The Programmer of the Year Award (an award I just made up) goes to Arthur Krewat. To understand what Arthur’s doing, why he’s doing it, and why he deserves the Programmer of the Year Award, I need to first tell you about an old computer game called Impossible Mission.
Impossible Mission was a game released for the Commodore 64 by Epyx in 1984. In the game, players control a secret agent who has invaded Professor Elvin Atombender’s secret lair. The lair is guarded by robots that can zap you with electricity and, on some levels, a floating black ball that has the power to kill you instantly. The goal of the game is to find and find and assemble puzzle pieces hidden behind pieces of furniture. Many rooms also contain computer terminals that allow players to perform special functions within the game. Despite the game’s great gameplay, it is most often for its use of speech synthesis (“Another visitor! Stay awhile … stay FOREVER!”).
Like many successful games, Impossible Mission was soon ported to several other platforms including the Apple II, Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Atari 7800. Unfortunately, the North American (NTSC) version of Impossible Mission contains a bug that randomly places some of the puzzle pieces needed to win the game behind the unsearchable computer terminals. Since not all the pieces could be retrieved, the game literally becomes an “impossible mission” — the Atari 7800 version of the game is unwinnable. Oops.
The Atari 7800 version of Impossible Mission was ported by Arthur Krewat. Arthur maintains that the code he provided to Atari did not contian the bug (and, in his defense, the European (PAL) release of the game works perfectly). Regardless, over the years Arthur’s name has become an asterix attached to a trivia question within gaming circles. (“What game on the Atari 7800 was unbeatable, and who wrote it?”)
This feat is not what earned Arthur my Programmer of the Year Award. Arthur gets the award because, twenty-something years after the release of Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800, Arthur is fixing the problem.
Over the past year, Arthur has been trying to recover the source code from many of the old games he programmed, including Impossible Mission, from vintage floppy disks. Once the programs were recovered, Arthur began digging through his own two-decade old source code and looking for the bug that made him infamous (which, as El Guapo’s assistant Jefe will tell you, is “more than famous”). According to this thread on Atari Age started by Arthur himself, the bug has been found and fixed.
Ultimately this fixed version will probably be distributed online for free between retro videogame hobbiests and will be played on computers running Atari emulators, although it is possible that the final version could be made into real cartridges and sold at videogame shows. Regardless of what happens with the finished version, I seriously doubt Arthur will make a dime (or wants to) off the fixed version. It’s all about a guy going back and righting a wrong.
Two joysticks up to Arthur Krewat for making Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 not quite so impossible.
Oh my gosh…closing my eyes and listening to the game gave me chills!!! (In a good way!) Takes me back to my childhood when Atari was my life and I’d literally wrestle and beat the crap out of my big brother to get the games away from him so I could play. Might explain his aversion to video games nowadays…getting beat up by his little sister might have damaged him. LOL!