Speaker 1: In two thousand and two. Ken van Muzbergen is, like
Speaker 1: many Atari fans, on the lookout for vintage Atari items,
Speaker 1: and by this point pretty much anything Atari is considered vintage.
Speaker 1: The heyday of the classic twenty six hundred console has
Speaker 1: come and gone. The video game scene is dominated by
Speaker 1: Nintendo Sony and the upstart Microsoft. Atari is the retro choice,
Speaker 1: an echo of childhood. It's fun to pick up old
Speaker 1: games on eBay and usually pretty cheap, but not always cheap.
Speaker 1: Ken is on eBay and he sees a listing that
Speaker 1: stops him in his tracks. The one thing, it's the price.
Speaker 2: I think it was an excess of eight to ten
Speaker 2: thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: For another, it's the game.
Speaker 2: And then all of a sudden, this prototype in quotes
Speaker 2: my air quotes shows up on eBay, so request air
Speaker 2: World like no, can't be.
Speaker 1: Like many Atari collectors, he's well aware of sword Quest,
Speaker 1: the contest that promised players a pile of gold treasure
Speaker 1: for winning one of four games, Earth World, fire World,
Speaker 1: water World, and the mythical final game air World.
Speaker 2: Tara It's our final challenge, a world made of air,
Speaker 2: Quick to the Flying Horse.
Speaker 1: Those first three games were released, then In nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: Atari's new management team canceled the contest, throwing the remaining
Speaker 1: prizes into limbo and the fourth game, Airworld, into the
Speaker 1: proverbial trash. It never appeared on store shelves.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is probably the most sought after prototype
Speaker 2: in the history of the Atari twenty one hundred. I
Speaker 2: mean Airworld, the fourth part to the sword Quest series,
Speaker 2: the never released Airworld.
Speaker 1: But here it is, i'm eBay of all places, an
Speaker 1: original air World cartridge, never before seen, long thought to
Speaker 1: be vaporware, never even finished on a programming level. If
Speaker 1: it existed at all, it could have only been as
Speaker 1: a single copy kept within the walls of Atari alone.
Speaker 1: Prototype Ken is so captivated by the game that it
Speaker 1: takes him a minute to register the price thousands and
Speaker 1: still going.
Speaker 2: But then, you know, the bids start to get astronomically high.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I got no chance of getting this. Hopefully
Speaker 2: it goes to someone I know.
Speaker 1: But then there's trouble. Even with the bidding increasing, the
Speaker 1: auction is suddenly terminated and.
Speaker 2: Then it ends just as abruptly, like, Okay, this is
Speaker 2: kind of fishy here.
Speaker 1: Air World is a part of the Lost sword Quest treasures.
Speaker 1: Like the prizes themselves, it appears to keep slipping through
Speaker 1: the hands of collectors.
Speaker 2: So what is this? I was curious to found just
Speaker 2: what it was. Was it something that escaped the lab? Oh? No,
Speaker 2: it was a lot of weird stuff went on Atari
Speaker 2: at the end. There were so many things going on.
Speaker 2: No one knew what was going on.
Speaker 1: But where had it come from? Who was selling it?
Speaker 1: And if Airworld had finally surfaced, was it possible the
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars in missing prizes wouldn't be far behind?
Speaker 1: For iHeartRadio, this is the legend of sword Quest. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Jamie Loftus and this is episode six Plunder.
Speaker 1: Sixteen years before Airworld popped up on eBay like a
Speaker 1: missing kid on a milk carton, Atari had done away
Speaker 1: with sword Quest. The prizes vanished. They were all made
Speaker 1: by the Franklin Mint, the collectibles company that specialized in
Speaker 1: limited edition art, and some believed they were returned to
Speaker 1: the Mint, only to be destroyed or sold to someone
Speaker 1: at the yard sale. See the last episode for details.
Speaker 1: A lot of collectors in pop culture historians care about
Speaker 1: the fate of those prizes, but some Atari collectors are
Speaker 1: Kart people. They scoured the internet for classic cartridges, preferably
Speaker 1: still in the original box and with the owner's manual.
Speaker 1: The rarer the better. The original Mario Brothers game, which
Speaker 1: came out for the Atari twenty six hundred before Nintendo
Speaker 1: launched in America. That might go for a grand in
Speaker 1: good condition. Joust Asteroids a few hundred bucks plus shipping
Speaker 1: Moon Patrol without a box, Well, that one we can
Speaker 1: let go for under twenty dollars no refunds. For Ken,
Speaker 1: a software developer based in San Diego, getting back into
Speaker 1: Atari after experiencing it as a kid wasn't just about
Speaker 1: watching games pile up. It was a kind of therapy.
