October 17, 2024 • 37 mins
An unreleased SwordQuest game suddenly surfaces online; the fate of the missing prizes undergoes fresh scrutiny by gaming historians.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
In two thousand and two. Ken van Muzbergen is, like
many Atari fans, on the lookout for vintage Atari items,
and by this point pretty much anything Atari is considered vintage.
The heyday of the classic twenty six hundred console has
come and gone. The video game scene is dominated by
Nintendo Sony and the upstart Microsoft. Atari is the retro choice,
(00:29):
an echo of childhood. It's fun to pick up old
games on eBay and usually pretty cheap, but not always cheap.
Ken is on eBay and he sees a listing that
stops him in his tracks. The one thing, it's the price.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I think it was an excess of eight to ten
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
For another, it's the game.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
And then all of a sudden, this prototype in quotes
my air quotes shows up on eBay, so request air
World like no, can't be.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Like many Atari collectors, he's well aware of sword Quest,
the contest that promised players a pile of gold treasure
for winning one of four games, Earth World, fire World,
water World, and the mythical final game air World.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Tara It's our final challenge, a world made of air,
Quick to the Flying Horse.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Those first three games were released, then In nineteen eighty six,
Atari's new management team canceled the contest, throwing the remaining
prizes into limbo and the fourth game, Airworld, into the
proverbial trash. It never appeared on store shelves.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I mean, this is probably the most sought after prototype
in the history of the Atari twenty one hundred. I
mean Airworld, the fourth part to the sword Quest series,
the never released Airworld.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
But here it is, i'm eBay of all places, an
original air World cartridge, never before seen, long thought to
be vaporware, never even finished on a programming level. If
it existed at all, it could have only been as
a single copy kept within the walls of Atari alone.
Prototype Ken is so captivated by the game that it
(02:23):
takes him a minute to register the price thousands and
still going.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
But then, you know, the bids start to get astronomically high.
I'm like, I got no chance of getting this. Hopefully
it goes to someone I know.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
But then there's trouble. Even with the bidding increasing, the
auction is suddenly terminated and.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Then it ends just as abruptly, like, Okay, this is
kind of fishy here.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Air World is a part of the Lost sword Quest treasures.
Like the prizes themselves, it appears to keep slipping through
the hands of collectors.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
So what is this? I was curious to found just
what it was. Was it something that escaped the lab? Oh? No,
it was a lot of weird stuff went on Atari
at the end. There were so many things going on.
No one knew what was going on.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
But where had it come from? Who was selling it?
And if Airworld had finally surfaced, was it possible the
one hundred thousand dollars in missing prizes wouldn't be far behind?
For iHeartRadio, this is the legend of sword Quest. I'm
your host, Jamie Loftus and this is episode six Plunder.
(03:38):
Sixteen years before Airworld popped up on eBay like a
missing kid on a milk carton, Atari had done away
with sword Quest. The prizes vanished. They were all made
by the Franklin Mint, the collectibles company that specialized in
limited edition art, and some believed they were returned to
the Mint, only to be destroyed or sold to someone
(03:59):
at the yard sale. See the last episode for details.
A lot of collectors in pop culture historians care about
the fate of those prizes, but some Atari collectors are
Kart people. They scoured the internet for classic cartridges, preferably
still in the original box and with the owner's manual.
The rarer the better. The original Mario Brothers game, which
(04:23):
came out for the Atari twenty six hundred before Nintendo
launched in America. That might go for a grand in
good condition. Joust Asteroids a few hundred bucks plus shipping
Moon Patrol without a box, Well, that one we can
let go for under twenty dollars no refunds. For Ken,
a software developer based in San Diego, getting back into
(04:45):
Atari after experiencing it as a kid wasn't just about
watching games pile up. It was a kind of therapy.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
The whole story about me getting back into Atari is
an interesting story in its own, but it was when
my mom was diagon gnosed with als lugeeric disease in
nineteen ninety six. The social worker. That's a pretty devastating
thing the news to get to that at that time
in your life. Really, you know, the person that's been
there for you, has been your strength for you, is
now at some point not going to be there anymore,
(05:16):
And the best thing to do is to not think
about that. Of course, that's easier said than done. But
find a hobby, find something that brought you joy in
your life at one point, and maybe revisit it. So
I sort of like, I really loved that Attori twice
two hundred. So I dug it out of storage, found
all my games again, found all my stuff again, and
(05:37):
started collecting. I picked up Atari computers. I started picking
up all their consoles I didn't own before, like the television,
the Clco vision, got the AIO hundred Exil for the
first time, so I started getting all that stuff again
and getting back into that, which really helped.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Ken played sword Quest as a kid. It was an
exercise in keeping one's expectations in check.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
We just couldn't figure out what was going on. For
the most part. I was mainly in it for the
story in the comics and pretty much playing the games
for the games. I actually had more fun reading the
comic books than I did playing the games. Quite honestly,
the comics really helped. I mean I read the comic
and then I wanted the other games for the comic.
Quite honestly. I mean, we still played the games, but
(06:18):
I want to know where the story went. We got
all those games because the comics were in them.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Ken played Earthworld, Fireworld, water World, and then watched the
video game industry burn to the ground before anyone could
get Airworld. For over a decade, it was understood that
Airworld was never finished. The game was intended to be
a first person adventure, with Tor, one of the two
heroes of the story, riding astride a flying horse as
(06:49):
one does. It was supposed to be based on the
I Chain, just as all the sword Quest games were
inspired by different philosophies. It would be the grand finale
to the series, with players finally finding out the fate
of siblings Tour and Tara in their fight against King Tyrannus.
