What cherished games would you take to the island?

Dan (left) and Garry in 1969. They already had a homemade computer in their basement built by elder brother Steve.

With such a staggering number of titles to his name, we have taken inspiration from Jacques’ ‘seven ages of man’ speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It to discuss Dan Kitchen’s gigantic back catalogue. Here, we present the ‘seven ages of Dan’…

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We begin with the age of the infant. Dan was born and raised in New Jersey, USA, and spent his formative years surrounded by technology. His father loved tinkering with electronics, and in the late Sixties, his older brother Steve constructed a desk-sized computer from component parts in their basement. “He’s the one who got me interested in electronics,” says Dan. “After high school, I was all set to go to university but Steve had gone to work for a local company, Wickstead Design Associates, making electronic gadgets for cars. They got into making toys and games and my other brother Garry ended up working there, too.”

Garry created the hugely popular handheld game Bank Shot for Parker Brothers, and in 1979 Dan joined his siblings at the company. “How could I not,” smiles Dan. “I loved them both. The age difference negated any rivalry. I looked up to them.”

The second age of man is the whining schoolboy, reluctantly dragging himself to class, but Dan’s enthusiasm for electronics and programming made him a very willing student. He collaborated with Garry on the handheld LED pinball game Wildfire, released in 1979, and in the same year, he acquired an Apple II. “I was a big fan of Microsoft Adventure and all of Scott Adams’ games,” he grins. “I fell in love with text adventures instantly and knew I wanted to make my own.”

By this time, Steve had departed from Wickstead and moved west, and with their eldest brother gone, Garry and Dan decided to set up their own company, ISS (Imaginative Systems Software). They secured a contract with Hayden Software, a local book publisher wanting a slice of the growing computer games market, to write six Apple II games. Having taught himself assembly language, Dan released his first text adventure, Crystal Caverns, in 1982, earning the tidy sum of $6,000 for his efforts. The game was a fairly traditional treasure hunt set beneath a spooky mansion, but for his second title Dan cast the player as private investigator Al Clubs, grandson of ‘a famous detective of another era and another suit’, on the trail of an abducted heiress.

“The idea for Crime Stopper came from one of my brother’s friends, Barry Marx, a writer and a brilliant chap. He suggested he write the story and I would make it interactive using my Crystal Caverns engine. And he’s responsible for the Sam Spade pun,” Dan assures us.

As Dan created his adventure games, his brother Garry sat on an adjacent desk in their basement studio, also using an Apple II but, having exploited the open architecture of the machine, he was using it to code games not for home computers but for consoles. The brothers were about to play with the big boys.