

Given that, it seems fair to say The Simpsons forms a cornerstone not just of television, but of popular culture.

Which brings us to the Apple II.

At first glance, the two seem unrelated. The Simpsons is a television show that turns a mirror on current events and inspires successors. The Apple II, now a relic, ran programs on floppy disks and faded into obscurity in the wake of more powerful computers like the Macintosh and IBM PC. Right?

Wrong.

Think of any game, or type of game (RPG, open world, puzzle, platformer, user-generated content, one-on-one fighters), and its roots likely trace back to the Apple II, or a game conceived on a mainframe and later converted to Apple II. Open-world games like Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim owe much of their design to SunDog: Frozen Legacy, published for the Apple II in 1984. Puzzle-platformers like Fez sprang from Prince of Persia, which debuted on Apple II in 1989. Prior to the likes of Ico and Demon's Souls, Karateka told powerful stories primarily through gripping atmosphere and nonverbal communication. LittleBigPlanet and Super Mario Maker equip users with tools to create and share levels, and owe their success, in part, to Pinball Construction Set. Pugilists satiated their bloodlust in The Bilestoad years before Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat turned heads (and then ripped them clean off).

Those early games came into extant because a group of visionaries saw computers as more than glorified adding machines, and went on to pioneer today's multi-billion-dollar game industry. John Romero, co-creator of Doom and Quake, got his start programming games for the Apple II. So did Fallout and Wasteland 2 producer Brian Fargo, Diablo creator David Brevik, Blizzard Entertainment co-founder Allen Adham, and Prince of Persia designer and Hollywood screenwriter Jordan Mechner. Other pioneers started earlier. Brøderbund co-founder Doug Carlston cut his teeth programming on punch cards and mainframes. Others assembled PCs that came in kits. Such computers could not be connected to screens or keyboards; knobs and flashing lights controlled input and output.

Just as Simpsons' influence extends beyond television, the Apple II's goes beyond gaming. Every computer you've touched, every printer you've un-jammed, every memory chip and graphics card and drive you've slotted into your motherboard, stemmed from or was refined by components available for Apple's seminal PC.

In other words: Apple II already did it.

Which brings us to this book. Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution celebrates the games, the trends, the hardware, and above all, the people who form the bedrock of video and computer games. Some of them, anyway.

It would be impossible for one book to tell the complete story of how every essential Apple II game came to be. Books can only be so long, deadlines extended so many times. Therefore, I had to whittle my list of hundreds of games down to roughly two dozen—no easy task. Let me tell you how I did that to preemptively disabuse you of the notion that I overlooked your favorite classic.

My goal in writing Break Out was to talk to developers firsthand. Talking to them (by phone and Skype in most cases, e-mail in others) enabled me to tell their stories, or parts of their stories, as comprehensively as possible. Of course, memories are imperfect, and inconsistencies are to be expected. Events detailed in these pages took place over three decades ago. To attain the greatest possible accuracy, I cross-referenced my interviews with extensive research spanning magazines, newspapers, books, Web articles, and other sources. The end result is a collection of narrative accounts based on first and secondhand sources. Scenes were recreated based on my findings, but in some situations, details and descriptions have been imagined or reconstructed, though always adhere to the integrity and spirit of my findings.

Each chapter concludes with a breakdown of how a particular game was received upon its release and how it contributed to modern games. To talk to developers, I cyber-stalked through Facebook, LinkedIn, and contacts made along the way. Some designers dropped off the radar after the Apple II catapulted them to fame in those hazy pre-Internet days, or did not respond to requests for interviews. If granted the opportunity to write a second volume of Break Out, I'd gladly try again.

The first Apple II rolled off assembly lines more than thirty-nine years ago. Regrettably, many of gaming's pioneers have passed away in that span of time. For Break Out to amount to more than a glorified compilation of Wikipedia sources and extracts from old magazine articles and archived websites, I made the difficult decision to focus on games whose designers could still offer at least one nugget of new information, or help me find a new angle from which to tell their story. That's not to say the tales of departed gaming giants like Douglas E. Smith, creator of Lode Runner, have been neglected or glossed over. Close friends such as Dane Bigham, programmer of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and a long-time friend of Smith's, were wellsprings of information.

