Just a few days ago I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Anthony Maro, the author of a game in a post I'd written several months back introducing a text adventure, Castle of Spirits.  At 15 years old he was paid a check of only $300 for his efforts by Commodore Magazine, and also wrote the text adventure Lifeboat.

I had the opportunity to ask Tony some questions and he provided some great feedback.  I hope you enjoy his responses below as much as I did!

C64W:  What got you started as a programmer on the Commodore 64?

Tony: Actually, I started programming on the Commodore VIC-20.  A friend of my brother's got a new TI-994A and a group of us sat around and taught it to play Christmas songs. I was immediately hooked and convinced my parents to get me a computer.  My mom bought a VIC-20 at the PX because "I liked the way it looked," she says.  It didn't take long to teach myself BASIC programming on the VIC-20.  The "Commodore Programmers Reference Guide" became my Rosetta Stone.  It got even more exciting when my parents finally got me a cassette tape drive so I could actually store and retrieve my work.

The first real "usable" things I wrote were text adventure games - in fact Castle of Spirits was my very first.  The biggest challenge - beyond the text parser - was obfuscating the game logic so you couldn't just read all of the text.  I was inspired by "Adventureland" by Scott Adams and "Voodoo Castle" which I believe his wife wrote.  I wanted to write my own interactive fiction games.  I was an avid reader my entire life so it was a natural extension for me and didn't require graphic art skills.  In my later stages of text game development I picked up "Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer" by Tim Hartnell.  I still have the old dog-eared copy on my bookshelf, and amazingly you can still find it used on Amazon.

C64W: GB64 lists two games under your name - Castle of Spirits, and Lifeboat.  Did you have any others published or unpublished, perhaps on different platforms?

Tony: Castle of Spirits was my first published game, and Lifeboat was a continuation.  Both were actually written for "Commodore Magazine" and designed to be typed in from a printed magazine - hence the small size and code obfuscation.  Originally I was going to do a regular column, but Commodore Magazine was in decline and falling on hard times just as Lifeboat came out.  My mom actually had to threaten to sue them to get me my payment on Lifeboat.

After Lifeboat I started working on a full sentence text parser and learned more about parts of speech than I ever would have in school.  I never actually released a game based on it because of the failure of Commodore magazine and the lack of Internet distribution at the time.  I did a bit of BBS'ing, but it was long distance for me so no software exchanges.  I also wrote a lot of silly little games that I never did anything with - the kind of cute little arcade games that were common at the time.  Adventures and fantasy were really where my interest was though.

In 1989 I started work on a 6502 assembly language (C-64) graphical strategy game to the rules of Battletech, but in the middle of it I met my wife and quickly lost interest in it.  I believe I still have a printed copy of the source code in my files.

I also wrote a complete double-entry accounting package for my parent's business that I called "AccountsEasy" (later I learned someone else used that name,) and I wrote a spreadsheet for a state programming competition in 1988. Both were for the Commodore 64 and neither were published anywhere. Believe it or not the fully functional spreadsheet only came in third place at the competition because I didn't "have enough comments" in my code.  The judges didn't understand the fact that with 64 KB of RAM, you didn't have memory to waste in REM's because they all ate up memory.  lol.

Later on I wrote a breakout clone for the Amiga 1000 since my wife was a huge fan of breakout games at the time - also never published, but we sure enjoyed it.

About a decade ago I came up with an isometric view MMORPG that I actually had working, even without a team of designers and programmers.  It was designed in a shard based system and could dynamically reload the game code and upadate the logic without having to disconnect players due to a unique memory management feature.  It also transferred players from one server to another seamlessly and was designed so that there was no "choose a server to connect to" - everyone was in the same world.  Once I hit the point of needing better graphics for the client and being unable to find any talent willing to work for free, I dropped the project and went back to real life.

C64W: Do you recall any "Easter Eggs" in those two C64 games?  Any special inspiration behind making them?

Tony: Honestly I don't recall.  I always was prone to do things like that, so no doubt there are a few clever responses, but it's been too many years to remember them now.

C64W: What are your interests today?  Have you tried a C64 emulator like VICE to look back on your programs from the old days?

Tony: Yes, actually about a year ago I downloaded a pirated copy Castle of Sprits (hehe, irony, eh?) and played around with it. It brought back some memories.  A played around with The Bard's Tale, which I'd been horribly hooked on as a kid.  I really remembered the graphics being better...

Today when I'm not working - I'm C.I.O. and part owner in EvriChart (www.evrichart.com) - a medical records management company - I'm working on various Linux software projects that strike my fancy.  I developed a complete workflow, inventory, and document management system for our company in PHP that runs across 5 servers.  I'm a strong advocate for Open Source software and just over 6 years ago released "CheckBook Tracker" for Linux as free software - a personal finance software comparable with commercial offerings for Windows.  freshmeat.net/projects/cbtracker

A few years ago I wrote and released a free document viewer and markup software - perfect for studying the Bible or reading other texts - designed for the Linux based touchscreen Internet tablets that run Maemo, specifically the Nokia n800 tablet.  I wrote about 90% of a game engine similar to The Bard's Tale that runs on that platform as well called DragonFear, but the wireless died on my tablet and I never replaced it.

My current project is a really cool photo manager and workflow software for Linux that I'm so far calling SimiliFlow.  Great for hobbyist photographers.  It will also be free but I haven't actually released any code yet.  www.ossramblings.com/similiflow

Unfortunately all my old C-64 floppies melted back in 1990 when I was living in a drafty mobile home.  An in-wall heater in the spare bedroom came on despite being turned off due to how cold it was.  My disk cases were leaning against the heater...  Probably for the best - a person would serve jail time today or at least face the software equivalent of the RIAA for what I had in those cases   A lot of the games I ... released ... back in high school I didn't put my own name to.  I met the group known as "Thieves' Guild" who taught me the basics of cracking piracy prevention methods, and some friends and I did a bit of our own ... releasing.  The "Action Replay" cartridge was probably one of the best purchases I ever made when it came to furthering my understanding of computers.

History of computers that I've owned:
VIC-20
C-64
Comodore PET with dual cassette drives
C-128
Amiga 1000  (the 1 MB memory expansion was bigger than my current media center PC)
Amiga 500
Then... PC Compatible ($2500 for my first 486)
Now I custom-build all my own and run Linux on everything except the gaming computer.

Languages I'm fluent in (or have been fluent in):
Commodore BASIC
6502 Machine Code
6502 Macro Assembly
ANSI C
Pascal / Delphi / FreePascal
PHP
Python
Javascript

And through all of that, professionally I am NOT a software developer.  I decided right out of high school that I get too addicted to programming and didn't want to do that as a career, so I keep it as a hobby.  In fact, about 90% of the current software projects at work are being handled by my team.  I spend most of my time planning and overseeing the projects and less time with actual coding.

Thanks for the interest! 

C64W: Thank you for the informative and lengthy responses!