Zombie Attackers (Game)

Zombie Attackers is a game for the PersonalMicro II released in 1983, being one of the last officially licensed games for the system, and one of the worst. It was originally meant to be a Zombie City spinoff, as it was made by Edge Technologies, the company who ported Zombie City II to the Apple II in 1981, and the Commodore 64 in 1982. They approached the creators of Zombie City about the spinoff, and they said no, despite being impressed with their work on the 2 ports. Edge, who had already started some work on the game, saved what they had done for a later project, after ceasing its development in early 1982. In early 1983, Edge Technologies wanted to assign their 2 newcomer developers, Jake and Tom Nguyen to a project. They gave them what they had of the Zombie City spinoff and told them to create a Zombie City-styled zombie first person shooter. Unfortunately, the 2 developers had never coded for, let alone used a PersonalMicro II. For 2 months, little work was done on the project, as they tried to learn the CX+ language that the PersonalMicro II utilized at an optimum level. After that, they only had 2 months to finish the project completely. Tom did graphical work and audio work, Jake did coding and writing. They were, at this point, no longer trying for a quality project, they were trying to get the whole game out of the door. They ended up finishing the whole 5 level game in the next month, and spent the next month ironing out a few bugs. Tom and Jake didn't credit themselves, instead, they attributed the whole game to Steven Nero, a fellow Edge employee who handled the Zombie City 2 Apple II port, who, according to Tom, "was kind of a jerk", in order to get back at him for trying to get the duo fired after the first week of Zombie Attackers' development showed no progress. After this false credit was discovered, Tom and Jake were fired from Edge immediately, and not only were Tom and Jake's credits put in the game in Revision B, they were put on the title screen, instead of being hidden in the code. This made Tom and Jake "practically unhirable" for the next year, until TyTex Interactive hired them in late 1984. Until then, Tom and Jake created very basic Commodore 64 games and distributed them for $0.99 a piece, getting decent sales.