Coda

All in all, Scram was a stupid game devoid of entertainment value. But it was loaded with clever graphics stunts (I even showed the water flowing through pipes with little moving bubbles) and boasted plenty of good sound effects: rumbling earthquakes, clanging metal, insistent klaxons, and so forth. I could hide behind the fact that software in those days was mostly bad. Indeed, at about the same time that we released Scram for the Atari HCS, somebody else released a game called Three Mile Island for the Apple II. This may be hard to believe, but Three Mile Island was considerably inferior to Scram. As a simulation it stank, its display was dull, its input structure was completely confusing, it had no sound effects, and the gameplay was, astoundingly, even worse than Scram's!

But I couldn't get away with such excuses. I screwed up the design of Scram. If I had it all to do over again, I would start my design process by asking myself, "What is fun and interesting about nuclear power plants?" The answer, of course, would be "Not much," and I would walk away from the idea of building such a game.

About six months after Scram was released, there was a minor accident at a nuclear power plant in upstate New York, and Ted Koppel of ABC Nightline decided to devote his show to the problems of nuclear power plant safety. As a pleasant wrap-up for the show, he sent his San Francisco area reporter, Ken Kashiwahara, to interview me. He obtained permission from Atari to interview me and we got together in a demo room on the Atari campus. Remember, this was all on a tight schedule: The decision to devote the show to nuclear power plant safety was made in the morning, and the show would air that night.

There were four of us in the demo room: Ken, his cameraman, myself, and a suspicious Atari public relations person who made sure to keep me on the straight and narrow. I was quite nervous and kept glancing over at the PR person for reassurance that I wasn't about to get myself fired. Ken figured out what was going on and put me at ease by suggesting that, prior to the interview, we just run through the basics while the cameraman got the lighting perfect. He asked me to talk about the game and I happily obliged, losing myself in the fun of explaining all the cute features in the game. Warming to my subject, I laughed and giggled as I fought earthquakes, struggled with steam voiding, and eventually melted down the reactor. Having explained the operation of the game to him, I handed him the joystick and suggested he give it a try.

"No, thanks," Ken answered. "We've got our interview."

Stunned, I stared uncomprehendingly. "But, but, aren't you going to do the interview?" I pleaded.

"We left the camera running while you were talking. You did great!"

The PR person was furious at being tricked. I grinned in admiration and tried, badly, to echo the PR guy's mortification. Ken Kashiwahara sure was a smooth operator. That night, viewers were treated to the sight of Chris Crawford bouncing up and down in his chair, laughingly pointing at the screen, and twittering in his best choirboy voice, "Oh no, Mr. Bob! Steam voiding!"