I did my best to cover a broad spectrum of game genres. Toward that end, I intentionally omitted games that, while excellent, were superseded in some way. Setting aside my fond memories playing Math Blaster!, The Oregon Trail came first, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is the second-most influential "edutainment" hit of all time, so I devoted more pages to those games. Likewise, the Apple II was a veritable breeding ground for RPGs, and I had to select which ones to highlight based on chronology. Fortunately, appendices are good for more than notes and citations. I encourage you to flip to the back of the book for a collection of long-form interviews with the likes of Richard Eckert, programmer of Math Blaster!; Troy Miles, programmer of Neuromancer; and several others.

Finally, I'd like to set the stage for my interest in writing a book on some of (but certainly not all) the greatest games released for Apple II. First, because I love telling stories about game development and culture. Second, because the Apple II means a great deal to me, as it has to so many. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak debuted the Apple II in June of 1977, and I was born in 1982. Short of inventing a DeLorean able to travel to any date in time upon accelerating to eighty-eight miles per hour, I'd have a short time experiencing the rise and fall of the Apple II computer and its drove of excellent games.

Given its longevity, however, the Apple II was hardly before my time. New incarnations of Apple's most famous computer pre-Macintosh held sway in schools around America through the mid-1990s. My maternal grandmother, Shirley Mason, taught reading classes for over thirty years, and kept an Apple II in her classroom. I accompanied her to work on days when I stayed home sick from school (sometimes sick, sometimes "sick") and whiled away hours playing Sticky Bear Math, The Oregon Trail, and other fun-yet-school-appropriate games.

Summers were best. "Gramma" brought her Apple II home during summers, and my education continued. Play outside? Ha! As if. While other kids pedaled bicycles and rubbed sticks together, I built a beverage empire in Lemonade Stand, cracked cases in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, gobbled sums and products in Number Munchers, solved arithmetic problems by blasting stick men out of cannons in Math Blaster!, and matched cards to their twins in Pick-A-Dilly.

During the summer before I began sixth grade, my mom signed up me for a programming course, and I learned to write BASIC code on an Apple II. Fast forward a few years and my high school—rather behind the technological curve—offered programming courses in BASIC and Pascal, on Apple IIs, in 1996. Nobody cared. I, along with fifteen to twenty other teenage boys, barreled through assignments as quickly as possible and spent the rest of the class period loading floppy disks from our teacher's immense catalog of games.

For me, the Apple II was a gateway to new interests, new experiences, new thoughts, and new friends. It not only helped to shape the gaming and PC industries; it helped shape me and so many others.

Now that I've spent more time setting the stage for Break Out than a cassette would have taken to load data, it's almost time to let the games and their creators speak for themselves. If you used an Apple II during the 1980s and 1990s, I hope this book brings back fond memories, as writing it did for me. If you enjoy games but have only heard of the Apple II in passing, or if you're just interested in stories of ingenuity and grit, there's plenty here for you to enjoy, too.

If you or someone you know helped make possible the games so many of us enjoyed on the Apple II, then I thank you deeply—not only for the games I played then, but for the games I play today, and the ones I'll play tomorrow.

Enjoy the book.
David L. Craddock, author

[Yzabel Ginsberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

[I received a copy of this book through Netgalley.]

I never owned an Apple II, but my family did have a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, and I do have a soft spot for the history and evolution of computing (and computers) in general, and I was glad to read this book, for it reminded me of a lot of things. The Apple II, after all, was part of that series of personal computers on which a lot of developers cut their teeth, at a time when one still needed to dive into programming, at least a little, if one wanted to fully exploit their machine. (I’ve forgotten most of it now, and was never really good at it anyway since I was 7 and couldn’t understand English at the time… but I also tried my hand at BASIC to code a few simple games, thanks to a library book that may or may not have been David Ahl’s “101 BASIC Computer Games”, I can’t remember anymore now.)

In other words, due to a lot of these developers coding not only for the Apple II, and/or to their games being ported to other machines, C64 included, I was familiar with a lot of the games and software mentioned in Craddock’s book. Even though, 1980s and personal computer culture of the time oblige, most of what we owned was most likely pirated, as we happily copied games from each others to cassettes and 5 ¼ floppy disks on which we punched a second hole (instant double capacity! Just add water!).

A-hem. I guess the geek in me is just happy and excited at this trip down memory lane. And at discovering the genesis behind those early games which I also played, sometimes without even knowing what they were about. (So yes, I did save POWs with “Choplifter!”, and I haunted the supermarket’s PC aisle in 1992 or so in the hopes of playing “Prince of Persia”. And I had tons of fun with Brøderbund’s “The Print Shop”, which I was still using in the mid-90s to make some silly fanzine of mine. And even though that game wasn’t mentioned in the book, I was remembered of “Shadowfax”, which I played on C64, and some 30 years later, I’m finally aware that I was actually playing Gandalf dodging & shooting Nazgûls. One is never too old to learn!)

