Epyx began with a Dungeons & Dragons referee who wanted to keep track of his monsters. It went on to make some of the best-known Commodore 64 games of the 1980s, from Impossible Mission to Summer Games, and then designed a colour handheld games console that it could not afford to launch. Atari bought the design and sold it as the Lynx. Within months of the sale Epyx had laid off most of its staff, stopped publishing computer games and filed for bankruptcy.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1978, as Automated Simulations, by Jim Connelley and Jon Freeman, in Mountain View, California. The first copy of its first game, Starfleet Orion, sold in December 1978.
- Renamed: Epyx, first as a label for the company’s games and then, after venture capital funding in 1982, as the company’s own name.
- Known for: Temple of Apshai, Jumpman, Impossible Mission, the “Games” series from Summer Games to California Games, the Fast Load cartridge and the 500XJ joystick.
- Hardware: the handheld later sold as the Atari Lynx, designed at Epyx by R.J. Mical and Dave Needle.
- Bankruptcy: filed for Chapter 11 protection on 19 October 1989.
Automated Simulations
Connelley met Freeman through Dungeons & Dragons in 1977. Connelley had bought a Commodore PET to keep track of monster statistics and hit points for the campaign he ran. When he started writing a game and ran into trouble, Freeman, a games writer who knew next to nothing about computers, offered to help. The result was Starfleet Orion, a space battle game, and Automated Simulations was set up to sell it. As Computer Gaming World later told the story, Connelley had decided that a good way to write off the cost of the PET was to design a game and sell it. The company was founded in his dining room and run from his and Freeman’s spare bedrooms.
Its breakthrough was Temple of Apshai, the first game in a series it called Dunjonquest. Freeman designed the game system, Connelley did most of the programming, and Jeff Johnson designed the dungeon and chose its monsters. Johnson also named it: he claimed Apshai was an obscure Egyptian god. Its early advertisements offered “over 200 rooms”, more than 30 kinds of monster and 70 or so treasures, on cassette for the TRS-80 and PET at $24.95 with a 56-page rule book, and called it “guaranteed to be the best version of Dungeons and Dragons”. The games of that era came in a clear plastic bag with a disk and a small manual.
Freeman and his wife, Anne Westfall, left the company in November 1981, and Freeman went on to create Archon. In 1982 Connelley raised venture capital, and the company took the name it had been using on its boxes since at least 1980, when its advertisements sold “Epyx computer games from Automated Simulations”. According to Bob Botch, its vice-president of marketing, the first choice had been “Epic”, for the epic nature of the games, but a record label already had it, so “we decided to take a high-tech approach”. In September 1983 COMPUTE!’s Gazette introduced Connelley as chairman of Epyx; by December he was running a design studio, The Connelley Group.
Jumpman and Impossible Mission
Botch joined Epyx a week before the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1983. The company was so short of money that its staff shared a rented condo instead of hotel rooms. At the show he was meant to demonstrate the company’s new role-playing games, but he kept loading a platform game he had been handed that morning, and taking it out whenever the president came over to shout at him. Epyx left with, in his words, “a ton of orders” for Randy Glover’s Jumpman, and three weeks later it was shipping. It was one of Epyx’s first big hits, and a turn away from the role-playing games it had been known for.
Impossible Mission, Dennis Caswell’s 1984 game for the Commodore 64, sends a secret agent into the underground complex of Elvin Atombender, a hacker threatening to start a missile war. You have six hours of game time to search the furniture in 32 rooms for the 36 puzzle pieces that make up his password, while robots patrol the platforms. Commodore Magazine credited Caswell with helping to pioneer synthesised speech in computer games, and Elvin’s greeting, “Stay a while… stay forever!”, was still being quoted by reviewers when Impossible Mission II came out in 1988. ZZAP!64 gave the sequel a Gold Medal.
