We spoke with pixel artist and programmer Jim Sachs about everything from Defender of the Crown to virtual aquariums.
Article by Joachim Froholt.
American Jim Sachs is one of the true greats in the area of classic pixel art. He is particularly known for his work on the Amiga, where he was responsible for the graphics in one of the platform’s most important system sellers, Defender of the Crown, as well as Ports of Call, which was a favourite here in Norway. However, his career didn’t end there, and if you were impressed by virtual aquariums around the turn of the millennium, it was probably his fish you were looking at.
We were fortunate enough to get a few words with the legendary developer, and in this article, we’ll attempt to go through his entire career.
From pilot to game developer
Sachs was born in 1949, and before he started making games, he served in the U.S. Air Force for many years. He eventually became a captain, flying massive cargo planes of the C-141 Starlifter type (he never visited Norway but flew to West Germany for NATO’s annual Reforger exercises). At the age of 28, he left the Air Force; they wanted him to become a flight instructor, but that would have required him to move from California to Texas, which he didn’t want to do.
It was at this point that he became interested in computers. He says:
– In the early ’80s, I was already out of the Air Force, and looking for something new. I would hear kids talking about bits and bytes, and was feeling sort of left behind, so I bought a Commodore 64 just to see what computers were all about. I spent a couple of weeks typing in Basic programs from magazines, and decided to learn machine language to see if I could come up with something better.
This turned out to be a turning point:
– Once I got into machine language, I found that you could manipulte graphics a lot faster than you could in Basic. I felt right at home programming the C64. It was such a new machine that nobody had done much with it yet, so the bar was pretty low.
Saucer Attack
Sachs’ first game was Saucer Attack from 1984, which he has described as a game everyone had, but no one bought. That fits well with my own experience with the game – as an avid Commodore 64 owner, I ended up with a bunch of cassette tapes full of pirated Turbotape games, including several copies of Saucer Attack.
Unlike many of the other games on these tapes, Saucer Attack is one I remember very well, mainly because of its graphics. The game featured a highly detailed drawing of the United States Capitol in the background, and the goal was to prevent the invading flying saucers from destroying the building and surrounding monuments.
It wasn’t by chance that most competing games had simpler graphics than Saucer Attack, as creating the detailed graphics was far from a trivial task. Sachs didn’t have access to any graphic tools that could be used to draw the background. So, he did it as manually as humanly possible, by hardcoding every single pixel on the screen:
– I found that I could create a fairly detailed background picture by entering all the data in hexidecimal numbers, so I drew a large picture of Washington DC on graph paper with each square corresponding to a pixel on the screen, and spent a couple of weeks typing in the numbers. Then a few more days making flying saucer sprites, and some programming to move the bytes across the middle of the saucers to simulate rotation.
Loved the platform, but not the pirates
Even though developing Saucer Attack required both time and patience, he eventually fell in love with the Commodore 64 as a platform for developing games:
– I loved the fact that all the memory and registers in the C64 were hard-wired, so I always knew which bytes controlled which functions. I never had that luxury again on any other computers.
Sachs’ next project was an ambitious game called Time Crystal, but the rampant piracy on the platform eventually led him to abandon the project. According to an older interview, he earned around $30,000 from Saucer Attack, while spending $27,000 on marketing alone. That made continuing unappealing:
– I was selling Saucer Attack by mail-order from my home, and was working on my second game, Time Crystal, when C64 piracy became so widespread that I got very depressed and decided to quit the market.
A demo of Time Crystal is still available and offers a glimpse of what could have been one of the platform’s most impressive games had history gone differently.
«The Best Creative Tool Ever»
Given that both Saucer Attack and Time Crystal received a lot of attention for their graphics, it may be surprising to learn that Sachs has no formal art education. But he was always interested in art, and in an old interview with Amazing Computing magazine, he explained that his way of drawing fit very well with how pixel graphics were created on computers.
– Detail, contrast – mostly contrast. That’s where most of the people fall down in trying to draw on a computer screen. That’s because it’s the opposite of how you would do It on paper. On paper, you start with something that’s white and put down darker colors. With the computer screen it’s just the opposite; you start out with a black screen and paint with points of light. It just turned out that my interpretations of light and shadow and detail happen to turn out really well on a computer screen, Sachs told Amazing Computing in 1987.
