We spoke with Fate of Atlantis designer Hal Barwood about how he got into the games industry, and his most famous game.
Hal Barwood was born on April 16, 1940, and his first love was the film industry. His first theatrical film work was on George Lucas’ debut film THX 1138, which released to a mixed reception in 1971. His first success was with Steven Spielberg’s debut film, The Sugarland Express from 1974, where he wrote the script together with Matthew Robbins. The pair would later work on films like MacArthur (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Corvette Summer (1978) and Dragonslayer (1980).
In 1984 he directed the horror film Warning Signs, but by then he was already convinced that he wanted to work with video games.
In this exclusive interview, Hal Barwood shares his journey into the world of video games and game development. Known for designing the classic adventure game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Barwood explains how his passion for storytelling in film eventually led him to the gaming industry. He discusses the inspiration behind his projects, the challenges of developing a new Indiana Jones adventure, and what it was like to bring such an iconic character’s story to life in an interactive format.
Read on for our interview:
What was your first experience with video games?
I got interested in computers when my wife Barbara and I traveled back to our home town, Hanover, New Hampshire, to take a summer break from her teaching job and from my film studies at the University of Southern California. The year was 1964. I had read a recent article on computer graphics in Scientific American, and I had the hazy thought that someday actual computer graphics, at that time ridiculously primitive, would become important.
Hanover is home to Dartmouth College, and in 1964 professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz set the BASIC computer language loose on the world. I grabbed a user manual at the Dartmouth Book Store — this happened so long ago that the manual was printed on mimeograph machines, purple ink and all. I studied up and started writing programs on a 10-character-per-second teletype terminal pounding out numbered statements on uncut rolls of yellow paper. I had always been fascinated with games, and my first program was a BASIC version of Paper Rock Scissors.
A few years later, while still toiling away in Hollywood, a friend told me about a computer game he had spotted in a hotel lobby in Barstow. I had never heard of such a thing; arcades meant pinball machines to me. There didn’t seem to be any arcades in LA, so we jumped in my car and drove 130 miles to throw quarters at Nolan Bushnell’s Computer Space. I was stunned by the dazzling action and the cool fiberglass cabinet.
And what made you start making games yourself?
I was playing games from early childhood, and making them as a natural extension of my obsession from early high school. My most successful effort was an electric football game. The board was mounted in a wooden box. Players would throw hidden switches to set up plays and defenses. Then they would press a button and an electric circuit would close, and a light would tell the outcome, gain or loss. My school friends loved it.
Barb’s and my two sons were 9 and 10 years old when the Fairchild Channel F game console appeared in 1976. We played all those clunky cartridges endlessly, especially the Spitfire (I think) and Space War videocarts. That was the beginning, when my itch started to need some scratching.
What made you pursue a career as a games developer considering you were already established in the film industry?
I’ve told the following story more than once: In 1980, my screenwriting partner, Matthew Robbins, and I were making the movie Dragonslayer in London. I was producing and he was directing. My job was to make sure goods and services arrived on a set that was ready for filming, and he took it from there. At one point we had to stage several scenes in an Iron Age village, which we built at a place called Stocker’s Farm, apparently lost in the middle of rural England, but actually only 30 miles from central London. We needed to reveal our leading lady as a young woman and not the boy other characters thought she was. We had to stage a celebratory dance with extras dressed in burlap, and we had to burn the place down when the dragon attacked.
Watching this seriously ambitious undertaking come together should have been one of the highlights of my moviemaking life, but when the extras were dressed, when the dance was rehearsed, when the thatched roofs were soaked in gasoline, when our director of photography finally managed to create moonlight with klieg lights shining down from steel scaffolds, I retired to my trailer and sat down to program my HP-41C calculator to play a Dragonslayer version of Hunt the Wumpus.
That experience taught me a big lesson — if I would rather huddle alone in a corner and write software instead of watching Matthew bring our movie to life, I was in the wrong business.
It took me ten years to make the professional transition from cinema to video games. The road was bumpy, with a detour into writing and directing the movie Warning Sign, and a couple of games I made on my own, a railroad simulator called Binary Gauge (compiled BASIC) and an oddly deep RPG called Space Snatchers (6502 assembly language). They were both made for the Apple II, a dying platform by the time I finished those things. But hey — you can still find them on my website, finitearts.com, and play emulated versions on Windows 11.
(By the way — last year Paramount restored and remastered Dragonslayer for 4K, 2K Blu-ray, and online download. It has now become an absolutely terrific modern digital visual effects thriller. Hal sez, check it out! )
Binary Gauge and Space Snatchers? The former seems surprisingly complex for a BASIC title . . .
Like many people, BASIC was my first computer language. Indeed, interpreted languages are slooowww. But Microsoft developed a BASIC compiler called TASC, and that sped up execution by a factor of 12, just enough to run a railroad. It’s still playable in Windows 11, via emulator, and I’m currently modeling the entire Portland Streetcar route complex.
. . . and it’s interesting to see that the latter has a full intro sequence.
