In May 1986 an Amiga owner called Steve Hull downloaded a file of pictures from a bulletin board in Virginia and, as he later wrote, his jaw dropped: a castle, a woodcut called Foxpuppy, a pair of Porsches, “and all these were done in low-res???” The artist was Jim Sachs, a former Air Force cargo pilot who had bought his first computer two years earlier. That year he was art director on Cinemaware’s Defender of the Crown, the game owners used to show their friends what the Amiga could do, and for the rest of the machine’s life Commodore kept hiring him to draw its first impressions.
Fast facts
- Born: 1949.
- Before computers: architecture at Cal State LA, then six years as a US Air Force pilot flying C-141 transports.
- First game: Saucer Attack, Commodore 64, which he wrote and sold by mail order.
- Best known for: art director on Defender of the Crown (Cinemaware, 1986).
- Other Amiga work: Ports of Call (Aegis), the built-in screens of Commodore’s CDTV and the CD32 start-up, Defender of the Crown II (CD32), box art for Brilliance.
- Tools: Graphicraft at first, then Deluxe Paint, and later Brilliance.
- Later: the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium screensaver and CompuTrainer 3D cycling software.
From the cockpit to the Commodore 64
Sachs studied architecture at Cal State LA and then flew C-141s for the Air Force for six years. When the service wanted to make him a flight instructor in Lubbock, Texas, he left instead. “I knew nothing about computers,” he told Amazing Computing in 1994, “so I decided to buy a Commodore 64 because the price was low.” He paid $360 for it in 1984 and, he joked in 1987, “I was sure the price would never go below that.”
There was no paint program he could use, so he drew on graph paper and typed the pictures in as hexadecimal numbers. His first screen, a view of Washington, D.C., took about three months, “putting it in a pixel at a time, not being able to see what I was doing”. His wife suggested turning it into a game based on the film Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and Saucer Attack was the result. He sold it himself by mail order. It made $30,000 and he spent $27,000 on advertising, and he blamed piracy for the rest: it was, he said, “the game every kid has and nobody bought”. A second game, a time-travel fantasy called Time Crystal, took him the best part of two years and never came out, though its demo went round the Commodore 64 scene. He wrote it straight to the hardware: “everything except for the last two bytes in the whole computer is all my own programming.”
The Amiga and Defender of the Crown
Sachs flew to Commodore’s offices in Pennsylvania unannounced, showed the head of software, Paul Goheen, what he had done on the 64, and asked to be an Amiga developer before the machine was out. With an Amiga and the primitive Graphicraft he drew a few screens and took them to the first Amiga show in San Francisco in February 1986. Two companies hired him on the spot: Aegis Development and Cinemaware, which was still at the idea stage.
At Cinemaware he was art director on Defender of the Crown, which Kellyn Beeck designed. His job, he said in 1987, was to make the graphics and to keep them consistent: “Much of the artwork handed in to me needed to be cleaned up, in order that all the graphics would look like they were done by the same person.” People took the pictures for high resolution, he pointed out later, “but it’s all anti-aliased lo-res.” What made them work, in his view, was contrast. On paper you start with white and add darker colours; on a screen “you start out with a black screen and paint with points of light.” He told his students to use “high contrast, but low saturation”, and to pick one light source and stick to it.
The schedule was brutal. In Sachs’s account it took “seven months at twenty hours a day average”, with calls in the middle of the night to check he was still working. By his own account he was also the one who suggested hiring R.J. Mical to program it, after two other programming teams had found it too difficult. At the end, he said, he “cracked”: he could not go into his computer room for a month, and never worked for Cinemaware again. His apprentice Rob Landeros drew the last screen, Robin Hood by the campfire, and became Cinemaware’s art director; Landeros later co-founded Trilobyte with Graeme Devine.
The game was worth it to the people who saw it. The Guide to Computer Living named Sachs its Amiga Artist of the Year in December 1986, saying that after Defender of the Crown “there wasn’t any competition for this award”, and called the game “a triumph for Beeck, Sachs, Master Designer and the Amiga computer”. Sachs said Cinemaware sold 20,000 copies in the first six weeks, “for a machine with a user base of about 150,000”.
Commodore’s artist
Sachs went to work for Aegis, drawing demos and magazine and book covers. When a German team sent Aegis Ports of Call, a shipping-trade game whose graphics were too poor to release, he redrew them all; because the program loaded standard IFF pictures, his art simply replaced theirs. It sold well, he said, especially in Europe, and was later bundled with the Amiga 500. Another Aegis project, Arazok’s Tomb, he preferred not to talk about: it was written in BASIC “and it was very slow”.