But since DC never created a comic, you'll have to
(07:10):
use your imagination.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
You're a jerk, King Terrannist. I hope you get bought
out by a capitalist who forgets you eat.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Exist up yours, Tour. It's a free market. Atari Sports
Quarter revenue forecast. We're a disaster. They sealed their own bait.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Go play in traffic Tyrannus.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Although Airworld was never released, that doesn't mean that no
one worked on it. Pod Fry, the creator of sword Quest,
started programming it before everything went south. Here's Todd.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
I started working on Airworld before water World was done.
So the story there is that I finished Fireworld and
put it in the pipeline, and I started working on
air World, and I had some concept animation and some
concept art, and I had this thing, some pretty interesting
(08:09):
stuff to me, and I got asked to do Zivius.
I got pulled off air World. Zevius was a popular
coin up game at the time, maybe and management wanted
it done. Other programmers threw up their hands in despair,
and they asked me to give it a shot, and
I went ahead and did it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
By the time he got back to Airworld, there was
no more sword Quest. The final game was only partially assembled.
That should have been case closed, except well, except Todd
Fry left Atari in nineteen eighty four. It's possible that
Todd began working on Airworld, sure, and he didn't finish it,
(08:51):
but that doesn't mean someone else at Atari didn't complete
the game. So it could be released without being associated
with the contest. They wouldn't even have to call it
air World. There was precedent for games being abandoned and
then rediscovered in the nineteen nineties, someone went to a
flea market and picked up a bizarre Atari cartridge that
(09:11):
was unlabeled. When they plugged it into their vintage Atari console,
they saw a game that was never known to exist,
aqua Venture. The game, which was about an underwater explorer
searching for lost treasure, had never been released by Atari.
(09:33):
Somehow the prototype had found its way out of the
offices and at a yard sale. So who's to say
this eBay listing for Airworld couldn't be a similar situation.
Maybe this was an incomplete version set aside when Todd left,
or a complete version finished by someone else. So Ken
van Mersbergen clicked on the eBay username of the seller
(09:54):
offering Airworld and dashed off a message he wanted more
details where the game him come from, But he can
get a copy for archival purposes. Can wait it. And
then he got to notice a new message.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
But he was always there's always an excuse as to
why he couldn't send me the carters to dump for him.
He didn't trust FedEx, hedn't trust ups, doesn't trust anybody.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
The seller didn't want to send Ken the game so
he could dump it. That's a slang term for making
a copy of a game from a rom chip as
a kind of backup, and well, you can see his point.
He had something valuable, why make a copy of it.
Atari collectors were beginning to buzz about the listing for gamers,
this was a grail. And then the seller introduced himself
(10:44):
to the Atari community. He posted on Atari Age, a
forum for Atari devotees. He explained how he had taken
possession of air World.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I think a story was he bought it from an
Exittari employee, then later it was his who got it
from the Exitari employer. He got it from his brother
and it probably morphed again.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
After that, the seller fielded a lot of questions. Sometimes
the game crashes, he said, when picking up an object
or entering your room. It was glitchy, but that was
all to be expected for an old prototype. Even Todd
Fry posted to say it was possible the seller had
gotten hold of an incomplete version that had somehow escaped
(11:25):
Atari's offices. The seller also had, as the kids would say,
though was seen.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
And then because everybody's asking, well, can you post some screenshots?
Can you post some video? Can we see something?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
One troubling thing was that the screenshots looked extremely clear clean.
This was a console that was twenty years old by
this point, so how had the seller gotten such sharp images?
Speaker 2 (11:52):
When they started examining the screenshots, he said they were
taken off a video capture card, which you said, is
this sophisticated one? But the AHTI all and wonder ve.
The VE stands for Value Edition. It's a consumer level
video card, and he says he's achieving these crystal clear
screenshots from an RF modulator from a twenty six hundred,
(12:13):
which wasn't known. They have the best video anyway. It's
a non modern system, he says, And it happens to
be the same resolution as the screenshots from the Stella emulator. Coincidence,
I think not.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Let's translate Kenn here. Basically, the game looked like it
was coming from an emulator, which runs old games on
modern equipment as opposed to old games on old systems.
Imagine someone telling you they found an old VHS tape
and then showing you a screenshot that looked like it
came from a Blu ray. It didn't add up. Some
(12:48):
collectors began doing a detailed analysis of the screenshots, treating
it like this appruder film this pixel looks like it
might be from an earlier sword Quest game. That pixel
could wouldn't have been generated on Atari technology of the era.
It became a matter of forensics. The character in the
game had a pink head, red shirt and black pants.
(13:10):
One single tiny pixel meant to represent his hand was green.
Green was a background for the original Earth World game.
It was as though someone had simply cut and pasted
the graphic from an existing sword Quest title. And another
bit of incriminating information, the horse on the title screen
looked a lot like a horse from another game.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The horse and rider is from the Lord of the
ringsportotype developed by Parker Brothers. And he said, oh, back then,
forms artis used to reduce gravies all the time. Yeah,
but these are two different companies, Atari and Parker Brothers,
and they did not have that kind of working relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
The air World story was getting stranger, but there was
one element of the Seller story that rang true. The
idea that something of value could get lost at a
Tari was no fiction. When the video game industry collapsed,
Atari went up for sale, and like a lot of transactions,
it was messy, chaotic, and some things or prizes may
(14:12):
have gone flying under the radar or in this case,
under someone's jacket. It's reasonable to imagine Atari would take
precautions over the sword quest prizes, like a bank watching
over valuables at a safety deposit box. And at the
(14:34):
contests they did, normally a security guard was standing over them.
