Does anyone know where Duane Later is these days? Duane wrote the three type-in games from the VIC-20 manual (Tank vs UFO, Killer Comet and Rocket Command). Beyond a few entries on some websites, I cannot find anything else.
Anyone know where he ended up after Commodore?
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Hmm. I found an old Geocities page of an interview with Neil Harris from 1997 where someone asks the same thing and Neil says “I haven’t heard anything about Duane in years. He was really only part of the team at the beginning, for a few months.” If he doesn’t know…he might be a tough guy to find. Link: https://www.geocities.ws/rmelick/8.htm
Nice!!
I have often wondered what he did next, and if he is still around? He also wrote another commercial game in 1981 in BASIC published by Commodore called Blue Meanies from Outer Space.
What’s interesting to me is I really remember the name “Blue Meanies from Outer Space” but I do not think I ever saw it. Not sure how I’d even know about it unless it was in a magazine I had or in a cartridge or something at the department store.
I am the actual writer of this game. I wrote it while I was in College in the late 70s on the Commodore Pet computers that were in a room at the college about a year after the first Commodore Pets came out.
It was one of the first games I had ever made and if I recall correctly my first experimentation with using the Peek and Poke commands.
I later went on to write many more games for the Pet and often when I went into that room I would find many of the people in there were playing my games.
I had taught myself machine language so my later games were much more impressive for the time although now they’d still look totally primitive.
I never realized there was any money to be made from games so I never got into that later but I did become a computer programmer and eventually owned and still own my own computer & software corporation.
I happened to be looking at a Vic-20 manual after it first came out and recoginized the code.
I then compared it to my original and other than some very minor changes it was identical and there was no difference in the gameplay or graphics.
I never knew the person, D.Later, who was shown in the manual as the writer nor was I ever able to find a way to contact him.
Also, there wasn’t much I could do about it being in the Vic-20 manual under someone else’s name.
I wrote it completely from scratch unlike Duane Later who just insignificantly modified it.
As his name was on all the games in the manual it makes me wonder if he actually wrote any of them.
I didn’t write them either so there is no way for me to know if he did.
I get the feeling he may have just worked at Commodore and found a few games to put in the manual and decided to make a tweak or two including adding his name to the code.
I don’t much care about me not getting credit as I do about someone who didn’t write them getting credit. To me that’s just wrong.
Are you referring to the Blue Meanies game, or one of the manual type-ins?