Speaker 2: The whole story about me getting back into Atari is
Speaker 2: an interesting story in its own, but it was when
Speaker 2: my mom was diagon gnosed with als lugeeric disease in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six. The social worker. That's a pretty devastating
Speaker 2: thing the news to get to that at that time
Speaker 2: in your life. Really, you know, the person that's been
Speaker 2: there for you, has been your strength for you, is
Speaker 2: now at some point not going to be there anymore,
Speaker 2: And the best thing to do is to not think
Speaker 2: about that. Of course, that's easier said than done. But
Speaker 2: find a hobby, find something that brought you joy in
Speaker 2: your life at one point, and maybe revisit it. So
Speaker 2: I sort of like, I really loved that Attori twice
Speaker 2: two hundred. So I dug it out of storage, found
Speaker 2: all my games again, found all my stuff again, and
Speaker 2: started collecting. I picked up Atari computers. I started picking
Speaker 2: up all their consoles I didn't own before, like the television,
Speaker 2: the Clco vision, got the AIO hundred Exil for the
Speaker 2: first time, so I started getting all that stuff again
Speaker 2: and getting back into that, which really helped.
Speaker 1: Ken played sword Quest as a kid. It was an
Speaker 1: exercise in keeping one's expectations in check.
Speaker 2: We just couldn't figure out what was going on. For
Speaker 2: the most part. I was mainly in it for the
Speaker 2: story in the comics and pretty much playing the games
Speaker 2: for the games. I actually had more fun reading the
Speaker 2: comic books than I did playing the games. Quite honestly,
Speaker 2: the comics really helped. I mean I read the comic
Speaker 2: and then I wanted the other games for the comic.
Speaker 2: Quite honestly. I mean, we still played the games, but
Speaker 2: I want to know where the story went. We got
Speaker 2: all those games because the comics were in them.
Speaker 1: Ken played Earthworld, Fireworld, water World, and then watched the
Speaker 1: video game industry burn to the ground before anyone could
Speaker 1: get Airworld. For over a decade, it was understood that
Speaker 1: Airworld was never finished. The game was intended to be
Speaker 1: a first person adventure, with Tor, one of the two
Speaker 1: heroes of the story, riding astride a flying horse as
Speaker 1: one does. It was supposed to be based on the
Speaker 1: I Chain, just as all the sword Quest games were
Speaker 1: inspired by different philosophies. It would be the grand finale
Speaker 1: to the series, with players finally finding out the fate
Speaker 1: of siblings Tour and Tara in their fight against King Tyrannus.
Speaker 1: But since DC never created a comic, you'll have to
Speaker 1: use your imagination.
Speaker 2: You're a jerk, King Terrannist. I hope you get bought
Speaker 2: out by a capitalist who forgets you eat.
Speaker 3: Exist up yours, Tour. It's a free market. Atari Sports
Speaker 3: Quarter revenue forecast. We're a disaster. They sealed their own bait.
Speaker 1: Go play in traffic Tyrannus.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 1: Although Airworld was never released, that doesn't mean that no
Speaker 1: one worked on it. Pod Fry, the creator of sword Quest,
Speaker 1: started programming it before everything went south. Here's Todd.
Speaker 4: I started working on Airworld before water World was done.
Speaker 4: So the story there is that I finished Fireworld and
Speaker 4: put it in the pipeline, and I started working on
Speaker 4: air World, and I had some concept animation and some
Speaker 4: concept art, and I had this thing, some pretty interesting
Speaker 4: stuff to me, and I got asked to do Zivius.
Speaker 4: I got pulled off air World. Zevius was a popular
Speaker 4: coin up game at the time, maybe and management wanted
Speaker 4: it done. Other programmers threw up their hands in despair,
Speaker 4: and they asked me to give it a shot, and
Speaker 4: I went ahead and did it.
Speaker 1: By the time he got back to Airworld, there was
Speaker 1: no more sword Quest. The final game was only partially assembled.
Speaker 1: That should have been case closed, except well, except Todd
Speaker 1: Fry left Atari in nineteen eighty four. It's possible that
Speaker 1: Todd began working on Airworld, sure, and he didn't finish it,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean someone else at Atari didn't complete
Speaker 1: the game. So it could be released without being associated
Speaker 1: with the contest. They wouldn't even have to call it
Speaker 1: air World. There was precedent for games being abandoned and
Speaker 1: then rediscovered in the nineteen nineties, someone went to a
Speaker 1: flea market and picked up a bizarre Atari cartridge that
Speaker 1: was unlabeled. When they plugged it into their vintage Atari console,
Speaker 1: they saw a game that was never known to exist,
Speaker 1: aqua Venture. The game, which was about an underwater explorer
Speaker 1: searching for lost treasure, had never been released by Atari.