But that doesn't account for the absolute chaos that was
Atari changing ownership. In summer nineteen eighty four, Warner Communications
sold Atari to Jack Tremmel, a computer hardware mastermind who
had made the Commodore sixty four one of the best
(14:55):
selling personal computers in history. That's true, even to Warner
held a kind of fire sale, selling Jack Atari's consumer
division and handing over the company's property, filing cabinets, chairs, desks,
even entire buildings. It all happened very quickly, but the
(15:19):
new leaner Atari didn't need so much stuff. Buildings had
to go, space had to be consolidated, and so did employees.
It was possibly the darkest chapter in Atari's long history.
In Hallway after Hallway, where star programmers like Todd Fry
once ran up and down and smoked incredible amounts of weed,
(15:42):
there was just silence in side offices. People had left
so abruptly that they had left monitors on gone in
mid assignment. It was like the rapture had hit Atari,
with most people disappearing completely out of sight. Here's an
example of the confusion. The lack of inventory keeping was
so profound that it wasn't until months later that one
(16:06):
Atari employee discovered Atari owned a large warehouse full of BMW's.
These were very expensive cars that were leased for upper management.
They were told to drop off the cars, which were
packed in so tightly that some workers had to crawl
out of the warehouse window to get out. An entire
(16:30):
fleet of company vehicles were left to collect dust, virtually forgotten.
If that could happen to cars, what could happen to
some contest prizes. Here's another thing about Atari. At this time,
there was a lot of employee turnover. Marketing. Employees with
knowledge of the contest were out the door. Atari's new
(16:51):
management knew about sword Quest, they had to address it,
but they may not have known about the prizes until
they went missing. Along the hallways of a Atari were
stacks of computers, printers, keyboards, files, and plenty of employees
just wandering through, some of whom seized an opportunity to
grab some work from home supplies despite their employment status.
(17:14):
It wasn't as though Atari fired everyone. It's just that
most employees weren't part of the sale and weren't being retained. Actually,
let's just be blunt. There was employee left during the transition,
mostly office equipment. This chaos went on for days, for
over a week, stuff being wheeled out, people being ushered out,
(17:35):
papers being shredded. No one aware that BMW's were just
sitting around, and possibly no one noticing that a bundle
of very expensive prizes were in the hands of a
disgruntled employee, one who was being unceremoniously dumped in an
effort to trim down costs. It could have gone under
(17:55):
someone's coat or in a filing cabinet. Here's Todd Fry.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
I don't know how much the prize that exists and
known as so I wouldn't be surprised if a couple
of them disappeared in inventory shrinkage. And I'm saying I
wouldn't be surprised if someone melted them down and you know.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
Bought drugs.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
It's like down payment of a house back then. Actually,
it's alcurely really shocking. You could like buy a car,
put yourself through college. It's been done. I wouldn't be
surprised if a couple of them just straight up disappeared
to conversion. I would be relatively surprised if someone had
them and was hiding them.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
The Great Atari Exodus of nineteen eighty four could have
seen the remnants of sword Quest disappear forever in someone's trunk,
in a safe that was wheeled out on a dolly,
in a warehouse that no one even knew existed. Isn't
that how most of history is lost, not by purposeful neglect,
but by the passage of time and the changing of
(18:57):
the guard. No one was responsible for guarding those treasures,
and it's possible someone simply plundered them.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
What a strange thing to have is part of my history.
I don't think about this that often, but I made
that sword come into existence through an act of manifestation.
I thought grail Quest sort of sorcery Franklin meant, and poof,
(19:27):
there was sixty thousand dollars precious metals and stones, and
it is out there somewhere. It may have been disassembled
for cash, but somewhere out there is this product of
my imagination weird.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
At least the other product of Todd's imagination, air World
had been found, hadn't it? Ken was frustrated. He decided
to take another look at the message Todd fry had
posted in support of this mythical air World find. This time,
(20:08):
he looked more closely at the return email. It was
your standard letter number combo. When he searched for it,
he found it was mentioned in another post, this time
along with the email used by the ebayseller Jeremy.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
When I first saw the posting was signed you know
a Fry, thought, did he actually say this? It's really
tough to know. And then I did some more digging
and I found the email address that posted that. That
email was linked to Jeremy's other account. Didn't take too
much digging to find that, And then I posted that saying, Okay,
(20:45):
he's faked the email, which just so happens to describe
this prototype he has, so it gets deeper and everyone's
coming out of the woodwork on it. We got Todd
Frye even looked at the photograph and said, no, that's
not our world.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The seller was being confronted virtually anyway, with overwhelming evidence
he had faked the whole thing, the game, the email
from Todd Fry, the screenshot. He acted surprised, He apologized
and vowed to find out what might have happened. He
asked that Angry Collectors didn't use any more foul language.
(21:25):
He didn't, of course take any responsibility. He had been
a victim too.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
He never admits that it's fake. He's he's thinking if
it's a fake, that he's a victim too, because he
bought it from somebody that they obviously faked it, but
he would never let any of us examine it. And
the photo of the character was always crainy. I mean,
everybody was thanking me for outing him for faking that email.
That was just like the final straw. And then he
(21:51):
also he made a second account on atari age to
be a friend of him, who is the engineer who
set up the graphics workstation that took the pictures. And
then Albert, who was the moderator of atari Age, found
out that both those accounts originated from the same IP
address in the same physical location. He was trying either
to raise the value of his bs or something. He
(22:14):
disappeared around two thousand and four and we haven't heard
from him since.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Even now, Ken isn't sure what the seller's endgame was.
Has he programmed the game so anyone buying it would
be fooled into thinking it was air World? Would he
simply insist it must have gotten even.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Glitchier make some money at someone else's expense. And at
the time, eBay did not have the protections they have now.
