But the rest of the collection gave us high hopes for his later home computer and console work. Unfortunately we found almost no remains of his time at Stern, which meant that his unreleased Hunt the Wumpus-inspired arcade game Crypt is likely gone forever. Untouched for years in the home basement he often worked from were piles of old computers, CD-R backups, floppy disks, notes, cassettes, EPROMs, and data tape going back to his earliest Apple II work in the late 70s, which his family agreed to loan to us for evaluation.Īs is often the case when looking at archives like this, our first priority was trying to recover any works of Chris’ that were lost – games he developed that, for one reason or another, were never available commercially. In early 2020, The Video Game History Foundation was approached by a friend of Oberth’s surviving family to help them make sense of the materials he had left behind.
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For others, it might be Winter Games for the Commodore 64, or perhaps his later arcade work at Incredible Technologies like Time Killers or World Class Bowling, or the handful of titles he developed on his Apple II in the late 70s and early 80s (on an Apple II with serial number 201, as he liked to brag). I think for most of us, the definitive Chris Oberth game was Anteater, the arcade title he designed and engineered during his time at Stern (or perhaps you know the clone that Chris himself wrote for home computers – Ardy the Aardvark – or the one he didn’t – Oil’s Well). Programmer and designer Chris Oberth had a long, diverse career in the video game industry before he passed away in 2012. Today I’m tag-teaming with Rich Whitehouse to bring you the story of how we recovered and re-assembled Days of Thunder, an unreleased, never-before-seen title co-authored by Chris Oberth at Mindscape. Hey all, VGHF founder Frank Cifaldi here. Video game programmer Chris Oberth (1953-2012)