Speaker 1: Somehow the prototype had found its way out of the
Speaker 1: offices and at a yard sale. So who's to say
Speaker 1: this eBay listing for Airworld couldn't be a similar situation.
Speaker 1: Maybe this was an incomplete version set aside when Todd left,
Speaker 1: or a complete version finished by someone else. So Ken
Speaker 1: van Mersbergen clicked on the eBay username of the seller
Speaker 1: offering Airworld and dashed off a message he wanted more
Speaker 1: details where the game him come from, But he can
Speaker 1: get a copy for archival purposes. Can wait it. And
Speaker 1: then he got to notice a new message.
Speaker 2: But he was always there's always an excuse as to
Speaker 2: why he couldn't send me the carters to dump for him.
Speaker 2: He didn't trust FedEx, hedn't trust ups, doesn't trust anybody.
Speaker 1: The seller didn't want to send Ken the game so
Speaker 1: he could dump it. That's a slang term for making
Speaker 1: a copy of a game from a rom chip as
Speaker 1: a kind of backup, and well, you can see his point.
Speaker 1: He had something valuable, why make a copy of it.
Speaker 1: Atari collectors were beginning to buzz about the listing for gamers,
Speaker 1: this was a grail. And then the seller introduced himself
Speaker 1: to the Atari community. He posted on Atari Age, a
Speaker 1: forum for Atari devotees. He explained how he had taken
Speaker 1: possession of air World.
Speaker 2: I think a story was he bought it from an
Speaker 2: Exittari employee, then later it was his who got it
Speaker 2: from the Exitari employer. He got it from his brother
Speaker 2: and it probably morphed again.
Speaker 1: After that, the seller fielded a lot of questions. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the game crashes, he said, when picking up an object
Speaker 1: or entering your room. It was glitchy, but that was
Speaker 1: all to be expected for an old prototype. Even Todd
Speaker 1: Fry posted to say it was possible the seller had
Speaker 1: gotten hold of an incomplete version that had somehow escaped
Speaker 1: Atari's offices. The seller also had, as the kids would say,
Speaker 1: though was seen.
Speaker 2: And then because everybody's asking, well, can you post some screenshots?
Speaker 2: Can you post some video? Can we see something?
Speaker 1: One troubling thing was that the screenshots looked extremely clear clean.
Speaker 1: This was a console that was twenty years old by
Speaker 1: this point, so how had the seller gotten such sharp images?
Speaker 2: When they started examining the screenshots, he said they were
Speaker 2: taken off a video capture card, which you said, is
Speaker 2: this sophisticated one? But the AHTI all and wonder ve.
Speaker 2: The VE stands for Value Edition. It's a consumer level
Speaker 2: video card, and he says he's achieving these crystal clear
Speaker 2: screenshots from an RF modulator from a twenty six hundred,
Speaker 2: which wasn't known. They have the best video anyway. It's
Speaker 2: a non modern system, he says, And it happens to
Speaker 2: be the same resolution as the screenshots from the Stella emulator. Coincidence,
Speaker 2: I think not.
Speaker 1: Let's translate Kenn here. Basically, the game looked like it
Speaker 1: was coming from an emulator, which runs old games on
Speaker 1: modern equipment as opposed to old games on old systems.
Speaker 1: Imagine someone telling you they found an old VHS tape
Speaker 1: and then showing you a screenshot that looked like it
Speaker 1: came from a Blu ray. It didn't add up. Some
Speaker 1: collectors began doing a detailed analysis of the screenshots, treating
Speaker 1: it like this appruder film this pixel looks like it
Speaker 1: might be from an earlier sword Quest game. That pixel
Speaker 1: could wouldn't have been generated on Atari technology of the era.
Speaker 1: It became a matter of forensics. The character in the
Speaker 1: game had a pink head, red shirt and black pants.
Speaker 1: One single tiny pixel meant to represent his hand was green.
Speaker 1: Green was a background for the original Earth World game.
Speaker 1: It was as though someone had simply cut and pasted
Speaker 1: the graphic from an existing sword Quest title. And another
Speaker 1: bit of incriminating information, the horse on the title screen
Speaker 1: looked a lot like a horse from another game.
Speaker 2: The horse and rider is from the Lord of the
Speaker 2: ringsportotype developed by Parker Brothers. And he said, oh, back then,
Speaker 2: forms artis used to reduce gravies all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but these are two different companies, Atari and Parker Brothers,
Speaker 2: and they did not have that kind of working relationship.