If you pretty much can't get scanned on eBay now,
But back then, once the buyer paid his money and
the seller showed a tracking number or a shipment, eBay
was off the hook.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
When Airworld was revealed as a fraud, it was a
total bummer for the Atari collecting community. Here was hope
something lost had been preserved and recovered. Only the it
was an impostor if you're a completist, someone who wanted
to see the series finished, then it was almost maddening.
(23:09):
But think about movies or books for a second. Sometimes
authors or filmmakers leave behind unfinished works. Sometimes creators don't
get a chance to have their full vision realized. Orson
Wells didn't have the money to finish his Opus The
Other Side of the Wind, but another director, Peter Bogdanovitch,
helped complete it. Decades later, Frank Herbert couldn't keep writing
(23:33):
Dune books because Well he died, so his son Brian
took up the mantle. In video games, some players become
programmers and their hobby becomes more participatory. So, following the
Great air World scandal, Ken van Muzbergen decided to become
the Bogdanovich to Todd fryes orson Wells, he decided he
(23:56):
would complete air World. He had been planning on a
home brew or homemade game for a while.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Then I was thinking to myself, Okay, what game should
I do? So I had to look back and think, okay,
sword quests Airworld never came out.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Ken reached out to Todd, the real Todd for advice.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Hey told me the air World was based on the
Eaching because all of the short quest games were based
on something. Earthworld was on the zodiac, Fireworld was the
Tree of Life, and I forget what Water Word was
based on, but it was it was something similar in
those veins. So Airworld being, you know, the Philosopher's Stone
was your prize that the e Ching was chosen as
(24:39):
the basis, and the different trigrams and there's sixty four
different texagrams and then things of that.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
This was a radical undertaking. Precious little of the game
had been made, and what there was had to be
described by others. For another thing, the narrative which had
been provided I did by DC Comics was canceled right
along with the game. Ken wanted to see if that
lost comic had ever been completed.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Like if I'm going to do air World, it has
to have a comic book, because the first three did
and the story was left kind of hanging there. I
always wondered what happened to those guys. So I got
in touch with Dick Giordano over at DC Comics. He
was still working there. He was the producer at the
(25:29):
time back then of special projects, and sword Quest was
one of those projects they did for Atari because at
the time they were both owned by Warner Communications, and
The Franklin Mint was also owned by Warner at the time,
so that stories of how that connection worked, and I
asked him was the fourth part ever written? Because I
did a little research on how comic books are created,
and usually the story is scripted out first, then storyboarded,
(25:53):
and usually all the parts of the story are done
before they start even beginning on the artwork. So figured, well,
maybe it was boarded and scripted and just never came out.
No such luck, he assumed there was. It was archived
there somewhere. He couldn't remember the details at all, but
he was going to take a look and let me know.
Well ended up never getting back to me, although I
(26:14):
did also get kind oft with George Perez, who was
the artist for the sword Quest series, and pretty good
art it was, and he told us that no artwork
for air World was ever begun or drawn. He said,
the authors may have done something in platform, but it
never got to the point where our work was required.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
But if Ken could make a game, he could make
a comic too.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
It ended up happening. Someone did respond to that challenge,
Amy Tait, now now Dingman. She offered to draw the comic,
and I said, peck, yes, let's let's see what we
can do with that. So we had to flesh out
a story. So me and her we fleshed out kind
of a story where the twins arrive in Airworld, they
(26:57):
wandered around. We noticed the first three stories follow a
certain pattern. They arrive, they get separated, they talk to
Mentorum and Tara, they go onto the quest, they get reunited,
and they ultimately find the prize. Right, so we went
along the same thing, although we had to put in
though the final confrontation because Conjero and Tarrannus are joining
(27:17):
them in air World, and that's going to be a
fight to end off fights in my opinion. But what
I ended up happening in the plot for mine for
ours actually was that they would get separated in battle
and Tara would face Conjiro and Toora would face Tyrannus
in one on one combat, and that Tara would definitely
(27:40):
be overmatched against Conjero. He's a very powerful sorcerer, but
Taranna's and tor could pretty much go even. So we
had to work that in there somehow, and we thought, okay, well,
Tara can be holding her own and dodging, but she
has to come up with some magical object that would
even the odds for her and be able to defeat Conjero.
So our theory was Herminus is still involved here, and
(28:04):
he finally decides whose side he's on, and he helps
Tara by giving her this object like tossing a turn
in the midst of battle and distracts Kunjero for him
for a moment. On the other side of air World,
you have Tyrannus and tor battling it out, and it's
got to the point where Torre has Tyrannus hanging off
a cliff where he's going to fall to his doom.
(28:26):
But even Tor is not going to kill Tarannus, so
he offers to help him up. But of course, what
does Tyranna's do. He grabs his hand, tries to pull
Tor over as well. And that's what we had there,
which I thought was a pretty good story, and that's
probably where it stood at that point. We had a
basic outline of what we wanted to do, and when
we see if we can actually get it done.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
In a sense, the sword Quest saga was Ken's to finish,
not in any official way, mind you. Unlike the eBay seller,
Ken wasn't pulling any kind of fast one on the community.