In the mid-eighties, there was one platform that everyone interested in graphics on computers was looking forward to. This was the Amiga, developed under the codename Lorraine. The machine promised a giant leap in graphics capabilities, with a palette of 4096 colors, a maximum screen resolution of 640×512 (in interlaced mode), and hardware specifically designed for running games and graphics software.
This was a time when microcomputers and consoles usually only used a handful of colors, a typical PC used 4-color CGA graphics if it even had a color screen, and Apple was promoting its expensive black-and-white Macintosh as a modern marvel. The Amiga was in a completely different league.
The new platform was eventually acquired by Commodore, and Sachs quickly contacted them:
– I started hearing about the Amiga Loraine, which promised to have phenominal graphics and sound capabilities. When Commodore took over the machine, I flew to their headquarters in Pennsylvania, met with their software director, and was granted developer status (but I still had to buy my own Amiga), he tells Spillhistorie.no.
Later in the eighties, Sachs described the Amiga platform as “the best creative tool ever designed,” but when he first got to test the Amiga, there was disappointingly little in the way of impressive software developed for it:
– I had read magazine articles about the Amiga, so I knew what its capabilities were, but no one had done much with it in those early days. Dale Luck’s bouncing soccer ball was about the only impressive thing they had to show at the time.
Defender of the Crown
With an Amiga in hand, Sachs immediately set out to make a name for himself:
– I spent the next few weeks using the dismal graphics tool Graphicraft to explore the capabilites of the new machine. Like the C64, the machine was so new that it was easy to move to the head of the pack, graphics-wise. I put about a dozen images on disks, gave them out at user group meetings, and soon found out they had spread all over the world. That’s when Cinemaware called, asking if I was interested in doing the graphics for a groundbreaking game.
“Groundbreaking” is indeed a fitting word for Defender of the Crown. Cinemaware’s vision was to create a game they called an interactive movie, with a player-driven narrative and a focus on cinematic techniques. For Sachs and the rest of the team, the development process was full of challenges – no one knew how much time a project of this kind would actually take, and Sachs himself compared the process to producing a film where experts in various fields had to be coordinated to bring the final product to life.
The game itself is a genre blend of the type Cinemaware would become known for. The framework is a strategy game where players vie for control of medieval England, but the game features plenty of mini-games and cinematic sequences that pop up depending on what the players do. It’s highly impressive, considering it came out as early as 1986.
Sachs took on the role of artistic director for the game, leading the effort to give it its final visual look. This involved both creating his own graphics from scratch and leading a team of artists who made rough sketches that he then took over to give them the final polish and ensure the high level of detail the game became known for.
– Kellyn Beck was the game designer on Defender of the Crown, and had already created storyboards when I joined the project. He had used the movie Ivanhoe for inspiration, so I bought a VHS tape of the movie and watched it many times. I supplemented this with a lot of books on castle design. I was well aware that no one had attempted this level of detail on a computer game before, and planned to break new ground.
Advanced Hardware, Limited Tools
The process was much simpler than with Saucer Attack, but still quite time-consuming. This was before the Amiga platform really got good graphics tools, and Sachs didn’t have access to anything more advanced than what regular users could buy.
– I used a plain Amiga 1000 and mouse to do the graphics. When I first started illustrating Defender of the Crown, I was using Graphicraft, then its clone, Aegis Images. These were extremely primitive graphics tools, which did little more than allow you to draw pixels on the screen.
In an interview with the website Amiga Love, he described the work process like this:
– I put dots on the screen. One at a time at first. Green dots for grass, blue dots for sky, gray dots for castle blocks. Hour after hour. I was happy if I got one square inch of the screen done in a day. The first screen (the Saxon castle in the distance) took about two weeks. After Deluxe Paint came out, I was able to create a screen in 3 or 4 days.
Fortunately, help was on the way in the form of the legendary Deluxe Paint from Dan Silva and Electronic Arts. This drawing program became both an industry standard for game developers and a favorite among creative users around the world, and according to Sachs, it greatly improved work speed.