The Games series
Late in 1983 Epyx thought about an official Olympic licence, and found that Atari had already taken the rights to the 1984 Los Angeles Games. It made its own multi-event game anyway and chose a title that would not step on Atari’s toes: Summer Games. Asked what happened next, Botch laughed: “We made a lot of money.” The series ran for the rest of the decade:
| Game | Year |
|---|---|
| Summer Games | 1984 |
| Summer Games II | 1985 |
| Winter Games | 1985 |
| World Games | 1986 |
| California Games | 1987 |
| The Games: Summer Edition and The Games: Winter Edition | 1988 |
For 1988 Epyx did get a licence, from the U.S. Olympic Committee, and COMPUTE!’s Gazette gave The Games: Summer Edition, set at the Seoul Olympics, its top marks in every category.
Epyx in Britain
At first Epyx’s games came to Britain through CBS, which published Impossible Mission there, while Summer Games came out under licence from Quicksilva because CBS Software was not ready. In July 1985 Commodore User reported that U.S. Gold had signed a deal to distribute Epyx software in the UK, beating Beyond to it “with cash up front”. U.S. Gold went on to publish Epyx’s games in Britain, including Spectrum conversions: CRASH gave the Spectrum Winter Games 93% and Impossible Mission 76%.
Trade ran the other way too. By January 1989 Epyx had taken the exclusive right to distribute Incentive Software’s Freescape games in the USA, and it published Driller there as Space Station Oblivion, in a Master’s Collection for experienced players, at $49.95 on the Amiga. It also took over the marketing of Rogue from A.I. Design and was shipping versions for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1986.
Not every deal went smoothly. Epyx published System 3’s International Karate in America as World Karate Championship, and Data East sued, claiming it copied Karate Champ. A district court found against Epyx in January 1987 and ordered the game recalled on 10 June 1987. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling on 30 November 1988: the features the two games shared came from the sport of karate itself, not from Data East’s expression of it.
Fast Load and the 500XJ
Epyx also sold hardware for other people’s games. The Fast Load cartridge, advertised in January 1985, promised that a Commodore 64 owner could “load, save and copy your disks five times faster than normal”. A rival’s measured chart that November timed Pitstop II, another Epyx game, at 144 seconds with the standard loader and 41 with Fast Load. Disk Fastloaders explains how cartridges like it worked. The 500XJ joystick, at $19.95, was shaped to be held in the left hand, with the fire button under the index finger. Antic liked it for precise control but warned that the forearm soon cramped in games that needed constant firing.
The handheld
In 1986 Epyx brought in Dave Morse, who had run Amiga before Commodore bought it, to look at new kinds of machine. He worked with R.J. Mical and Dave Needle, two of the Amiga’s designers. Mical told The Games Machine that the idea of a handheld came up over a restaurant meal with Morse. Needle designed the hardware, and Mical wrote the development system, which ran on an Amiga. What they wanted and could not afford is revealing: a tilt sensor to replace the joystick, and a video output, both dropped because the parts cost too much.
The finished machine had a backlit colour screen showing 16 colours from a palette of 4,096 and could link up to eight units to play one game. Epyx could not afford to bring it to market. “Created and developed at Epyx, that product proved too expensive for the company to market,” COMPUTE! reported, “so Epyx sold it to Atari earlier this year.” Atari showed it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June 1989, first as the Portable Color Entertainment System and then as the Lynx, with Epyx’s California Games in the box. The first six Lynx games were all Epyx’s, among them Blue Lightning, a 3D shoot-’em-up, and The Gates of Zendocon. Mical said that another, Chip’s Challenge, was also finished.
Bankruptcy
The sale did not save the company. In late September 1989 Epyx announced large lay-offs. Amiga Computing reported that Morse and Mical had gone along with 85 per cent of the staff, and ACE that Epyx would stop publishing computer games and work for other publishers, particularly on Nintendo titles and on the Lynx. On 19 October 1989 Epyx filed for protection from its creditors under Chapter 11. Computer Gaming World could not reach anyone to comment: the company’s phone line had been disconnected. Another company took over the 500XJ joystick, and Publishing International decided to sell its game Ishido, which Epyx had been due to distribute, itself.