A World was transparently a fan effort, something to satisfy
those who wanted a complete set of sword Quest games,
(29:07):
but it would still come in a box, in a
cartridge and with a comic. All Ken had to do
was find the right programmer, one ideally suited to an
Atari Homebrew.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
And more help arrived in the form of Ryan Campbell,
who was a programmer who basically took the skeleton that
I had written and added more stuff to it and
actually got it where we had rooms and objects and
a character that could run between the rooms. We actually
had it a basis skeleton of a program there, and
(29:39):
it was coming along.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
The community reaction was positive. Air World seemed like it
would be moving forward. Then in two thousand and two,
Ken encountered his first hiccup.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
But then Ryan disappeared. He ghosted me, yes is the
term you'd use now? And I don't know what happened
to him, and I knew it and complete without them.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
This was a bumpier road than Ken had anticipated, and
there was an even bigger issue at play. Fan fiction
can run into copyright issues with the original manufacturer. Some
treat it as a part of fandom. Lucasfilm, for example,
has long champions Star Wars fan films, while Paramount tends
to be very strict about Star Trek fan films. Though
(30:24):
it had changed hands several times over the years, Atari
was still the rightful owner of sword Quest, and Ken
began to get a sense that they may not be
totally on board with his homebrew project.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
I rightly don't blame him, because if you don't protect
your property, you're going to lose it. I mean, you
have to protected. Now. Our product was not on sale yet.
That's probably why I didn't get anything directly. There are
some friends of mine who are producing homebrews of Atari copyrights,
and they were getting seasoned desist letters, season desist, copyright infrigement,
(30:58):
trademark dissolution, whole bunch of nasty evil stuff. So at
that point, like, well, we're kind of struggling now anyway,
why not just shut it down for a while, And
that's what we did.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
So in two thousand and two, Ken announced there wouldn't
be an air World. That was, if we're keeping count,
the third time the game has been declared missing. But
for Ken, the project had the same effect as his collecting.
It was something that had helped him come to terms
with his mother's illness. She had gotten ill in nineteen
(31:33):
ninety six. The air World saga Good and Bad came
in the wake of what happened.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Next to take your mind off the inevitability of what
was going to occur. As would turn out, she would
only live for an her two years. She passed away
in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Ken's Airworld failed to take flight. But did it matter
The work itself, even the work of debunking the fake game,
had occupied his mind, and it helped. You're likely wondering
why wouldn't Todd Fry simply finish the game. It's complicated.
For one thing, it's not really commercially viable to make
(32:12):
a game for an extinct gaming console. For another, it
can't be hard to go back and replicate how those
games were made. It's not unlike going back to the moon.
It's not that NASA forgot how. It's just hard to
retrace your steps.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
You know, it's hard. Look, the fact of the matter
is that Airworld is my brain child. A sword Quest
is my brain child. Only I can do air World.
You can do a bunch of things that are eaching
informed Atari to twenty six hundred adventure games, but it
won't be air World unless I do it. You can
(32:50):
call it whatever you want, and Atari gets to call
it as a trademark owner gets to call it whatever
the heck they want. I've thought about making an air
World cartridge, but boy, it is way too much work.
I've gone back and done Simtari twenty six hundred coding.
It is so hard. I forgot how hard it was.
I mean, you can say, oh, yeah, that was really hard,
(33:12):
but I remember the fun parts. I don't remember the intense,
amazing tedium. There is a reason that we smoked pot.
It was hours and hours and hours of incredibly hard work,
incredibly tedious, detailed, unforgiving, relentlessly difficult, mind numbing work. It's like,
(33:37):
oh my god, And that sounds I'm grinning when I
say this, because that sounds like a good time, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Like most everyone familiar with the sword Quest saga, ken
Vin Murzbergen has a theory on where the prizes may
have ended up. In fact, as an Atari historian himself,
he's looked into it. Like some collectors. He believed the
Franklin mint which made the prizes, took them back and
melted them down. We mentioned this in the last.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Episode, probably gone yeah, from the research we had done.
I just don't believe they exist. Please prove me wrong
out there, but I don't think they exist.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
There's a kind of trinity of theories that have endured
over the years. One is that the prizes were returned
to the Franklin Mint, then melted down for their material value.
That's what Ken thinks. Another is that someone at Atari
walked out with the prizes during its transfer of ownership
in nineteen eighty four. The third and most pervasive theory
(34:37):
is that they never disappeared at all. They were just relocated.
In twenty sixteen, a number of former Atari employees came
together for a tech convention. They fielded all of the
usual questions. Then a kid stepped up to the microphone
and got real. He asked them if they knew what
(34:58):
had happened to the sword question surprizes. Former Atari employees
got this question a lot, and the panel gave the
usual answers. Could have been an employee, could have been
an inventory oversight. But then, as one member of the
panel was talking, someone in the audience spoke up and
offered a name. Tremmel, a name that comes up over
(35:23):
and over in sword quest lore. A man who loomed
almost as large in gaming history as Mario, someone who
scared some people and who even considered buying Apple. It's
time to meet the man who conquered Atari, and who
may have held the sort of ultimate sorcery up in
victory after he canceled the contest.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Oh, it's impossible, it has to be a lie.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Ha ha.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Foolish children, your search for the sword has led you
to me. I am the king, and the king he
must have his crowd. Tod decarve you both up like
a holiday.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Ham a, that's next time on sword Quest.
Speaker 5 (36:17):
The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart
Podcasts and School of Humans. This episode was written by
Jake Rosson and hosted by Jamie Loftus producers are Miranda
Hawkins and Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, L. C. Crowley,
Brandon Barr, and Jason English. Our show editor is Mary Doo.
Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by
(36:41):
Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson. Original score by Jesse Niswanger.
This episode was sound designed by Jonathan Washington, with additional
editing by Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Miranda Hawkins.
Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Voices in this episode are
provided by Josh Fisher, Hayley Ellman, and Graham Parkard.
In two thousand and two. Ken van Muzbergen is, like
many Atari fans, on the lookout for vintage Atari items,
and by this point pretty much anything Atari is considered vintage.
The heyday of the classic twenty six hundred console has
come and gone. The video game scene is dominated by
Nintendo Sony and the upstart Microsoft. Atari is the retro choice,
(00:29):
an echo of childhood. It's fun to pick up old
games on eBay and usually pretty cheap, but not always cheap.
