The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 1
Welcome to Quicksilver!
Our story is four decades long, and still going strong. It involves more than 50 games, a half-dozen military trainers, several educational packages, a restaurant and even a device to assist with breast cancer surgery. But, all throughout, games have always played a central role. In fact, virtually all of our non-game projects came to us specifically because we know about games, user interfaces and usability.
Several themes show up repeatedly over the years:
- Synergies between projects spanning very different markets
- The amplifying power of great tools and proprietary engines
- Relationships that pay back years or even decades later
- The importance of asking the right questions and solving the right problems
- Coming to the rescue of projects in trouble
- The value of hiring the right people for the job
- Copy Protection, and Security by Design
- Sophisticated AI across all product lines
- Always learning new skills
It All Began Here: Mattel Electronics
In this series of posts, we’ll explore the history of our studio, starting with our beginnings at the legendary Mattel Electronics in Hawthorne, California – home of the Mattel Intellivision game console – and how we created our new company out of the wreckage of the Great Video Game Crash of 1983.
Interesting tidbit: look at the color of the sky in that photo. It’s not that way because of the age of the photo. In the 1980s, in Los Angeles, the smog was so bad that the sky was often bright orange in color during the day. It’s much better now. But this is what it really looked like on many days.
That was the beginning of the era of programmable video game consoles. The Intellivision, seen here at bottom center in this photo from the National Video Game Museum, was the first 16-bit console, sporting a powerful (for its day) 880 kHz General Instrument CP1610 CPU and a custom graphics chip that could display eight simultaneous moving objects and play sounds on three independent channels.
Ours was a world of firsts. Virtually everything we did had never been done before. Sports games with the ability to control any of the players on the field. Strategy games playable on a TV set. Several different takes on space combat. And even human voices in games, like in the popular title B-17 Bomber.
The cover art was fanciful and in no way represented the games within. Some pundits insisted that these new “video games” were just a fad, no more lasting or important than Cabbage Patch Kids. Little did we know just how much of a tectonic shift in society was about to take place.
The following Intellivision games were all written by some of Quicksilver’s founders (B-17 also included the legendary John Sohl, author of the mega-hit game Astrosmash). B-17 was the largest of the lot, weighing in at a massive 12K, 5K of which was dedicated to voices.
The team that would later found Quicksilver became experts at rescuing projects that were in trouble.
For Space Spartans, the game tried to be a full 3D galaxy navigation and combat game. We still have copies of the original EPROMs that were burned just before we took over the project. This rare photo shows the interior of a "T-Card" used for development, with the four EPROMs containing the 8K of game code (Intellivision games used an unusual 10 bit wide format, so two EPROMs were needed for each 4K bank).
These changes worked very cohesively, especially with the addition of the carefully constructed voices. We had a variety of voices so it was easy to tell them apart: female, male and robot (we did a few status voice prompts, such as the end-game “the battle is over” in a robot voice because we could use a lower bit rate and therefore save space in the cartridge).
But the code base was huge and could never fit in 12K as required. Some super-cool features, like the rolling altimeter readouts and the top-gunner, had to be scrapped. Then we needed to tune the flight parameters so that they made an interesting game and required interesting tradeoffs – how much fuel vs. how many bombs, for example.
Fitting the game into the cartridge required some exceptionally difficult optimization of the code and voice data. We had to play some pretty strange tricks with the assembly language of the console’s 16-bit processor in order to jam in the last few fixes and get the title out the door. We shipped the ROMs on an airplane via courier, making the deadline by a matter of hours.
Autographed copies of these games still appear and are sold at “classic game” and “vintage computer” events. For example, this happened at the Vintage Computer Festival in February, 2024:
The source code listing for Space Hawk still exists. It’s now archived at the National Video Game Museum. Not only is it one of the few existing examples of early video game code, but it also contains at the end of the listing a complete day-by-day diary of what was done on the game during development, beginning in August of 1981. This is a short excerpt of the printed paper listing (the full document is a 1”-thick book, printed on 11x14” line-printer paper – a true relic of that era).
Those with sharp eyes will notice that the original working title of the game was “Space Hawks,” which changed at some point along the way to “Space Hawk” by the time it was released.
Personal Computers: Apple ][ and IBM PC
Our people were some of the first to develop games for personal computers such as Apple ][ and IBM PC, starting in 1982-1983 at Mattel.
Mattel wanted to expand onto other platforms, and two of the most popular in that day were the Apple ][ and the IBM PC. Mattel actually formed a deal with IBM to gain early access to some of its newer computers, such as the PCjr, so we could develop games that took advantage of their special capabilities, such as enhanced video modes. In-house, we had people working on Apple and IBM versions of Night Stalker, Lock ‘N Chase and Data East’s BurgerTime. A few of these, such as Apple ][ BurgerTime, actually made it to the market.
