The Macintosh had more games than people gave it credit for and among those developers gliding in to make their mark was John Calhoun thanks to a bunch of quirky, innovative titles that included an instant classic

Words by David Crookes

John Calhoun became a wellknown name in Macintosh circles following the release of his acclaimed game, Glider, published as shareware in 1988. Forming his own company (Soft Dorothy Software – anod to The Wizard Of Oz since he grew up in Kansas), John also created other innovative Mac titles. He struck a deal with publisher Casady & Greene and became a full-time games developer, too. By the mid-Nineties, however, he landed a job with Apple, before Steve Jobs returned and created a powerhouse of a company. Being employed by Apple effectively ended his gaming endeavours (except for a brief period when he produced iOS titles) but, now he’s retired, he can be found blogging and working on projects at engineersneedart.com and he doesn’t rule out a return.

Can you remember when you first became interested in computers?

A friend of the family had a TRS-80 and we were starting to see computers in the movies and in shows such as Star Trek. One of the games he had was Trek-80, programmed in BASIC, and it was the first time I’d seen a game running on a personal computer. I remember thinking, “Now that’s really cool.” I guess the idea of computers and games ignited something in me.

Did you then begin coding yourself?

My high school was progressive enough to have a computer-science class which I took in my junior year. Since this was 1980, the teacher told us to buy a stack of punch cards and said we were going to learn COBOL or Fortran or something like that. Then, a week or two later, half of the classroom had Apple II computers and the teacher said, “Forget the stack of punch cards, you’re gonna have to buy two of these 5.25-inch floppy disks and we’re gonna learn BASIC.” That was my introduction to programming computers.

Were you fortunate enough to get a computer of your own?

Kids would hang out in the computer science room after school and the teacher was cool with that. He enjoyed seeing our enthusiasm to learn. Some of the wealthier kids had their own Apple IIs at home and they’d bring games into school – there was a lot of pirating going on. But my single mother didn’t have near enough money to buy a computer so I’d just use the ones in high school, writing games in BASIC.

What games did you write?

I had a friend in high school who had aCommodore PET. We were into Dungeons & Dragons at the time and I’d go over to his house after school, and we’d write programs that would generate players or characters. I also remember a crude, almost Asteroids-like game that had been developed with scrolling ASCII. When we saw the game’s source code, we spent a lot of time tweaking it, adding shields, extra lives and so on. It was fun taking an existing game and modifying it.

Did you have experience with any other machines?

My father lived in Alaska and I would go there during the summertime to visit and work in the salmon canneries because they would need lots of workers. I also spent time hanging out, playing on my father’s VIC-20, originally, then a Commodore 64. I wrote a little Tron-type game with ASCII graphics before discovering Commodore’s manual showed how to remap the character tables so you could basically do your own font, as long as each character was five by seven pixels.