Speaker 1: The air World story was getting stranger, but there was
Speaker 1: one element of the Seller story that rang true. The
Speaker 1: idea that something of value could get lost at a
Speaker 1: Tari was no fiction. When the video game industry collapsed,
Speaker 1: Atari went up for sale, and like a lot of transactions,
Speaker 1: it was messy, chaotic, and some things or prizes may
Speaker 1: have gone flying under the radar or in this case,
Speaker 1: under someone's jacket. It's reasonable to imagine Atari would take
Speaker 1: precautions over the sword quest prizes, like a bank watching
Speaker 1: over valuables at a safety deposit box. And at the
Speaker 1: contests they did, normally a security guard was standing over them.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't account for the absolute chaos that was
Speaker 1: Atari changing ownership. In summer nineteen eighty four, Warner Communications
Speaker 1: sold Atari to Jack Tremmel, a computer hardware mastermind who
Speaker 1: had made the Commodore sixty four one of the best
Speaker 1: selling personal computers in history. That's true, even to Warner
Speaker 1: held a kind of fire sale, selling Jack Atari's consumer
Speaker 1: division and handing over the company's property, filing cabinets, chairs, desks,
Speaker 1: even entire buildings. It all happened very quickly, but the
Speaker 1: new leaner Atari didn't need so much stuff. Buildings had
Speaker 1: to go, space had to be consolidated, and so did employees.
Speaker 1: It was possibly the darkest chapter in Atari's long history.
Speaker 1: In Hallway after Hallway, where star programmers like Todd Fry
Speaker 1: once ran up and down and smoked incredible amounts of weed,
Speaker 1: there was just silence in side offices. People had left
Speaker 1: so abruptly that they had left monitors on gone in
Speaker 1: mid assignment. It was like the rapture had hit Atari,
Speaker 1: with most people disappearing completely out of sight. Here's an
Speaker 1: example of the confusion. The lack of inventory keeping was
Speaker 1: so profound that it wasn't until months later that one
Speaker 1: Atari employee discovered Atari owned a large warehouse full of BMW's.
Speaker 1: These were very expensive cars that were leased for upper management.
Speaker 1: They were told to drop off the cars, which were
Speaker 1: packed in so tightly that some workers had to crawl
Speaker 1: out of the warehouse window to get out. An entire
Speaker 1: fleet of company vehicles were left to collect dust, virtually forgotten.
Speaker 1: If that could happen to cars, what could happen to
Speaker 1: some contest prizes. Here's another thing about Atari. At this time,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of employee turnover. Marketing. Employees with
Speaker 1: knowledge of the contest were out the door. Atari's new
Speaker 1: management knew about sword Quest, they had to address it,
Speaker 1: but they may not have known about the prizes until
Speaker 1: they went missing. Along the hallways of a Atari were
Speaker 1: stacks of computers, printers, keyboards, files, and plenty of employees
Speaker 1: just wandering through, some of whom seized an opportunity to
Speaker 1: grab some work from home supplies despite their employment status.
Speaker 1: It wasn't as though Atari fired everyone. It's just that
Speaker 1: most employees weren't part of the sale and weren't being retained. Actually,
Speaker 1: let's just be blunt. There was employee left during the transition,
Speaker 1: mostly office equipment. This chaos went on for days, for
Speaker 1: over a week, stuff being wheeled out, people being ushered out,
Speaker 1: papers being shredded. No one aware that BMW's were just
Speaker 1: sitting around, and possibly no one noticing that a bundle
Speaker 1: of very expensive prizes were in the hands of a
Speaker 1: disgruntled employee, one who was being unceremoniously dumped in an
Speaker 1: effort to trim down costs. It could have gone under
Speaker 1: someone's coat or in a filing cabinet. Here's Todd Fry.
Speaker 4: I don't know how much the prize that exists and
Speaker 4: known as so I wouldn't be surprised if a couple
Speaker 4: of them disappeared in inventory shrinkage. And I'm saying I
Speaker 4: wouldn't be surprised if someone melted them down and you know.
Speaker 5: Bought drugs.
Speaker 4: It's like down payment of a house back then. Actually,
Speaker 4: it's alcurely really shocking. You could like buy a car,
Speaker 4: put yourself through college. It's been done. I wouldn't be
Speaker 4: surprised if a couple of them just straight up disappeared
Speaker 4: to conversion. I would be relatively surprised if someone had
Speaker 4: them and was hiding them.