Ports of Call
Defender of the Crown was released to great acclaim, and Sachs went on to work on several other projects. One of these games is particularly well-known in Norway, namely the economic strategy game Ports of Call. It was released in 1987, and like Defender of the Crown, it is a game where the framework involves strategy, but where the player also has to succeed in action sequences along the way. The goal of the game is to get rich through shipping, and in addition to deciding which contracts to take, the player must also maneuver the ship at port, rescue shipwrecked sailors, and avoid icebergs. Sachs explains:
– I was doing some work for Aegis Development when their VP, William Volk, was approached by two German developers, Rolf Dieter-Klein and Martin Ulrich. They had created Ports of Call, and were looking for a publisher. The gameplay was good, but the graphics were pretty dismal.
He continues:
– Aegis liked the game and was willing to publish it if the graphics could be fixed. I agreed to supply all new graphics. Rolf had the foresight to use the IFF format to store all the pictures, so I could simply substitute my graphics with little or no additional programming required.
You can read more about the story behind Ports of Call in another article, where we also got Rolf-Dieter Klein to answer questions about the game. But one thing it shares with Defender of the Crown and several other projects Jim Sachs worked on is beautiful, animated water. Here, Sachs used a technique called color cycling, where he changed (some of) the colors on the screen’s palette for each frame. That is, a pixel that was drawn as dark blue in one frame could be light blue in the next, and with meticulous screen design, it created a surprisingly convincing illusion of animation without the pixels actually moving on the screen. Sachs explains:
– Yes, I spent many days experimenting with different ranges of color cycling, and discovered a lot of interesting effects. I found that just a bit of motion in the background scenes really brought them to life without any animation programming required. I liked having water in a scene because it was easy to color-cycle. Fire worked pretty well, too.
The title screen of Ports of Call is a good example:
Working with Commodore
In the following years, Sachs worked on a number of projects, creating graphics for the strategy game Centurion: Defender of Rome and the title screen for Who Framed Roger Rabbit for instance. He also had a close relationship with Commodore, and among other things, he created several drawings for an official Amiga demonstration used in various stores. When they created their groundbreaking CD-based game and multimedia machine, the Commodore CDTV, Sachs was responsible for all the graphics – the opening screen, user interface, and so on.
He would later do the same for the first 32-bit game console in the western market, the Amiga CD32. But working with Commodore was not always smooth sailing:
– Working with Commodore was pure hell. When I did all the internal interfaces and graphics for CDTV, I was working with Carl Sassenrath and Reichart Von Wolfsheild. They acted as a buffer between me and Commodore, so I never had to deal with any of the corporate politcs. I was pretty much left to do whatever I wanted, and those guys would sell it to Commodore.
This situation did not last, however:
– When the time came to do the same for CD32, I had to work with Commodore directly. I flew to their headquarters in Pennsylvania, and was set up with a workstation. But everyone there had a different opinion, many of which were contradictory. I finally couldn’t take it any more and quit. They ended up using some of the effects I had developed, but the whole splash screen was very low-res and clunky looking. I feel that this was partly responsible for the machine not being taken seriously.
Defender of the Crown II
But Sachs had another project for the CD32 that – on his end, at least – was much more successful. This was the official sequel to Defender of the Crown. He explains:
– Commodore was looking for content to run on their new CD32 machine, and I volunteered to rework Defender of the Crown to take advantage of that machine’s capabilities. Gail Wellington at Commodore contracted with me to do the job. Since Cinemaware went bankrupt owing me money, all my original artwork for Defender of the Crown reverted back to me.
Defender of the Crown II is largely based on the original game, and Sachs describes it as «a kind of Director’s Cut version that includes a lot of material we didn’t have time to implement in the original.” He also made several changes:
– I reworked the gameplay to more accurately reflect the historical fact of attempting to raise the ransom for Richard the Lionheart after he was captured by Leopold of Austria. The original game had the player attempting to become King himself, which I considered unrealistic.
The project involved many different tasks, and Sachs had to do much more than just graphics:
– Defender of the Crown II was entirely my project. No one else worked on it. I rewrote every line of code, added some scenes (including a whole new end scene), replaced the one scene which Cinemaware had done (the Robin Hood scene), wrote narration for the whole game, recorded voice actors in 5 different languages, and created a cinematic musical score. I was really proud of how it turned out and was sorry to see Commodre go out of business just as it was being released.