Ken is on eBay and he sees a listing that
stops him in his tracks. The one thing, it's the price.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I think it was an excess of eight to ten
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
For another, it's the game.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
And then all of a sudden, this prototype in quotes
my air quotes shows up on eBay, so request air
World like no, can't be.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Like many Atari collectors, he's well aware of sword Quest,
the contest that promised players a pile of gold treasure
for winning one of four games, Earth World, fire World,
water World, and the mythical final game air World.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Tara It's our final challenge, a world made of air,
Quick to the Flying Horse.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Those first three games were released, then In nineteen eighty six,
Atari's new management team canceled the contest, throwing the remaining
prizes into limbo and the fourth game, Airworld, into the
proverbial trash. It never appeared on store shelves.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
I mean, this is probably the most sought after prototype
in the history of the Atari twenty one hundred. I
mean Airworld, the fourth part to the sword Quest series,
the never released Airworld.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
But here it is, i'm eBay of all places, an
original air World cartridge, never before seen, long thought to
be vaporware, never even finished on a programming level. If
it existed at all, it could have only been as
a single copy kept within the walls of Atari alone.
Prototype Ken is so captivated by the game that it
(02:23):
takes him a minute to register the price thousands and
still going.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
But then, you know, the bids start to get astronomically high.
I'm like, I got no chance of getting this. Hopefully
it goes to someone I know.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
But then there's trouble. Even with the bidding increasing, the
auction is suddenly terminated and.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Then it ends just as abruptly, like, Okay, this is
kind of fishy here.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Air World is a part of the Lost sword Quest treasures.
Like the prizes themselves, it appears to keep slipping through
the hands of collectors.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
So what is this? I was curious to found just
what it was. Was it something that escaped the lab? Oh? No,
it was a lot of weird stuff went on Atari
at the end. There were so many things going on.
No one knew what was going on.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
But where had it come from? Who was selling it?
And if Airworld had finally surfaced, was it possible the
one hundred thousand dollars in missing prizes wouldn't be far behind?
For iHeartRadio, this is the legend of sword Quest. I'm
your host, Jamie Loftus and this is episode six Plunder.
(03:38):
Sixteen years before Airworld popped up on eBay like a
missing kid on a milk carton, Atari had done away
with sword Quest. The prizes vanished. They were all made
by the Franklin Mint, the collectibles company that specialized in
limited edition art, and some believed they were returned to
the Mint, only to be destroyed or sold to someone
(03:59):
at the yard sale. See the last episode for details.
A lot of collectors in pop culture historians care about
the fate of those prizes, but some Atari collectors are
Kart people. They scoured the internet for classic cartridges, preferably
still in the original box and with the owner's manual.
The rarer the better. The original Mario Brothers game, which
(04:23):
came out for the Atari twenty six hundred before Nintendo
launched in America. That might go for a grand in
good condition. Joust Asteroids a few hundred bucks plus shipping
Moon Patrol without a box, Well, that one we can
let go for under twenty dollars no refunds. For Ken,
a software developer based in San Diego, getting back into
(04:45):
Atari after experiencing it as a kid wasn't just about
watching games pile up. It was a kind of therapy.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
The whole story about me getting back into Atari is
an interesting story in its own, but it was when
my mom was diagon gnosed with als lugeeric disease in
nineteen ninety six. The social worker. That's a pretty devastating
thing the news to get to that at that time
in your life. Really, you know, the person that's been
there for you, has been your strength for you, is
now at some point not going to be there anymore,
(05:16):
And the best thing to do is to not think
about that. Of course, that's easier said than done. But
find a hobby, find something that brought you joy in
your life at one point, and maybe revisit it. So
I sort of like, I really loved that Attori twice
two hundred. So I dug it out of storage, found
all my games again, found all my stuff again, and
(05:37):
started collecting. I picked up Atari computers. I started picking
up all their consoles I didn't own before, like the television,
the Clco vision, got the AIO hundred Exil for the
first time, so I started getting all that stuff again
and getting back into that, which really helped.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Ken played sword Quest as a kid. It was an
exercise in keeping one's expectations in check.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
We just couldn't figure out what was going on. For
the most part. I was mainly in it for the
story in the comics and pretty much playing the games
for the games. I actually had more fun reading the
comic books than I did playing the games. Quite honestly,
the comics really helped. I mean I read the comic
and then I wanted the other games for the comic.
Quite honestly. I mean, we still played the games, but
(06:18):
I want to know where the story went. We got
all those games because the comics were in them.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Ken played Earthworld, Fireworld, water World, and then watched the
video game industry burn to the ground before anyone could
get Airworld. For over a decade, it was understood that
Airworld was never finished. The game was intended to be
a first person adventure, with Tor, one of the two
heroes of the story, riding astride a flying horse as
(06:49):
one does. It was supposed to be based on the
I Chain, just as all the sword Quest games were
inspired by different philosophies. It would be the grand finale
to the series, with players finally finding out the fate
of siblings Tour and Tara in their fight against King Tyrannus.
But since DC never created a comic, you'll have to
(07:10):
use your imagination.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
You're a jerk, King Terrannist. I hope you get bought
out by a capitalist who forgets you eat.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Exist up yours, Tour. It's a free market. Atari Sports
Quarter revenue forecast. We're a disaster. They sealed their own bait.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Go play in traffic Tyrannus.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Although Airworld was never released, that doesn't mean that no
one worked on it. Pod Fry, the creator of sword Quest,
started programming it before everything went south. Here's Todd.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
I started working on Airworld before water World was done.
So the story there is that I finished Fireworld and
put it in the pipeline, and I started working on
air World, and I had some concept animation and some
concept art, and I had this thing, some pretty interesting
(08:09):
stuff to me, and I got asked to do Zivius.