Speaker 1: The Great Atari Exodus of nineteen eighty four could have
Speaker 1: seen the remnants of sword Quest disappear forever in someone's trunk,
Speaker 1: in a safe that was wheeled out on a dolly,
Speaker 1: in a warehouse that no one even knew existed. Isn't
Speaker 1: that how most of history is lost, not by purposeful neglect,
Speaker 1: but by the passage of time and the changing of
Speaker 1: the guard. No one was responsible for guarding those treasures,
Speaker 1: and it's possible someone simply plundered them.
Speaker 4: What a strange thing to have is part of my history.
Speaker 4: I don't think about this that often, but I made
Speaker 4: that sword come into existence through an act of manifestation.
Speaker 4: I thought grail Quest sort of sorcery Franklin meant, and poof,
Speaker 4: there was sixty thousand dollars precious metals and stones, and
Speaker 4: it is out there somewhere. It may have been disassembled
Speaker 4: for cash, but somewhere out there is this product of
Speaker 4: my imagination weird.
Speaker 1: At least the other product of Todd's imagination, air World
Speaker 1: had been found, hadn't it? Ken was frustrated. He decided
Speaker 1: to take another look at the message Todd fry had
Speaker 1: posted in support of this mythical air World find. This time,
Speaker 1: he looked more closely at the return email. It was
Speaker 1: your standard letter number combo. When he searched for it,
Speaker 1: he found it was mentioned in another post, this time
Speaker 1: along with the email used by the ebayseller Jeremy.
Speaker 2: When I first saw the posting was signed you know
Speaker 2: a Fry, thought, did he actually say this? It's really
Speaker 2: tough to know. And then I did some more digging
Speaker 2: and I found the email address that posted that. That
Speaker 2: email was linked to Jeremy's other account. Didn't take too
Speaker 2: much digging to find that, And then I posted that saying, Okay,
Speaker 2: he's faked the email, which just so happens to describe
Speaker 2: this prototype he has, so it gets deeper and everyone's
Speaker 2: coming out of the woodwork on it. We got Todd
Speaker 2: Frye even looked at the photograph and said, no, that's
Speaker 2: not our world.
Speaker 1: The seller was being confronted virtually anyway, with overwhelming evidence
Speaker 1: he had faked the whole thing, the game, the email
Speaker 1: from Todd Fry, the screenshot. He acted surprised, He apologized
Speaker 1: and vowed to find out what might have happened. He
Speaker 1: asked that Angry Collectors didn't use any more foul language.
Speaker 1: He didn't, of course take any responsibility. He had been
Speaker 1: a victim too.
Speaker 2: He never admits that it's fake. He's he's thinking if
Speaker 2: it's a fake, that he's a victim too, because he
Speaker 2: bought it from somebody that they obviously faked it, but
Speaker 2: he would never let any of us examine it. And
Speaker 2: the photo of the character was always crainy. I mean,
Speaker 2: everybody was thanking me for outing him for faking that email.
Speaker 2: That was just like the final straw. And then he
Speaker 2: also he made a second account on atari age to
Speaker 2: be a friend of him, who is the engineer who
Speaker 2: set up the graphics workstation that took the pictures. And
Speaker 2: then Albert, who was the moderator of atari Age, found
Speaker 2: out that both those accounts originated from the same IP
Speaker 2: address in the same physical location. He was trying either
Speaker 2: to raise the value of his bs or something. He
Speaker 2: disappeared around two thousand and four and we haven't heard
Speaker 2: from him since.
Speaker 1: Even now, Ken isn't sure what the seller's endgame was.
Speaker 1: Has he programmed the game so anyone buying it would
Speaker 1: be fooled into thinking it was air World? Would he
Speaker 1: simply insist it must have gotten even.
Speaker 2: Glitchier make some money at someone else's expense. And at
Speaker 2: the time, eBay did not have the protections they have now.
Speaker 2: If you pretty much can't get scanned on eBay now,
Speaker 2: But back then, once the buyer paid his money and
Speaker 2: the seller showed a tracking number or a shipment, eBay
Speaker 2: was off the hook.
Speaker 1: When Airworld was revealed as a fraud, it was a
Speaker 1: total bummer for the Atari collecting community. Here was hope
Speaker 1: something lost had been preserved and recovered. Only the it
Speaker 1: was an impostor if you're a completist, someone who wanted
Speaker 1: to see the series finished, then it was almost maddening.
