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Tod Frye, Asteroids

Hi, there! \\xa0Welcome to the next in the series of Atari-related interviews being produced by Antic, the Atari 8-bit computer podcast. \\xa0My name is Randy Kindig and I\\u2019ll be leading this interview. \\xa0Most notably, while working at Atari, Tod Frye developed the 400/800 version of Asteroids and the 2600 version of Pac-Man, converting them from the coin-op version. \\xa0He has many other games to his credit. \\xa0He later worked for Axlon, Nolan Bushnell\\u2019s company.

This interview was conducted on January 3, 2016.

Teaser Quotes

• \\u201cWhile I was at Atari, it went from a pretty big company, to a huge company, to a complete flop.\\u201d
• \\u201cI didn\\u2019t work at Atari; I LIVED at Atari; and I loved it.\\u201d
• \\u201cBecause of the CTIA and GTIA and Antic, the sprite hardware was WAY better than the sprite hardware on the Commodore.\\u201d
• \\u201cThe hard parts were: writing code that was fast enough, writing code that was small enough to fit in the cartridge, and writing code that would fit in the RAM. \\xa0Basically everything was hard.\\u201d

Links

• Tod Frye at Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tod_Frye
• Tod Frye at PRGE 2015 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLoJ5jcccPU