I got pulled off air World. Zevius was a popular
coin up game at the time, maybe and management wanted
it done. Other programmers threw up their hands in despair,
and they asked me to give it a shot, and
I went ahead and did it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
By the time he got back to Airworld, there was
no more sword Quest. The final game was only partially assembled.
That should have been case closed, except well, except Todd
Fry left Atari in nineteen eighty four. It's possible that
Todd began working on Airworld, sure, and he didn't finish it,
(08:51):
but that doesn't mean someone else at Atari didn't complete
the game. So it could be released without being associated
with the contest. They wouldn't even have to call it
air World. There was precedent for games being abandoned and
then rediscovered in the nineteen nineties, someone went to a
flea market and picked up a bizarre Atari cartridge that
(09:11):
was unlabeled. When they plugged it into their vintage Atari console,
they saw a game that was never known to exist,
aqua Venture. The game, which was about an underwater explorer
searching for lost treasure, had never been released by Atari.
(09:33):
Somehow the prototype had found its way out of the
offices and at a yard sale. So who's to say
this eBay listing for Airworld couldn't be a similar situation.
Maybe this was an incomplete version set aside when Todd left,
or a complete version finished by someone else. So Ken
van Mersbergen clicked on the eBay username of the seller
(09:54):
offering Airworld and dashed off a message he wanted more
details where the game him come from, But he can
get a copy for archival purposes. Can wait it. And
then he got to notice a new message.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
But he was always there's always an excuse as to
why he couldn't send me the carters to dump for him.
He didn't trust FedEx, hedn't trust ups, doesn't trust anybody.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
The seller didn't want to send Ken the game so
he could dump it. That's a slang term for making
a copy of a game from a rom chip as
a kind of backup, and well, you can see his point.
He had something valuable, why make a copy of it.
Atari collectors were beginning to buzz about the listing for gamers,
this was a grail. And then the seller introduced himself
(10:44):
to the Atari community. He posted on Atari Age, a
forum for Atari devotees. He explained how he had taken
possession of air World.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I think a story was he bought it from an
Exittari employee, then later it was his who got it
from the Exitari employer. He got it from his brother
and it probably morphed again.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
After that, the seller fielded a lot of questions. Sometimes
the game crashes, he said, when picking up an object
or entering your room. It was glitchy, but that was
all to be expected for an old prototype. Even Todd
Fry posted to say it was possible the seller had
gotten hold of an incomplete version that had somehow escaped
(11:25):
Atari's offices. The seller also had, as the kids would say,
though was seen.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
And then because everybody's asking, well, can you post some screenshots?
Can you post some video? Can we see something?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
One troubling thing was that the screenshots looked extremely clear clean.
This was a console that was twenty years old by
this point, so how had the seller gotten such sharp images?
Speaker 2 (11:52):
When they started examining the screenshots, he said they were
taken off a video capture card, which you said, is
this sophisticated one? But the AHTI all and wonder ve.
The VE stands for Value Edition. It's a consumer level
video card, and he says he's achieving these crystal clear
screenshots from an RF modulator from a twenty six hundred,
(12:13):
which wasn't known. They have the best video anyway. It's
a non modern system, he says, And it happens to
be the same resolution as the screenshots from the Stella emulator. Coincidence,
I think not.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Let's translate Kenn here. Basically, the game looked like it
was coming from an emulator, which runs old games on
modern equipment as opposed to old games on old systems.
Imagine someone telling you they found an old VHS tape
and then showing you a screenshot that looked like it
came from a Blu ray. It didn't add up. Some
(12:48):
collectors began doing a detailed analysis of the screenshots, treating
it like this appruder film this pixel looks like it
might be from an earlier sword Quest game. That pixel
could wouldn't have been generated on Atari technology of the era.
It became a matter of forensics. The character in the
game had a pink head, red shirt and black pants.
(13:10):
One single tiny pixel meant to represent his hand was green.
Green was a background for the original Earth World game.
It was as though someone had simply cut and pasted
the graphic from an existing sword Quest title. And another
bit of incriminating information, the horse on the title screen
looked a lot like a horse from another game.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The horse and rider is from the Lord of the
ringsportotype developed by Parker Brothers. And he said, oh, back then,
forms artis used to reduce gravies all the time. Yeah,
but these are two different companies, Atari and Parker Brothers,
and they did not have that kind of working relationship.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
The air World story was getting stranger, but there was
one element of the Seller story that rang true. The
idea that something of value could get lost at a
Tari was no fiction. When the video game industry collapsed,
Atari went up for sale, and like a lot of transactions,
it was messy, chaotic, and some things or prizes may
(14:12):
have gone flying under the radar or in this case,
under someone's jacket. It's reasonable to imagine Atari would take
precautions over the sword quest prizes, like a bank watching
over valuables at a safety deposit box. And at the
(14:34):
contests they did, normally a security guard was standing over them.
But that doesn't account for the absolute chaos that was
Atari changing ownership. In summer nineteen eighty four, Warner Communications
sold Atari to Jack Tremmel, a computer hardware mastermind who
had made the Commodore sixty four one of the best
(14:55):
selling personal computers in history. That's true, even to Warner
held a kind of fire sale, selling Jack Atari's consumer
division and handing over the company's property, filing cabinets, chairs, desks,
even entire buildings. It all happened very quickly, but the
(15:19):
new leaner Atari didn't need so much stuff. Buildings had
to go, space had to be consolidated, and so did employees.
It was possibly the darkest chapter in Atari's long history.
