Hi,
My name is Doug T. and my former roommate, Tony K., and I worked at Microsoft in the early 90s.
Tony wrote Chips in a summer. He was pretty clever about how he did it. My job was testing it for him (except I missed a nasty bug at the end of the next to the last level! Sorry 'bout that, to all of you 1.0 users who hit the bug!)
Microsoft shipped it as part of the Entertainment Pack for Windows. It was incredibly fun to work on.
If you're interested and it's not too boring, let me know and I'll write up the story and post it. I'll also get Tony's comments. We're both closing in on 40, we're still great friends, and we're often very surprised about the places where references to Chips pops up.
Tony also wrote some amazing screenblankers for the Entertainment Pack's screen blankers. The screenblanker engine was ingenious and written by Brad C.
I wrote an icon bouncer for it. It may surprise you to know that the Windows 3.0 team stole the screenblanker from us, and made it into the Windows screenblanker. For a while, our .IW files could be renamed to be .SCR and they'd still work. (I doubt this works on post-Win95 operating systems.)
Also, Windows stole WinMine, written by our friend Rob D., and it is still a blast to play. He hates it now!
But we're very proud of the work we did on Chips. Thanks for keeping it alive, it really is still an incredibly fun game. My kids came home from second and fourth grade one day talking about it and were shocked to find out that "Uncle Tony" and I were the ones who worked on it! Ha!
- Doug
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