IN THE CHAIR: FRANZ LANZINGER

From creating arcade games for Atari in the Golden Age to converting the classics for home consoles, Franz Lanzinger is certainly the king of his castle

Words by Paul Drury

» [Arcade] Crystal Castles in all its isometric glory.

“The whole reason I became a games developer was because I was completely addicted to videogames „

Franz Lanzinger

Who said hanging around in arcades playing silly videogames would never lead to anything? Franz Lanzinger did just that and it led to him joining Atari’s coin-op division, producing the wonderfully imaginative Crystal Castles. It did help that he had a solid background in mathematics and programming and his technical nous saw him continue to make games for home consoles and computers for many decades. He now writes books about game design and any budding coders interested in creating games using Unity should check out his published work at franzlanzinger. com He also plays classical piano and laughs a lot. Not at the same time, though.

On the first level of Crystal Castles, the letters FXL are part of the structure. That’s you, right?

[laughs] Yes, that’s me. The X stands for Xaver, the German version of Xavier.

Was this you making a point about programmers deserving credit for their work?

Atari did let you include your initials by way of recognition but not your full name. They were afraid, and probably rightly so, that competitors would steal their employees so wanted to keep the names secret. By the time I left, Atari allowed each team to have a credits screen, which was the right thing to do… and I was partly responsible for that.

How?

I put an Easter Egg into Crystal Castles that said “Programmed by Franz Lanzinger” and management had a fit. They sent me a written letter saying if I didn’t remove it, they’d reduce my bonus. I thought that was a bit bizarre but I took it out… which I really regret. I should never have told them I’d done it in the first place!

You joined Atari at the start of 1982. Were you a keen arcade gamer?

The whole reason I became a games developer was because I was completely addicted to videogames. There was a group of five of us who played a lot, like, three hours every single day between 1980 and 1984, in places like Central Park arcade, Galactican, Golfland… I still live right next to Golfland, here in Sunnyvale, California.

The original home of Atari!

My friend, Brian McGhie, one of our group of arcade gamers, got a job there. He told me Atari coin-op were hiring and so I applied. I had a degree in mathematics from the University Of Notre Dame and I went to graduate school in Berkeley, California. After that, I worked as a software engineer for three years, mainly scientific research programming, at several companies, working on government projects for people like DARPA, who invented the internet before it was even called that.

Would that be ARPANET?

That’s right. I was using tools like Telnet and FTP, which are still part of the internet today and I was connecting to computers 400 miles away. That was a big deal back then [laughs].

What was it like meeting and working with the people who had made the games you had loved in the arcade?

I was heavily into Asteroids and Missile Command but I didn’t know who had written those games. No one did! Of course, when I found out, that was just awesome. One of my favourite memories of Atari is sitting at this giant table in the cafeteria, which could seat about 30 people, eating lunch and talking about everything.