Blackbeard's Island

Greg.Miller, July 12, 2015 - Reply
I recall granting permission for the disk image to be shared several years ago, so I knew it was available on the net somewhere.

My partner-in-lots-of-things in the late 1980s, Erik Gavriluk, convinced me to both find a very old floppy box in my garage and to use some up-to-date tools to read the floppies.

I had very little of my 1980s creations. There was no Blackbeard's Island source code, alas, much less a binary disk.

Two days ago, I mentioned to a coworker that I suspect I could find references on the net to things I'd done dating back quite a ways, and the snapshots on BlackBeard's Island was the first match I spotted.


I admit I came to this site looking for a .dsk image, so that I could see things that I hadn't seen in 30 years.

I was shocked and flattered to find an actual review of the first commercial venture I was involved in. Reviewing it so many years after it's publication is a very kind act, and I thank you.

In regards to your critiques, I couldn't begin to argue with them. :)

When this was written, I had to have been 15 years old, and 16 when published. I'd played 'Sands Of Egypt' and was tickled at how well Steve used such limited graphics capabilities to produce a game. Referencing another Tandy creation, Sands of Egypt wasn't the Adventure that Bedlam had been - it was more simplistic, but it showed the difference visuals made, both positive and negative.

Writing this gave me a deeper understanding of graphics, pseudo-color, dithering, and the terrible bridge that traditional artistry faced when moving from pencils and paints to simplistic digital tools.

Another outcome from the experience was that I had my very first (in a continuing) lesson about entrepreneurism, and the propensity (or lack) for most people to involve themselves in anything without a guaranteed payout. Lessons learned then have served me well in the subsequent 30 years, and all still apply. It also heavily weighed toward working with Erik Gavriluk a year or so later, when I realized that Erik was, like me, willing to pursue things that required an investment in time without a guarantee of return. Without the experience around Blackbeard's Island, Erik and I might never had generated so many things together over the following years.

The game was sold through Tom Mix software, who (if I recall correctly) was based in Grand Rapids, Michigan - perhaps 90 minutes from where I lived at the time. My entire profits from the enterprise were roughly $200-$300. I'd have to pull old copies of Tom Mix Rainbow ads to find out what they retailed it for. Given my profit levels at the time, I cannot imagine Tom Mix sold more than 50 copies, so any guilt over early efforts is assuaged by the recognition that few people paid anything for it. :)

Thank you again for the review, and the very kind comment about how a follow-up effort could have been better. My time after Blackbeard's island was writing programs like Teleterm, Greg-E-Term (yes, I was intentionally mocking Mike Ward's MikeyTerm name), and a slew of projects with Erik, frequently revolving around a recognition that graphics wasn't easy: McPaint, Color Max, Color Max Deluxe.