This book may be worth more to people who owned and Apple II and/or played the games it describes, but even for those who never owned that computer and games, I think it holds value anyway as a work retracing a period of history that is still close enough, and shaped the world of personal computing as we know it today. It’s also worth it, I believe, for anyone who’s interested in discovering how games (but not only) were developed at the time, using methods and planning that probably wouldn’t work anymore. All things considered, without those developers learning the ropes by copying existing games before ‘graduating’ to their own, so to speak, something that wouldn’t be possible anymore either now owing to said software’s complexity, maybe the software industry of today would be very different. And, last but not least, quite a few of our most popular post-2000 games owe a lot, in terms of gaming design, to the ones originally developed for the Apple II.

My main criticism about “Break Out” would be the quality of the pictures included on its pages. However, I got a PDF ARC to review, not a printed version, and I assumed from the beginning that compression was at fault here, and that the printed book won’t exhibit this fault. So it’s not real criticism.

Conclusion: If you’re interested in the history of computers and/or games; in reliving a period you knew as a gamer child or teenager; and/or in seeing, through examples and interviews, how developing went at that time: get this book.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of chapters (articles?) about Apple II game designers and their games. Good history accompanied by really tiny images that aren't always relevant to the paragraph they accompany. The appendix has a set of interviews with game designers that don't always match a single game.

I picked this up after reading Craddock's Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games, which was a 5 star read for me. A big part of that was one cohesive history and narrative, letting the games tell their own stories.

In this book, the articles each tell a single story, but sometimes overlap. There is no single narrative, despite the author's claim in the introduction "it's because of the Apple II!" - many of the stories start with development on mainframes, TRS-80, C64, and others.

Back to the pictures which are incredibly tiny - actual size in the library copy less than 2" by 3", both screen shot and caption. Sure, I'm older, but this doesn't work. As I read the third chapter/story/article, I did a quick online search. It seems *very* likely to me that this is a collection of articles written for episodiccontentmag.com at the time, and the picture size makes more sense now. On a web page, a picture taking a third of the width is perfectly normal. On a 8" page with margins, it just doesn't work. This also explains the articles that duplicate information - each would stand fine on its own.

Anyhow, I enjoyed most of the articles, maybe even more by approaching them as web page captures. The author doesn't satisfy his introduction premise, but then I know the Apple II was important - no need to convince me. It is a quick read, I liked it - 3 out of 5 stars.

It is perhaps telling that David L Craddock doesn't list this book on his own website "books" list - https://www.davidlcraddock.com/books/

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Craddock's best book yet.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video games today are big business and may even be ‘unrecognisable’ to us old-timers who remember the blocky, text-inspired graphics of the earlier days of computing. Yet it is undeniable that today’s modern-day works of ‘gaming art’ owe their heritage to the pioneering work of hackers who cut their programming teeth on early computers such as the Apple II.

This book looks at those who created some of the Apple II’s most iconic and loved games, telling insider stories about what they did, how they did it and other interesting knowledge. It is a very engaging book, yet you don’t need to have had an Apple II to love it. Of course, if you’ve played these classic games it may be literary nirvana! The legacy of these game hackers continues to be seen today – in fact over the intervening years many of these programmers have continued to develop on other platforms too. The legacy lives on in many ways.

It is a well-researched work of love. The author’s enthusiasm shines through. The author made a wise decision in not trying to cover the entire world of Apple II gaming, instead focussing on what he considers to be games that explicitly defined the genre and time, where influence would be long-living. Of course, limitations will exist, notwithstanding the availability of willing interview subject, but still this is not a game-changer, err, so to say. Some purists may be offended that their favourite classic is missing, but you can’t please all the people all the time and this is still a good testament for a time that many would have missed.

Personally, I found the design was a bit annoying, as I read it on a tablet and it just did not feel to be ‘built for reading’ but opinions will vary and, in any case, it was worth a minor inconvenience for the book’s content. The author must be credited for producing such an engaging work and managing to leave ‘fan enthusiasm’ away from the text, so it resulted in a credible, worthy text that may appeal to a broad readership.

If you are interested in old-time computing or gaming in general, this may be worth considering, but if the price is a little too rich for you, check it out at a bookstore and see if you form a connection to it first.

