Orion by Raph Koster

[+Philsan]

Raph Koster is a well-known game designer who co-created the online role-playing game LegendMUD (1994), directed the development of Ultima Online (Electronic Arts, 1997) and was the creative director of Star Wars Galaxies (LucasArts, 2003), massively multiplayer networked role-playing games. He is also the author of the classic book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design". In 2012 he was named an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online. He is currently the founder and CEO of Playable Worlds, Inc., a developer of immersive online worlds.

In an interview in Retro Gamer magazine (issue 254) he said that his first computer was a 16KB Atari given to him by his great-uncle and his third an Atari 130XE, which he still owns. Intrigued, I contacted him for more details and he told me that the first Atari was a 600XL and the second one was a 1200XL.

 

In 1985 he programmed Orion, an Atari Basic game which actually consisted of five two-players games loaded in succession.
He kindly gave me the permission to share the game.

Orion (1985)(Protovision, Raph Koster)(basic).zip

 

Years ago he made a video about it:

More info about Raph Koster in his website where there's a page dedicated to Atari 8-bit computers emulation.

[www.atarimania.com]

Many thanks for getting in touch with the author, the game would've probably been lost without you!