**********************************************
**STELLA's 20th BIRTHDAY PROGRAMMING CONTEST**
***********SPONSORED BY CYBERPUNKS************
**********************************************
Ever since the Starpath Supercharger CD was released a year ago I have
wanted to sponsor a contest to encourage programming but I had no way to
provide a suitable prize.
All this changed yesterday when I shot at Nolan Bushnell's home for my
documentary. I printed out a special "Happy 20th Birthday to Stella"
signature certificate on parchment-style paper which has the following
signatures:
Nolan Bushnell - Father of videogames, founder of Atari
Al Alcorn - co-founder of Atari
Ron Milner - designer of the Atari 2600
Joe Decuir - designer of the Atari 2600, 400/800, and Amiga
Steve Mayer - designer of the Atari 2600
Larry Wagner - original head of 1st group of programmers who completed
Combat and wrote the number-crunching part of Video Chess.
Larry Kaplan - Symbolic of the originator of 2600 programming tricks: Air
Sea Battle, Bowling, Bridge, Kaboom.
This is going to be matted with a photo of the entire group (many more
than just the above) blowing out a special cake shaped like a 2600 (with
candles as console switches).
Only 6 of these certificates exist, 4 reserved for Cyberpunks, one being
used as a scanning master to create copies as momentos to the participants
of the documentary, and one for this purpose.
This would make the ultimate collector's item for the Atari enthusiast.
There may also be additions to the prize-list as time goes on.
In order to win, you must write the best Atari 2600 game by April 1st
1998. This gives you 8 months to either complete a game already in
progress or write a new one from scratch.
The rules are that the game must be freely distributable as .BINs for the
Supercharger and secondly, that the game MUST be shared with the list at
certain stages so that it is ultimately a collaborative effort. This
contest is to encourage people to devote more time and effort to their
2600 coding but only TOGETHER can we get the most out of the unit. Being
possessive about our code will only hinder everyone in the long run. What
I learned from this documentary is that the best games grew out of a lot
of collaboration and a lot of playtesting. That won't mean the author has
any less of a reason to take credit for his work, and Cyberpunks will
mediate piracy disputes if necessary.
There are many factors that will influence the judging in a positive or
negative way. Things like originality, gamplay, depth, replay value,
complexity of the graphics, art/design/story. Special brownie points for
multiload games.
Good luck!
==========================================================================
== Glenn Saunders http://www.lawguru.com/production/production.html ==
== krishna@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ ==
== Stale homepage @ http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698 ==
==========================================================================
--
Archives updated once/day at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsubscribing and other info at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/stella.html
