Every developer has his roots, and in the case of the noted Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online designer, those roots were in an Atari 8-bit game that cloned some arcade titles and sold exactly one copy.
You might need to get some headphones on and blast your volume all the way to hear it, but in the above video, designer Raph Koster (of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies fame) revisits the first game he ever made: an Atari 8-bit computer-based compilation of, mainly, arcade game clones. Koster coded the game himself when he was 14, and sold it in Ziploc baggies, because that's how he'd heard his hero Richard Garriott got his start. The game sold exactly one copy. Koster managed to dig out a surviving floppy and get the game running on modern hardware for the sake of the above video, which was originally presented to fans and aspiring developers at the fan-centric PAX East expo last month. "The biggest thing it taught me is that even at 14, it can be done," Koster reflects in the video.
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