[Daiya Hashimoto · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was the golden age of self-taught programmers, when the border between hobby and profession were vague. A group of school teachers made a game to teach their local history, which turned to be Oregon Trail, the first edutainment game brilliant in game history. Richard Garriott, Lord British, an originator of Ultima, the legendary RPG which made the way for the later games to Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior was writing a code to render 3D maze on the screen with mathematical advice given by his creative mother.

It was very exciting to read their success stories of ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Seeing them, I deplored a bit about the fact that I was born a little late to join this movement.

I found a great achievement of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. Thanks to his decision to bundle an assembler and instructive "red book" he wrote with Apple II. Therefore, many initial users were able to start their programming life somehow. Unlike Steve Jobs, a marketing genius, Woz was a hacker himself and he wanted to leave rooms for users to infiltrate inside the machine.

With many interesting anecdotes and color pictures, the author stories what happened during the Big ban period of game universe. I as one of the first generation of PC gamers, couldn't read this book without tears. The Oregon Trail, Choplifter, Wizardry, Ultima, Karateka, Prince of Persia and so on, if you feel something about the names, you must read it.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have many a fond memory sitting in front of an Apple ][ and playing games. Most of the games in the book I played. Just like _Secret History of Macintosh Gaming_, the theme here is to learn about the people who wrote the games and the times they were written. In all of these cases, it is a singular person or a handful that did their own thing, not following rules or convention. As the author points out in each chapter, the games he covers each gave ideas that are still in use today.

Things I didn't know: Karateka & Prince of Persia used rotoscoped video & hand plotted images to come up with the fluid motion of the characters. Ultima I used Basic. Wizardry was multi character so that if someone died while in the dungeon the party as a whole could come back (no saving in the dungeon). Or how Bard's Tale grew out of wanting to add a character class & having it become what players sought (singing bolsters the party, like magic spells). The story of Lord British and how he got his name is in here too, as told by Lord British himself. Plus... Brian Fargo met up with other coders at warez parties, including the guy who started Activision.

There is a lot of neat history here. Most of it is with first person accounts, though fuzzy after 30 years. I can tell that the book was a labor of love, where each of the game authors was happy to tell the tales of their games. It is amazing how much was done with so little. Code size (140k per floppy, 48-64k RAM), knowledge (not easy to share techniques, lots of hacks to make things happen, etc), or support (financial or otherwise). As with the initial Mac gaming authors, each person here did it for fun and to push the edges with little thought towards what boundaries should have been.

Take a trip through the history of Apple ][ games & learn about a small group that made a huge impact on game developers today. At the very least delight in how they made the Apple ][ make magic.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who came of age during the early part of the events in this book and knew some of the people talked about, it was interesting to see how they were portrayed. I bought my Apple II in 1980 and still play with it today. If you have any interest in the Apple II, older video games or computer/gaming history it can be an enjoyable read but be aware that there are some mistakes. Most are easily attributed to mistakes in memory of some of the people interviewed which is understandable and there isn't anything really major there. But there are some historical and technical mistakes that have to be due to poor editing/proof reading/or just got it wrong so be sure to check with other sources before quoting anything from the book in a bet. Overall a worthwhile read and one I generally enjoyed.

[Peter Mueller · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this to be very disappointing. Books on the Apple II are so hard to come by so I was thrilled to see this new release, but just like in the author's comments on this page, he meanders so far off base as to render the original topic almost as an aside - this is not a true 'Apple II' book as I expected but more or less a long, drawn out "See? The Apple II started it!!" with scant proof for any of its claims.

I'm still holding out for a decent book about Apple II games, but as time goes by the likelihood seems less and less, and this book, I wont be reading through again, it really was a huge letdown to be honest.

[Justin Weiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book brought back tons of good memories — typing in programs from the back of magazines and books, breaking into the debugger to add new features, swapping disks with friends and discovering favorite games in the bottom of boxes full of software. It was amazing to hear about gaming legacies built from experiences like these. And it was fun to eavesdrop on the close relationships between early game creators.

[Jonathan Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read on what it was like to be a game development back in the early 80s. Everyone was more or less independently doing their own thing while creating a industry.

Minor gripe - the screenshots from olden games are super small. I had to bring my face to the page to make out any details.

[Brad Feld · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you had an Apple II, read this book.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great source of insight into the folks who developed games for the Apple II and the process behind it. It actually inspired me to go out and get an Apple II Plus so I could actually try out some of these games they talk about!