Speaker 1: But think about movies or books for a second. Sometimes
Speaker 1: authors or filmmakers leave behind unfinished works. Sometimes creators don't
Speaker 1: get a chance to have their full vision realized. Orson
Speaker 1: Wells didn't have the money to finish his Opus The
Speaker 1: Other Side of the Wind, but another director, Peter Bogdanovitch,
Speaker 1: helped complete it. Decades later, Frank Herbert couldn't keep writing
Speaker 1: Dune books because Well he died, so his son Brian
Speaker 1: took up the mantle. In video games, some players become
Speaker 1: programmers and their hobby becomes more participatory. So, following the
Speaker 1: Great air World scandal, Ken van Muzbergen decided to become
Speaker 1: the Bogdanovich to Todd fryes orson Wells, he decided he
Speaker 1: would complete air World. He had been planning on a
Speaker 1: home brew or homemade game for a while.
Speaker 2: Then I was thinking to myself, Okay, what game should
Speaker 2: I do? So I had to look back and think, okay,
Speaker 2: sword quests Airworld never came out.
Speaker 1: Ken reached out to Todd, the real Todd for advice.
Speaker 2: Hey told me the air World was based on the
Speaker 2: Eaching because all of the short quest games were based
Speaker 2: on something. Earthworld was on the zodiac, Fireworld was the
Speaker 2: Tree of Life, and I forget what Water Word was
Speaker 2: based on, but it was it was something similar in
Speaker 2: those veins. So Airworld being, you know, the Philosopher's Stone
Speaker 2: was your prize that the e Ching was chosen as
Speaker 2: the basis, and the different trigrams and there's sixty four
Speaker 2: different texagrams and then things of that.
Speaker 1: This was a radical undertaking. Precious little of the game
Speaker 1: had been made, and what there was had to be
Speaker 1: described by others. For another thing, the narrative which had
Speaker 1: been provided I did by DC Comics was canceled right
Speaker 1: along with the game. Ken wanted to see if that
Speaker 1: lost comic had ever been completed.
Speaker 2: Like if I'm going to do air World, it has
Speaker 2: to have a comic book, because the first three did
Speaker 2: and the story was left kind of hanging there. I
Speaker 2: always wondered what happened to those guys. So I got
Speaker 2: in touch with Dick Giordano over at DC Comics. He
Speaker 2: was still working there. He was the producer at the
Speaker 2: time back then of special projects, and sword Quest was
Speaker 2: one of those projects they did for Atari because at
Speaker 2: the time they were both owned by Warner Communications, and
Speaker 2: The Franklin Mint was also owned by Warner at the time,
Speaker 2: so that stories of how that connection worked, and I
Speaker 2: asked him was the fourth part ever written? Because I
Speaker 2: did a little research on how comic books are created,
Speaker 2: and usually the story is scripted out first, then storyboarded,
Speaker 2: and usually all the parts of the story are done
Speaker 2: before they start even beginning on the artwork. So figured, well,
Speaker 2: maybe it was boarded and scripted and just never came out.
Speaker 2: No such luck, he assumed there was. It was archived
Speaker 2: there somewhere. He couldn't remember the details at all, but
Speaker 2: he was going to take a look and let me know.
Speaker 2: Well ended up never getting back to me, although I
Speaker 2: did also get kind oft with George Perez, who was
Speaker 2: the artist for the sword Quest series, and pretty good
Speaker 2: art it was, and he told us that no artwork
Speaker 2: for air World was ever begun or drawn. He said,
Speaker 2: the authors may have done something in platform, but it
Speaker 2: never got to the point where our work was required.
Speaker 1: But if Ken could make a game, he could make
Speaker 1: a comic too.
Speaker 2: It ended up happening. Someone did respond to that challenge,
Speaker 2: Amy Tait, now now Dingman. She offered to draw the comic,
Speaker 2: and I said, peck, yes, let's let's see what we
Speaker 2: can do with that. So we had to flesh out
Speaker 2: a story. So me and her we fleshed out kind
Speaker 2: of a story where the twins arrive in Airworld, they
Speaker 2: wandered around. We noticed the first three stories follow a
Speaker 2: certain pattern. They arrive, they get separated, they talk to
Speaker 2: Mentorum and Tara, they go onto the quest, they get reunited,
Speaker 2: and they ultimately find the prize. Right, so we went
Speaker 2: along the same thing, although we had to put in
Speaker 2: though the final confrontation because Conjero and Tarrannus are joining
Speaker 2: them in air World, and that's going to be a
Speaker 2: fight to end off fights in my opinion. But what
Speaker 2: I ended up happening in the plot for mine for
Speaker 2: ours actually was that they would get separated in battle
Speaker 2: and Tara would face Conjiro and Toora would face Tyrannus
Speaker 2: in one on one combat, and that Tara would definitely
Speaker 2: be overmatched against Conjero. He's a very powerful sorcerer, but
Speaker 2: Taranna's and tor could pretty much go even. So we
Speaker 2: had to work that in there somehow, and we thought, okay, well,
Speaker 2: Tara can be holding her own and dodging, but she
Speaker 2: has to come up with some magical object that would
Speaker 2: even the odds for her and be able to defeat Conjero.