Amazing Computing reported in 1987 that his work had “appeared on the covers of every Amiga magazine”, and that you would be “hard-pressed to find an Amiga dealer that doesn’t have a Sachs color screen dump proudly tacked to the wall”. Commodore used him for its own showpieces: he said he drew the original Amiga 500 demo given to dealers, and the CD32 demo “with the dinosaur and the jets”. He drew all the graphics built into the CDTV, the start-up screen, preferences and the audio panel; .info in 1991 credited the CDTV’s CD player screen to Sachs and Leo Schwab. He designed the CD32’s start-up as well, and was unhappy with how much Commodore changed it.
His last big Amiga game was Defender of the Crown II, a “Director’s Cut” with new scenes, new music and narration in five languages. He built it in a multimedia tool, The Director, working with its author Keith Doyle, and rebuilt it as Commodore moved it from the CDTV to the CD32. It took about two years, and Commodore released it at the end of 1993; AmigaWorld called it “the brand-new Defender of the Crown II, by renowned Amiga artist Jim Sachs”. For the new paint program Brilliance, from Digital Creations, he drew the box art and helped shape the interface, and after its unlimited undo he found it “very hard to go back to DeluxePaint”.
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s he kept trying to make 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a game, first for Aegis and then with Disney. In 1994 he hoped for a release in summer 1995, but it never appeared.
Later work
Sachs later turned from games to other kinds of software. He wrote the CompuTrainer 3D software for an indoor cycle trainer, and the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium screensaver for Windows, a slow, detailed tank of tropical fish that sold widely in the 2000s. By 2024 he had retired, and asked whether he would make another game, he said: “Nope! I’m too old.”
Sources
- Steve Hull, “Amazing Interviews: Jim Sachs”, Amazing Computing vol. 2 no. 4, April 1987, pp. 9–14: the downloaded pictures; the Air Force; the $360 Commodore 64; Saucer Attack, Time Crystal and their earnings; developer status from Paul Goheen; the Guide’s Artist of the Year; contrast and “points of light”; cleaning up the Defender of the Crown art; 20,000 copies in six weeks; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Aegis.
- Mark Hoffman, “Jim Sachs: Amiga Artist and Game Developer”, Amazing Computing vol. 9 no. 4, April 1994, pp. 55–57: Cal State LA and the C-141s; graph paper and hexadecimal; Earth Versus the Flying Saucers; the San Francisco show; “seven months at twenty hours a day”; the breakdown; Rob Landeros; Aegis, Ports of Call and Arazok’s Tomb; the Amiga 500, CDTV and CD32 work; Defender of the Crown II and The Director; “anti-aliased lo-res”; high contrast, low saturation; Brilliance; 20,000 Leagues.
- Mat Broomfield, interview with Jim Sachs, CU Amiga, January 1994, pp. 44–46: the Air Force; Paul Goheen; the San Francisco show and Graphicraft; art director “during Defender of the Crown” only; the two earlier programming teams and R.J. Mical; the CDTV graphics and the CD32 start-up; Defender of the Crown II and Ivanhoe; the Brilliance box art.
- The Guide to Computer Living vol. 3 no. 8, December 1986, pp. 28 and 32: Artist of the Year for the Amiga; the Defender of the Crown award citation.
- AmigaWorld vol. 9 no. 12, December 1993, p. 31: CD32 news (“the brand-new Defender of the Crown II”). CU Amiga, December 1993, p. 51: Commodore’s CD32 release of Defender of the Crown 2, with narration and a ransom for Richard the Lionheart.
- Harv Laser, CDTV and CD+G, .info issue 44, November 1991, p. 43: the CD player interface “designed by Jim Sachs and Leo Schwab”.
- Joachim Froholt, “Legends of the games industry: Jim Sachs”, Spillhistorie.no, 13 September 2024 (web, secondary): Ports of Call (1987); Defender of the Crown II (1993); the end of 20,000 Leagues; CompuTrainer 3D; SereneScreen Aquarium; retirement and his quote. https://spillhistorie.no/legends-of-the-games-industry-jim-sachs/
- Wikipedia, “James D. Sachs” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): CompuTrainer 3D, SereneScreen Aquarium, the CDTV and CD32 start-up animations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Sachs