About this episode

Mike Lorenzen discusses his work on Atari games and software, including the Atari Program-Text Editor and Pitfall II.

Mike Lorenzen: Atari Program-Text Editor, Pitfall II Mike Lorenzen worked at Atari, Activision, and Accolade, creating games for the Atari 2600, Atari 8-bit, and Commodore 64 computers. At Atari, Mike coded Golf and Circus Atari for the Atari 2600. For the 8-bit computers, he wrote MEDIT (which he told me stands for Mike's EDITor.) Atari got a lot of mileage from MEDIT, using versions of that text editor in several products: first, in Atari Program-Text Editor (which was bundled with Atari's Macro Assembler), and in two Atari Program Exchange products: APX 20075, Atari Program-Text Editor; and APX 20076: Word Processing Diskette, where it was bundled with a text formatter. Both Program-Text Editor and Word Processing Diskette first appeared in the Winter 1981 APX catalog (the second APX catalog) with a price of $39.95 for Program-Text Editor and $49.95 for Word Processing Diskette — relatively hefty prices, considering the median price for software in that catalog was just $17.95. At Activision, he ported Pitfall and Pitfall II Lost Caverns to the Atari 8-bit — and in that, created the undocumented Easter egg of an additional game inside: Pitfall III, which appears only in the…

People in this episode

Hosts: Randy Kindig, Kay Savetz, Brad Arnold

Guest: Mike Lorenzen

Topics covered

• Atari history
• game development
• text editors
• video games
• interviews

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Atari, Activision, Accolade

Products: MEDIT, Atari Program-Text Editor, Word Processing Diskette, Pitfall, Pitfall II Lost Caverns, Psi-5 Trading Company

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