Speaker 2: So our theory was Herminus is still involved here, and
Speaker 2: he finally decides whose side he's on, and he helps
Speaker 2: Tara by giving her this object like tossing a turn
Speaker 2: in the midst of battle and distracts Kunjero for him
Speaker 2: for a moment. On the other side of air World,
Speaker 2: you have Tyrannus and tor battling it out, and it's
Speaker 2: got to the point where Torre has Tyrannus hanging off
Speaker 2: a cliff where he's going to fall to his doom.
Speaker 2: But even Tor is not going to kill Tarannus, so
Speaker 2: he offers to help him up. But of course, what
Speaker 2: does Tyranna's do. He grabs his hand, tries to pull
Speaker 2: Tor over as well. And that's what we had there,
Speaker 2: which I thought was a pretty good story, and that's
Speaker 2: probably where it stood at that point. We had a
Speaker 2: basic outline of what we wanted to do, and when
Speaker 2: we see if we can actually get it done.
Speaker 1: In a sense, the sword Quest saga was Ken's to finish,
Speaker 1: not in any official way, mind you. Unlike the eBay seller,
Speaker 1: Ken wasn't pulling any kind of fast one on the community.
Speaker 1: A World was transparently a fan effort, something to satisfy
Speaker 1: those who wanted a complete set of sword Quest games,
Speaker 1: but it would still come in a box, in a
Speaker 1: cartridge and with a comic. All Ken had to do
Speaker 1: was find the right programmer, one ideally suited to an
Speaker 1: Atari Homebrew.
Speaker 2: And more help arrived in the form of Ryan Campbell,
Speaker 2: who was a programmer who basically took the skeleton that
Speaker 2: I had written and added more stuff to it and
Speaker 2: actually got it where we had rooms and objects and
Speaker 2: a character that could run between the rooms. We actually
Speaker 2: had it a basis skeleton of a program there, and
Speaker 2: it was coming along.
Speaker 1: The community reaction was positive. Air World seemed like it
Speaker 1: would be moving forward. Then in two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: Ken encountered his first hiccup.
Speaker 2: But then Ryan disappeared. He ghosted me, yes is the
Speaker 2: term you'd use now? And I don't know what happened
Speaker 2: to him, and I knew it and complete without them.
Speaker 1: This was a bumpier road than Ken had anticipated, and
Speaker 1: there was an even bigger issue at play. Fan fiction
Speaker 1: can run into copyright issues with the original manufacturer. Some
Speaker 1: treat it as a part of fandom. Lucasfilm, for example,
Speaker 1: has long champions Star Wars fan films, while Paramount tends
Speaker 1: to be very strict about Star Trek fan films. Though
Speaker 1: it had changed hands several times over the years, Atari
Speaker 1: was still the rightful owner of sword Quest, and Ken
Speaker 1: began to get a sense that they may not be
Speaker 1: totally on board with his homebrew project.
Speaker 2: I rightly don't blame him, because if you don't protect
Speaker 2: your property, you're going to lose it. I mean, you
Speaker 2: have to protected. Now. Our product was not on sale yet.
Speaker 2: That's probably why I didn't get anything directly. There are
Speaker 2: some friends of mine who are producing homebrews of Atari copyrights,
Speaker 2: and they were getting seasoned desist letters, season desist, copyright infrigement,
Speaker 2: trademark dissolution, whole bunch of nasty evil stuff. So at
Speaker 2: that point, like, well, we're kind of struggling now anyway,
Speaker 2: why not just shut it down for a while, And
Speaker 2: that's what we did.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand and two, Ken announced there wouldn't
Speaker 1: be an air World. That was, if we're keeping count,
Speaker 1: the third time the game has been declared missing. But
Speaker 1: for Ken, the project had the same effect as his collecting.
Speaker 1: It was something that had helped him come to terms
Speaker 1: with his mother's illness. She had gotten ill in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six. The air World saga Good and Bad came
Speaker 1: in the wake of what happened.
Speaker 2: Next to take your mind off the inevitability of what
Speaker 2: was going to occur. As would turn out, she would
Speaker 2: only live for an her two years. She passed away
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 1: Ken's Airworld failed to take flight. But did it matter
Speaker 1: The work itself, even the work of debunking the fake game,
Speaker 1: had occupied his mind, and it helped. You're likely wondering
Speaker 1: why wouldn't Todd Fry simply finish the game. It's complicated.