We even expanded our team by collaborating with Mattel’s partner in Taiwan, creating Mattel Electronics Limited, Taiwan (MELT) to work on Apple and IBM products. Quicksilver’s William Fisher was tapped to hire and train the Taipei-based team, and spend the summer of 1983 there to make sure operations spun up smoothly. The team there ultimately had 18 people writing games.
These titles gave us our first taste of the copy protection and computer security work that would become a significant part of Quicksilver’s future business. For example, we worked with our team to analyze various mechanisms for preventing the copying of floppy disks, even traveling to the manufacturing sites to see their production facilities in action. We celebrated our ability to “crack” supposedly secure systems, and ended up writing our own system to protect Apple ][ BurgerTime. One of the highlights of that project was a special Apple BASIC program called “SHUFFLE”, which would take a file containing assembly language code and “shuffle” it like a deck of cards while maintaining the same functionality, effectively rendering the code untraceable.
When Mattel Electronics officially folded in early 1984, Quicksilver ended up doing over two dozen Data East arcade game conversions to personal computer platforms.
The Great Video Game Crash of 1983
The year 1983 began with visions of endless expansion and opportunity in the game business. Much has been written about those times, so there’s no need to delve into detail here except to say that structural factors in this new business exposed some fatal weaknesses that ultimately took all of the players off of the table. Major companies lost money and went out of business. Mattel Electronics lost so much money that it almost took down Barbie and Hot Wheels when it crashed in early 1984.
Just like that, the entire Intellivision crew lost their jobs in several layoffs, ending with a final closure on January 20, 1984. Several of us didn’t want the party to end, so we gathered together and decided to start our own company. Ultimately, three of the Mattel programmers became founders of Quicksilver Software, Inc. We originally wanted to call it “Blue Sky Software,” but that name was taken.
It’s good to have friends. Within months of kicking off the new company and buying ourselves several now-surplus Apple ][ computers from Mattel, we landed two excellent projects: one to help develop a state-of-the-art lighting console, and a second to develop what would turn into a series of nearly 30 arcade game adaptations for Data East and SNK. This was the first of a long string of extended customer relationships that became a key contributor to our long-term success. We have since had many customers who worked with us for more than a decade.
The Data East projects were technically challenging. Because the personal computers of the time were only modestly powerful, and because their graphics capabilities were very limited, we had to work hard just to get things to show up on screen at all. The most challenging were the low-end IBM PC-compatible machines, which sometimes had only 320x200 graphics in four “CGA” colors: pink, cyan, black and white. Creating playable games with so few colors was quite a trick.
The Apple ][ won the prize for the weirdest graphics mode. Their “HIRES” mode had eight colors, but two of those were different versions of black and white, so in reality there were six colors: black, white, orange, green, purple and blue. And sometimes colors of one type were not allowed to be next to colors of a different type. As Wikipedia points out, this was weird even by the standards of the 1980s; it was a side effect of designer Steve Wozniak’s efforts to minimize chip count in the machine (chart courtesy of Wikipedia).
We were also tremendously limited when it came to computer memory. These machines frequently had only 32K or 48K of available RAM, including space for the operating system, so we had to squeeze out every last byte. One way we did this was to create our own disk operating system (DOS) to replace MS-DOS and Apple’s OS. We called this Quick-DOS (tm) and used it as a fast and very small bootloader for almost all of our personal computer games. This would open up some interesting opportunities in completely different markets a couple of years down the road.
We also started discovering the value of creating our own tools to support development efforts. For example, for these games we created a custom “tile” editor that allowed our team to create the levels of the games quickly and reliably. This was extremely important for large titles like Karnov. We designed the editor to handle multiple different graphics modes, and to save data files in an extremely compact form that was ideally suited to the computers of the day. The editor was used many times in the coming years, over nearly 30 titles.
Soon, we were busy, expanding and setting up our first office in Costa Mesa, California adjacent to Red Hill Avenue. Every one of our later offices ended up next to that same street – not because we planned it that way, but because we kept finding great places around the airport.
Soon, in addition to our game projects, we were working on all sorts of interesting hardware/software hybrids, like the Prestige Series of theater/TV lighting control consoles that we helped develop for Lee Colortran. And we began working with companies like Western Digital, Hitachi and JVC on various high-technology projects like the brand-new CD-ROM drives. Interestingly, all of these hardware projects added a great deal to our game development projects, since we were one of the very first game studios to develop expertise with operating system drivers and optical media.
Coming Up Next: Chapter 2 – Original Game Development
Porting games from arcade to home was good business in the early 1980s. But original game development is where the real action is, and our work on porting soon led to breakthrough relationships with original game publishers.
The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 2
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