THE MAKING OF

BART VS.THE SPACE MUTANTS

THIS EARLY VIDEOGAME VERSION OF THE SIMPSONS WAS NOTORIOUSLY,PUNISHINGLY DIFFICULT– BUT THE STORY OF ITS CREATION REVEALS AN EQUALLY PUNISHING DEVELOPMENT

WORDS BY LEWIS PACKWOOD

» [Mega Drive] Barry Marx, who created the story for Bart Vs The Space Mutants, eventually moved into TV, but died of a heart attack in 1997 at the age of 41, not long after starting work on Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

» Garry Kitchen coded Donkey Kong for the Atari VCS before joining Activision in the early Eighties, later forming the publisher Absolute Entertainment and developer Imagineering in 1986. This year, he released a new game for the Atari VCS called Circus Convoy through Audacity Games, a company he cofounded with David Crane.

“I mean, to it try was do that game on to that machine”

Garry Kitchen

Let’s begin right at the beginning. Before The Simpsons, before the NES, there was a man called Garry with two ‘r’s.Garry Kitchen wanted to be an artist.He’d been drawing and painting all his life, and in the late-Seventies, he began studying art at his local college. But in his second year, he was suddenly drawn away from his life’s passion by the rapidly developing realm of electronic entertainment. He would soon set out on a path that would see him become a leading light in 8-bit game development.

He had begun working part-time for the electronics firm Wickstead Design Associates as a technician, doing odd jobs like soldering circuit boards – and he was so drawn into this world of chips and wires that he switched his college degree to electrical engineering. But his college courses lagged behind what was happening in the real world. This was the age of the new-fangled microprocessor, yet his course was still teaching mainframe programming with FORTRAN. He found he was learning more on the job than at college – and he had to learn very quickly indeed when a big contract came in from Parker Brothers.

“They asked us to engineer a game called Wildfire, which was a pinball machine with a microprocessor in it,” says Garry. But the programmer they had earmarked to work on the toy pulled out, and Garry suddenly found himself being ‘volunteered’ to fill the gap. “So in about six weeks, I learned how to program and wrote a 1.5K program to simulate pinball on this device,” he says.