Speaker 1: For one thing, it's not really commercially viable to make
Speaker 1: a game for an extinct gaming console. For another, it
Speaker 1: can't be hard to go back and replicate how those
Speaker 1: games were made. It's not unlike going back to the moon.
Speaker 1: It's not that NASA forgot how. It's just hard to
Speaker 1: retrace your steps.
Speaker 4: You know, it's hard. Look, the fact of the matter
Speaker 4: is that Airworld is my brain child. A sword Quest
Speaker 4: is my brain child. Only I can do air World.
Speaker 4: You can do a bunch of things that are eaching
Speaker 4: informed Atari to twenty six hundred adventure games, but it
Speaker 4: won't be air World unless I do it. You can
Speaker 4: call it whatever you want, and Atari gets to call
Speaker 4: it as a trademark owner gets to call it whatever
Speaker 4: the heck they want. I've thought about making an air
Speaker 4: World cartridge, but boy, it is way too much work.
Speaker 4: I've gone back and done Simtari twenty six hundred coding.
Speaker 4: It is so hard. I forgot how hard it was.
Speaker 4: I mean, you can say, oh, yeah, that was really hard,
Speaker 4: but I remember the fun parts. I don't remember the intense,
Speaker 4: amazing tedium. There is a reason that we smoked pot.
Speaker 4: It was hours and hours and hours of incredibly hard work,
Speaker 4: incredibly tedious, detailed, unforgiving, relentlessly difficult, mind numbing work. It's like,
Speaker 4: oh my god, And that sounds I'm grinning when I
Speaker 4: say this, because that sounds like a good time, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: Like most everyone familiar with the sword Quest saga, ken
Speaker 1: Vin Murzbergen has a theory on where the prizes may
Speaker 1: have ended up. In fact, as an Atari historian himself,
Speaker 1: he's looked into it. Like some collectors. He believed the
Speaker 1: Franklin mint which made the prizes, took them back and
Speaker 1: melted them down. We mentioned this in the last.
Speaker 2: Episode, probably gone yeah, from the research we had done.
Speaker 2: I just don't believe they exist. Please prove me wrong
Speaker 2: out there, but I don't think they exist.
Speaker 1: There's a kind of trinity of theories that have endured
Speaker 1: over the years. One is that the prizes were returned
Speaker 1: to the Franklin Mint, then melted down for their material value.
Speaker 1: That's what Ken thinks. Another is that someone at Atari
Speaker 1: walked out with the prizes during its transfer of ownership
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four. The third and most pervasive theory
Speaker 1: is that they never disappeared at all. They were just relocated.
Speaker 1: In twenty sixteen, a number of former Atari employees came
Speaker 1: together for a tech convention. They fielded all of the
Speaker 1: usual questions. Then a kid stepped up to the microphone
Speaker 1: and got real. He asked them if they knew what
Speaker 1: had happened to the sword question surprizes. Former Atari employees
Speaker 1: got this question a lot, and the panel gave the
Speaker 1: usual answers. Could have been an employee, could have been
Speaker 1: an inventory oversight. But then, as one member of the
Speaker 1: panel was talking, someone in the audience spoke up and
Speaker 1: offered a name. Tremmel, a name that comes up over
Speaker 1: and over in sword quest lore. A man who loomed
Speaker 1: almost as large in gaming history as Mario, someone who
Speaker 1: scared some people and who even considered buying Apple. It's
Speaker 1: time to meet the man who conquered Atari, and who
Speaker 1: may have held the sort of ultimate sorcery up in
Speaker 1: victory after he canceled the contest.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's impossible, it has to be a lie.
Speaker 2: Ha ha.
Speaker 3: Foolish children, your search for the sword has led you
Speaker 3: to me. I am the king, and the king he
Speaker 3: must have his crowd. Tod decarve you both up like
Speaker 3: a holiday.
Speaker 1: Ham a, that's next time on sword Quest.
Speaker 5: The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart
Speaker 5: Podcasts and School of Humans. This episode was written by
Speaker 5: Jake Rosson and hosted by Jamie Loftus producers are Miranda
Speaker 5: Hawkins and Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, L. C. Crowley,
Speaker 5: Brandon Barr, and Jason English. Our show editor is Mary Doo.
Speaker 5: Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by
Speaker 5: Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson. Original score by Jesse Niswanger.
Speaker 5: This episode was sound designed by Jonathan Washington, with additional
Speaker 5: editing by Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Miranda Hawkins.
Speaker 5: Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Voices in this episode are
Speaker 5: provided by Josh Fisher, Hayley Ellman, and Graham Parkard.