The company carried on as a developer. Later accounts say it shrank from 145 employees to eight and in 1993 sold its assets to Bridgestone Media Group. In 2006 System 3 licensed some of Epyx’s games for new versions on the Nintendo DS, PSP and Wii.
Sources
- BYTE, September 1979 (Starfleet Orion advertisement) and November 1979 (Temple of Apshai advertisement: TRS-80 and PET, $24.95); BYTE, March 1980, and COMPUTE!, June 1980: Dunjonquest advertisement naming “the two guys who are Automated Simulations: Jim Connelley and Jon Freeman”.
- 80 Microcomputing, February 1981: “Epyx computer games from Automated Simulations” advertisement.
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette, September 1983: Kathy Yakal, “Jim Connelley: The Programmer Behind Temple of Apshai”; December 1983, p. 49: Connelley and The Connelley Group.
- John Jermaine, Epyx history and interview with Bob Botch, Commodore Magazine, August 1989, pp. 50–53 (Freeman and Connelley, Temple of Apshai, Archon, the Epyx name, Jumpman, Summer Games and the Olympic licences, Dennis Caswell). Recollections, told a decade later.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 100, November 1992: “The Major Players in 1981”; issue 118, May 1994: Starfleet Orion.
- Ahoy!, September 1988: Impossible Mission 2 review (“Stay a while…stay forever!”). ZZAP!64, issue 38, June 1988: Impossible Mission II Gold Medal.
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette, June 1989, p. 17: The Games: Summer Edition review.
- Commodore User, July 1985: U.S. Gold’s Epyx distribution deal. Personal Computer News, 26 January 1985, and ZZAP!64, issue 2, June 1985: Impossible Mission published in Britain by CBS. Your Commodore, March 1985, and ZZAP!64, issue 5: Summer Games licensed to Quicksilva.
- CRASH, issue 22, November 1985, p. 88: Impossible Mission review (the plot, the rooms and the password).
- CRASH, issue 48, Christmas Special 1987: review index (Impossible Mission, issue 22; Winter Games, issue 26).
- CRASH, issue 60, January 1989, p. 105: Incentive’s deal with Epyx. Ahoy!’s AmigaUser, issue 5, January 1989, p. 22: Space Station Oblivion, $49.95.
- Atari ST User, August 1986, and Computer Gaming World, issue 30, August 1986: Epyx’s Rogue.
- Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc., 862 F.2d 204 (9th Cir. 1988), decided 30 November 1988. Wikipedia, “Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc.” (web, secondary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East_USA,_Inc._v._Epyx,_Inc.
- Epyx advertisement, COMPUTE!, issue 56, January 1985, p. 33; Magnum Load advertisement, COMPUTE!’s Gazette, issue 29, November 1985, p. 73.
- Antic, December 1988: joystick round-up (Epyx 500XJ, $19.95).
- The Games Machine, issue 26, January 1990: interview with R.J. Mical and Dave Needle.
- Amiga Format, issue 4, November 1989: Morse and Mical at Epyx and the handheld.
- ACE, issue 23, August 1989, and ST Format, issue 2, September 1989: the handheld at the June 1989 Consumer Electronics Show and its Epyx games. Antic, October 1989: the Portable Color Entertainment System. ACE, issue 31, April 1990: “the original six games that were programmed for it by Epyx”.
- Keith Ferrell, “Epyx goes diskless”, COMPUTE!, December 1989: the lay-offs and the sale to Atari.
- ACE, issue 26, November 1989: Epyx job cuts and the end of its computer games publishing. Amiga Computing, November 1989: Morse and Mical laid off.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 66, December 1989: “Epyx Files For ‘Chapter 11’ Bankruptcy”; issue 67, January 1990: products and the 500XJ after the bankruptcy.
- Wikipedia, “Epyx” (web, secondary): Morse’s hiring in 1986, the company’s size after 1989, the 1993 sale to Bridgestone Media Group and System 3’s 2006 licence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyx