Now that money was flowing in and I was learning coding methodologies at University of Central Florida (who knew about linear coding – I was so sloppy, I still blush at the mess Eagles was internally), I decided to write another game for SSI, this one from an old board game I’d done a decade earlier through our startup Setheral Simulations. DeathRace was a pretty neat car game. My hope was to combine the clean driving system of Grand Prix with a combat system with a lot of dice. Never got the driving part to work very well, but blasting someone in the trunk with a shotgun was a very satisfying sensation.

I got that game running in its most basic form and was just getting sound effects into it when I sent it to SSI. Sadly they were not interested. I’ll give them that the game probably needed a lot better graphics (I was up to my font tricks again, but I really couldn’t get the sounds to come across well). But the other reason they gave was that the same gaming house that stole our cute little board game idea (after stripping off the good points and introducing crap) also were now producing a computer version of it. So my copyright-violated board game was now being snuffed as a computer game by the same people? What a sad irony.

And you know what? A year later I finally did manage to pick up their game and give it a play on the Atari. And it sucked. It really did. I wouldn’t have minded so much if my hopes had been crushed by a product of merit. But no, this was just a crummy arcade game that didn’t work very well.