I realized soon after finishing Binary Gauge that a real Apple II game could not be built with BASIC, even when compiled. So I taught myselfd 6502 assembly language. Space Snatchers pulls every assembly language trick in the book and some that aren’t. I wrote a scripting language in 6502, which led to animated movie sequences. I wrote load and store routines to bypass the Apple’s clunky disc access methods. I created a complex tiling system for the graphics and cool artificial stupidity for the many enemies. Etc. I learned a university enducation’s worth of design ideas building that gsme. The work served me well later in life.
How did you get involved with Lucasfilm Games?
George Lucas and I overlapped in film school. We became friends, and we both wound up living in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Following the tremendous success of Star Wars, established game companies approached him to begin developing games with some of their money. He decided games were a good idea, and started his own company that soon turned into LucasArts.
I hung around on the company’s edges until Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade became a hit. The creators, Ron Gilbert, David Fox, and Noah Falstein were exhausted by the effort, and all three of them wanted to move on to other projects. So they recruited me. Noah and I were given a rejected screenplay for another Jones movie to use as the underlying story, but we didn’t think it worthy of a game either, and we cooked up Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis instead.
Fate of Atlantis feels like a true Indiana Jones story (so much so that we’re surprised it’s not been made into a movie yet). Could you describe how you came up with the story?
When Noah and I realized we needed a completely new story for Indy’s next adventure, we mulled what was left in the history of antiquity to motivate our hero. No more arks, no more holy vessels. What then? We needed a headline.
Well, why not history itself? We started to think about Plato and his references to Atlantis and an obvious maguffin, the magical substance orichalcum, whatever the heck that was. We liked looping in Plato to authenticate our ideas, but the old professor was sparing with his words, and Atlantis is barely mentioned. To enrich the connection we made up a lost dialogue called The Hermocrates. Gotta say, even now it seems real – !
We had a start, but we weren’t sure of ourselves, and we repaired to George’s production design library and its piles of visual reference books to research Atlantis. Almost the first thing we picked up, a Time-Life book called Mystic Places, had an extensive chapter on the lost city, and most important — a diagram: three concentric circles with moats leading from the outer rim to the center. O. My. God. — that diagram sure looks like a game.
That illustration settled the matter, and Fate got underway. In order to flesh out the tale (and populate the three paths), we enlisted the usual crew of sneering Nazis, and I invented our dishonest heroine, Sophia Hapgood, and the Atlantean god, Nur-Ab-Sal, who had her in thrall.
(It’s worth reminding Fate’s admirers that Lucas and Spielberg would never make a movie out of material that was not original with them. I don’t mind — but I would love to see the game itself remastered. Under the Deluxe Paint and 256 color palette, the story and play hold up. It remains one of my all-time favorite gaming experiences.)
The fact that Indy gets a sidekick in most of the game (in the team path at least) makes it feel different from a lot of earlier adventures. What was the idea behind adding Sophia Hapgood, and can you tell us a bit about the process of creating her character?
I had played a goodly number of games before I started working at what became LucasArts, and most of them are lonely quests with little friendly interaction with NPCs. Noah and I both wanted more humanity. In the movies, Indy always gets shamelessly involved with a woman. So, the added humanity was always going to be female. We wanted dramatic tension, and I found the way to achieve my goal by making Sophia a tricky dishonest person. For most of the game Indy just knows to be wary, but eventually he finds out that she is being influenced by the spirit of a dead Atlantean god, Nur-Ab-Sal. Thus, the Team path in the game.
What was the thought behind the three paths in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis? Did you ever regret the choice?
Noah, ever analytical, knew from experience with Last Crusade that various elements of that game appealed differently to different players. Some players liked the puzzling, and some liked the fighting, and some hated both and looked for human interaction. He proposed the three paths. Fists with game play to emphasize fighting; Wits for heavy duty puzzling, and Team for cooperative companionship. We both hoped that incorporating a way for players to tune their experience would enlarge our market — and I suppose it actually did.
Do I regret working up those paths? No. I was too new to graphic adventure games to know about regret. However, Noah was off on another project, and all the implementation details fell to me.
Getting the paths to work was a Herculean labor that added months to our schedule. We had limited resources and budget, so we worked a lot of the game locations into each path with differing mechanics. And I decided that the paths must converge when the player arrived in Atlantis or the game would never get finished.
I’m proud of the result and free of regret, because our hard work paid off. Among other things, it tripled total gameplay among the substantial subset of players who were obsessive completists. (And I think less dedicated players felt that they were immersed in an adventure made shiny by a sense of depth, even if they only tackled one path.)
How did your experience from the film industry influence your thoughts on game design?
I was a screenwriter with a pretty well-developed sense of narrative structure and in the games I made, that sense helped me get rid of the tendency of game narratives to ramble incoherently.
What was the experience of working at Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts like?
I was a designer and project leader at LucasArts for 13 years, but I don’t have much to say about the experience. Like a lot of other companies, LucasArts didn’t really know all the best practices for game development. My first boss liked to pop into our development caves and ask about the “funativity level.” I later worked for 10 other bosses who came and went with some frequency. It was rarely actual fun, but when you’re doing something you love, it’s joyful labor.
We would like to thank Hal for taking the time to answer our question and for his great patience over the past few months.
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