What cherished games would you take to the island?

From glaives and hacky sacks to skateboards and spatulas, Matt Householder’s long and winding career has taken in some interesting turns…

Words by Paul Drury

It doesn’t get much more Eighties than a California Games Hawaiian shirt…

A great idea for a game can hit you at any time. And for Matt Householder, it almost literally did. “It was a Saturday morning in the summer of 1986 and my wife, Candi, and I were walking to a coffee shop for breakfast,” recalls Matt, “when this kid on a skateboard rolls past us down the hill, making this horrible racket with the old hard wheels. My wife said, ‘You should do a game with skateboarding in it’ and I’m like, ‘Woah! You’re right! And we should have roller-skating and hacky sack and surfing… I think I designed the whole of California Games in the next 30 seconds.”

Matt had always been open to inspiration from unexpected sources. After completing his degree in computer engineering at the University Of Michigan, he had joined the corporate world of Bell Labs in January 1980, working alongside 2,000 other programmers in a huge building in Naperville, Illinois. Unsurprisingly, he hated it, though stuck it out as the company promised to send him to grad school to complete a Masters degree and it was there he met the VP of engineering of Gaming Devices Inc (GDI), a small videogame division of the famous jukebox manufacturers, Seeburg.

“This guy starts talking to me at the end of class one day, telling me they had licensed a couple of videogames from Irem in Japan,” says Matt. “He offered me a job and so the day I graduated, which would be August 1981, I quit Bell Labs, became a programmer at GDI and soon they flew me out to Japan!”

The games in question were Red Alert, a fairly standard shooter which cheerfully imagines how World War III might play out over various capital cities, and Oli-Boo-Chu, a maze game as bonkers as its title. Matt’s first task was to ‘tune’ the latter’s gameplay for the American market, which essentially meant tweaking the speed and other variables to make it harder for the more seasoned US arcade gamer. GDI also began developing a video poker game, which Matt had a hand in, but when that project folded, he was approached by a head-hunter, the perfectly named Joe Morocco, who set him up with an interview at Gottlieb’s arcade division.

“I was actually interviewed alongside one of my colleagues from GDI, Chris Krubel,” Matt explains, “by this big, imposing guy called Ron Waxman. He chain-smoked and the ash kept falling down his black turtleneck. His eyes kind of drilled into you, trying to tell if you could actually do what you said you could. He hired us both to do a game based on a film in production but told us if it wasn’t ready for when the movie was released, we’d be out on our butts.”

Matt and Chris immediately began designing Krull, a multi-screened arcade adventure based on the fantasy epic from Columbia Pictures. You can read the full story of the frenetic ten-month development of the game in issue 233 and the good news is that Matt did indeed meet the tight deadline and achieved that rare accolade of producing a game considerably better than the movie it was inspired by. The bad news is, the film was dire and flopped at the box office, which rather dampened interest in the coin-op from both arcade operators and players. “That whole period was really intense,” sighs Matt. “Neither