Russ Wetmore

Russ Wetmore is an American computer programmer best known for writing a number of commercial products for the Atari 8-bit family in the early to mid 1980s. He wrote the Frogger-inspired Preppie! (1982),[1] its maze-game sequel Preppie II (1983),[2] and ported Sea Dragon from the TRS-80 (1982).[3] All three games were developed under the name Star Systems Software and published by Adventure International.

As a result of the North American video game crash of 1983, Wetmore stopped writing games[4] and created the integrated application suite Homepak (1984) for the Atari 8-bit computers.[5] It contains a word processor (Hometext), database (Homefind), and terminal communications program (Hometerm). Homepak was published by Batteries Included. It is one of the few commercial products written in the Action! programming language from Optimized Systems Software.[6]

He has since worked as a software architect and director of development for a variety of companies, including Apple Computer.[7]

Following his appearance on the ANTIC Podcast in January 2016, Wetmore released the Atari 8-bit source code for Preppie, Preppie II, and Sea Dragon to the Internet Archive.[8] Also made available was a demo for an unfinished Atari computer game, Lulu.[8]

References

  1. ↑ Covert, Colin (September 1983). "Russ Wetmore: Prepped for Success". Electronic Games.
  2. ↑ "Preppie II". Atari Mania.
  3. ↑ Reed, Matthew. "Sea Dragon". TRS-80.org.
  4. ↑ "Preppie Three? - Atari 8-Bit Computer Forums". Atari Age. February 20, 2005.
  5. ↑ Davison, John S. "Homepak Review". Page 6 (23): 32.
  6. ↑ Small, David (May 1985). "Outpost: Atari". Creative Computing. 11 (5): 94.
  7. ↑ "Russ Wetmore". LinkedIn.
  8. 1 2 Savetz, Kevin (January 4, 2016). "ANTIC Interview 113 - Russ Wetmore, Preppie!, Sea Dragon, Homepak". ANTIC the 8-bit Podcast.


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