From the Apple II to Activision and Absolute Entertainment, John Van Ryzin talks us through his heroic adventures on consoles and computers and how he’s back making games for the Atari 2600

Words by Paul Drury

John Van Ryzin began his gamemaking career with a soldering iron in his hand, creating prototype circuit boards for various toys and gadgets, including early LED handheld, Bank Shot. He moved on to coding games for the Apple II and became one of the founding four members of Activision’s East Coast development studio, which produced such fine titles as Keystone Kapers, Crackpots and John’s own masterpiece, HERO Indeed, John bears an uncanny resemblance to Roderick Hero, the star of the game, as depicted in the cover art. He would go on to make games across a range of genres and machines, including the C64, NES and Game Boy. “It sure has been a wild ride,” he says, laughing – something he does throughout our conversation.

» John proudly displaying some HERO memorabilia – and he never liked the MAD magazine-style cover of the 2600 box so later versions featured a more Dan Dare-looking Roderick Hero.

If someone had told you in 1984 that you’d still be making Atari 2600 games in 2024, would you think they were mad?

Yes. And I thought I was mad when I agreed to do it.

Apart from insanity, what was the impetus for going back to that old hardware?

Dan Kitchen contacted me and told me that he and his brother Garry and David Crane from Activision were making new game cartridges for the Atari. He showed me their website and this elaborate game they’d made [Circus Convoy], I couldn’t believe that there were people who would still buy games for the 2600, let alone the concept of going back in time and actually making new games for it.

Did you have ‘unfinished business’ with that console?

Oh yeah, because the first game I made for it [Cosmic Commuter] was rejected. I thought I was going to get fired but they just told me to make another one that was more fun. I’d spent too much time making it look good and not working on the fun part so for my second game, HERO, I just tried to make it fun.

And it was! Though you’re probably best known for HERO on the 2600, you actually started on far more basic hardware, working on electronic toys and gadgets at Wickstead Design.

I was an intern there, like a summer job, while I was studying electrical engineering at the New Jersey Institute Of Technology. Wickstead were an industrial design company making consumer electronics and they hired me to construct prototypes of the hardware people had designed. They’d hand me a schematic and a bunch of chips and say, “Make it!” They were inventing some pretty crazy toys… like, they had one where a kid would put on this helmet, so they kind of looked like Darth Vader. It had a loudspeaker on top and when they spoke, it scrambled their voices and only another kid wearing a helmet could understand what they were saying.

We want one!

Ah, it never went into production because they never got it to work [laughs].

You met Garry Kitchen there, who you would later join at Activision.

Yeah, he was working on his second handheld game called Bank Shot, a pool game, for Parker Brothers. I worked on some of the prototypes for that and the wiring. I thought he was really smart. He was making cuttingedge stuff plus he’d reversed engineered an Atari 2600. I mean, how did he do that?!