Programming has always been a hobby for me since learning that I could make my own games on a computer in 4th grade, elementary school. Ever since then I've dabbled in BASIC programming and have made my own personal games. I always considered it a career, but once I graduated high school, all the gaming platforms at the time were going 3D and it appeared that 2D gaming was going to be a distant memory. I didn't care for 3D games, so I found myself in a void and bounced around different computer jobs for about 10 years before I settled on a different career path in 2D animation. With Flash, not only has it given me a lot of opportunities in animation, but it also brought back a revival in 2D gaming online, thankfully and 2D games have been on the comeback since then. I was always curious about programming for a console and thought to give the Atari a try when I came across Batari BASIC. My assembly is very limited and I could never do a complex game with it. I messed around with BATARI for a while, and made a mostly complete game, but when I couldn't fix all the bugs I put it away and kind of forgot about Batari and making an Atari game for a few years. Then I saw a Mega Man demo built with it and found out how powerful it could be. I decided to give it another try with my own port of a popular series. SMB was a natural choice. When I was a kid, people were getting the Nintendo with SMB while I was stuck with the Atari. I thought in my naive mind that Atari would come out with a SMB game for their system, but it never happened. I always wanted a SMB game for the Atari, so if I had to make it myself, then so be it.
It is pretty much what I expected to get out of the system. There was more that I wanted to do and other workarounds I had to concede to. Batari BASIC is a powerful system but it still has limitations. The reason why I had the moving platform stop when you jumped on it was because you are limited to 2 sprites at one time on the Atari's hardware without advanced programming tricks, and I didn't want a moving platform occupying that 2nd sprite if you were already finished with it, so I got rid of it and made it solid platform pixels, allowing enemies to appear sooner rather than later. You have limited CPU time because a good chunk of that time is used to draw the screen on the fly so you have to be really efficient with your code. There is also only 128 byte of RAM you get to play with so you're very limited with a lot of different aspects of game design.
It was always in the back of my mind and the longer it went on, the less likely it seemed that it was going to happen because there was always some article being written about it somewhere. I thought for sure they had known about it. But once the IGN review video of the game happened, I think it finally tipped them off, because it was right after that, that Nintendo took action.
Do you understand why Nintendo send the Cease & Desist because of the game?
I understand, although I may not completely agree with it. It is their intellectual property and they want to protect it. I totally get it, however the game was meant to be an homage to the series and plays on a system that hasn't been in production for over 20 years. The game only had limited copies, but you have to do what they say, it isn't worth fighting expensive legal battles over.
We're gonna see. It hasn't stopped me on working on the game at all, in fact the demo is just about finished and just in time for the Portland Retro Game Expo where AtariAge will be demoing it in cartridge form on a real Atari for the first time. But when it comes time to produce it, I'm going to take a few precautions and make sure that it's not going to get killed right away before we can do anything with it.
Do you have other projects or game designs you would like to realize on the VCS or on another console?
Many, but I'm just one guy and I'd love it if more people would make high quality homebrews for the system as well. You can see what I can do and I'm just a hobbyist. I want other people to make Mega Man, Zelda, and Metroid type games for it. I'd love to play them and it'd take a load off of my plate as well!
Personally, which is your all time favorite game and system?
Oh I can't go there. There's just too much content out there to play. However my favorite kind of games are puzzle, arcade, and platformers. Whatever system does those well, I'll play it.