The bankruptcy meant that although the game made it to the market in 1993, it never got a chance to become well-known. Even today, few people know that Defender of the Crown ever got a sequel.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Another project Jim Sachs had worked on was an ambitious game based on the Disney movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from 1954. Initially, he worked on the game for Ports of Call publisher Aegis, but he also needed Disney on board. The movie featured a distinctive version of the submarine Nautilus designed by Harper Goff, which is why he specifically wanted to base his game on that rather than the original novel by Jules Verne. But as Sachs explains in a forum post on LemonAmiga, it all ended in disaster:
– I had a lot of meetings at Disney and it looked like things were going well. Then I got hit by the boot-block virus, which wiped out all my code. I immediately called Bill Volk at Aegis to warn him not to boot the emergency back-up disk they were keeping for me. Too late.
It took a few years before Sachs was motivated to work on the project again, but after Defender of the Crown II, he tried once more:
– After Defender of the Crown II, I tried one more time to get Disney to fund a game based on «20,000 Leagues Under the Sea». After many months of my efforts, they finally turned it down once and for all, he tells us.
It was never an option to do the project without Disney, as he was determined to use Goff’s version of the Nautilus in the game. Today, the only thing we have left is an impressive presentation that Sachs later transferred from VHS and posted on YouTube (everything you see in that video was made on Amiga), as well as some impressive images where he really shows what he could do with color cycling to create water effects.
Bicycle Training and Virtual Aquariums
With the cancellation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Sachs also ended up leaving the games industry, but he continued doing what he was good at:
– A short time later, my friend Michael Crick (whose dad was DNA-discoverer Francis Crick, by the way) called to ask if I wanted to take over programming for the CompuTrainer bicycle training device software. Mike had done the original Nintendo-based software for that machine, but now the company wanted to enter the 21st century with an immersive 3D experience. So I spent a couple of years doing that, and I’m quite proud of how the software turned out. If you’ve seen Peloton or Zwift, they still look very similar to my program, and it’s hard to believe that there is a 25 year separation between mine and theirs.
While his CompuTrainer software might not be quite as well known as his games, Sachs is quite proud of the work he did:
– I’m probably more proud of the CompuTrainer 3D software than anything else I’ve done, and it may be the most massive program ever made by one person (though Defender of the Crown II might be a close second).
After CompuTrainer, he went on to what would probably become his most financially most successful project. And it’s quite possible you’ve seen it, most likely without knowing that it was Amiga legend Jim Sachs who created it. Sachs:
– After my deep-dive into 3D programming for the CompuTrainer, I was looking for another 3D project. This was around 1999-2000, and Microsoft had their silly-looking fish screensaver running on every screen in the Big-Box stores. I decided it was time for someone to do a realistic 3D program that would take over that market, and spent the next year writing the SereneScreen Aquarium. The timing was right – just as 3D was gaining popularity, and the program was a huge hit. Suddenly it was my program instead of Microsoft’s running on every screen in every store.
He continues:
– Microsoft eventually used my Aquarium as the centerpiece of the Plus-Pack. All I can say about that deal is – don’t ever deal with Microsoft without a lawyer present! Anyway, the Aquarium funded the rest of my life. Even though sales went to near-zero after the 2008 recession, Roku-founder Anthony Wood was kind enough to license the program, allowing Roku to use it on their 4k devices.
No return to the games industry
Today, Sachs enjoys a well-deserved retirement period. When we asked him if he had heard anything from NordCurrent, the publisher who recently acquired the Defender of the Crown rights and is working on a new version, he said that he hasn’t. But even if they were to contact him, it’s unlikely they could lure him back to work:
– Nope! I’m too old.
We would like to thank Jim Sachs for taking the time to talk with us and for his great patience over the past few months. Let’s end with a few calm hours courtesy of Sachs’ virtual aquarium:
The colour cycling examples in this article can be found at the Amiga Graphics Archive, which is a site full of stunning Amiga art. They were used with permission.