In Hallway after Hallway, where star programmers like Todd Fry
once ran up and down and smoked incredible amounts of weed,
(15:42):
there was just silence in side offices. People had left
so abruptly that they had left monitors on gone in
mid assignment. It was like the rapture had hit Atari,
with most people disappearing completely out of sight. Here's an
example of the confusion. The lack of inventory keeping was
so profound that it wasn't until months later that one
(16:06):
Atari employee discovered Atari owned a large warehouse full of BMW's.
These were very expensive cars that were leased for upper management.
They were told to drop off the cars, which were
packed in so tightly that some workers had to crawl
out of the warehouse window to get out. An entire
(16:30):
fleet of company vehicles were left to collect dust, virtually forgotten.
If that could happen to cars, what could happen to
some contest prizes. Here's another thing about Atari. At this time,
there was a lot of employee turnover. Marketing. Employees with
knowledge of the contest were out the door. Atari's new
(16:51):
management knew about sword Quest, they had to address it,
but they may not have known about the prizes until
they went missing. Along the hallways of a Atari were
stacks of computers, printers, keyboards, files, and plenty of employees
just wandering through, some of whom seized an opportunity to
grab some work from home supplies despite their employment status.
(17:14):
It wasn't as though Atari fired everyone. It's just that
most employees weren't part of the sale and weren't being retained. Actually,
let's just be blunt. There was employee left during the transition,
mostly office equipment. This chaos went on for days, for
over a week, stuff being wheeled out, people being ushered out,
(17:35):
papers being shredded. No one aware that BMW's were just
sitting around, and possibly no one noticing that a bundle
of very expensive prizes were in the hands of a
disgruntled employee, one who was being unceremoniously dumped in an
effort to trim down costs. It could have gone under
(17:55):
someone's coat or in a filing cabinet. Here's Todd Fry.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
I don't know how much the prize that exists and
known as so I wouldn't be surprised if a couple
of them disappeared in inventory shrinkage. And I'm saying I
wouldn't be surprised if someone melted them down and you know.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
Bought drugs.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
It's like down payment of a house back then. Actually,
it's alcurely really shocking. You could like buy a car,
put yourself through college. It's been done. I wouldn't be
surprised if a couple of them just straight up disappeared
to conversion. I would be relatively surprised if someone had
them and was hiding them.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
The Great Atari Exodus of nineteen eighty four could have
seen the remnants of sword Quest disappear forever in someone's trunk,
in a safe that was wheeled out on a dolly,
in a warehouse that no one even knew existed. Isn't
that how most of history is lost, not by purposeful neglect,
but by the passage of time and the changing of
(18:57):
the guard. No one was responsible for guarding those treasures,
and it's possible someone simply plundered them.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
What a strange thing to have is part of my history.
I don't think about this that often, but I made
that sword come into existence through an act of manifestation.
I thought grail Quest sort of sorcery Franklin meant, and poof,
(19:27):
there was sixty thousand dollars precious metals and stones, and
it is out there somewhere. It may have been disassembled
for cash, but somewhere out there is this product of
my imagination weird.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
At least the other product of Todd's imagination, air World
had been found, hadn't it? Ken was frustrated. He decided
to take another look at the message Todd fry had
posted in support of this mythical air World find. This time,
(20:08):
he looked more closely at the return email. It was
your standard letter number combo. When he searched for it,
he found it was mentioned in another post, this time
along with the email used by the ebayseller Jeremy.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
When I first saw the posting was signed you know
a Fry, thought, did he actually say this? It's really
tough to know. And then I did some more digging
and I found the email address that posted that. That
email was linked to Jeremy's other account. Didn't take too
much digging to find that, And then I posted that saying, Okay,
(20:45):
he's faked the email, which just so happens to describe
this prototype he has, so it gets deeper and everyone's
coming out of the woodwork on it. We got Todd
Frye even looked at the photograph and said, no, that's
not our world.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The seller was being confronted virtually anyway, with overwhelming evidence
he had faked the whole thing, the game, the email
from Todd Fry, the screenshot. He acted surprised, He apologized
and vowed to find out what might have happened. He
asked that Angry Collectors didn't use any more foul language.
(21:25):
He didn't, of course take any responsibility. He had been
a victim too.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
He never admits that it's fake. He's he's thinking if
it's a fake, that he's a victim too, because he
bought it from somebody that they obviously faked it, but
he would never let any of us examine it. And
the photo of the character was always crainy. I mean,
everybody was thanking me for outing him for faking that email.
That was just like the final straw. And then he
(21:51):
also he made a second account on atari age to
be a friend of him, who is the engineer who
set up the graphics workstation that took the pictures. And
then Albert, who was the moderator of atari Age, found
out that both those accounts originated from the same IP
address in the same physical location. He was trying either
to raise the value of his bs or something. He
(22:14):
disappeared around two thousand and four and we haven't heard
from him since.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Even now, Ken isn't sure what the seller's endgame was.
Has he programmed the game so anyone buying it would
be fooled into thinking it was air World? Would he
simply insist it must have gotten even.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Glitchier make some money at someone else's expense. And at
the time, eBay did not have the protections they have now.
If you pretty much can't get scanned on eBay now,
But back then, once the buyer paid his money and
the seller showed a tracking number or a shipment, eBay
was off the hook.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
When Airworld was revealed as a fraud, it was a
total bummer for the Atari collecting community. Here was hope
something lost had been preserved and recovered. Only the it
was an impostor if you're a completist, someone who wanted
to see the series finished, then it was almost maddening.
(23:09):
But think about movies or books for a second. Sometimes
authors or filmmakers leave behind unfinished works. Sometimes creators don't
get a chance to have their full vision realized. Orson
Wells didn't have the money to finish his Opus The
Other Side of the Wind, but another director, Peter Bogdanovitch,
helped complete it. Decades later, Frank Herbert couldn't keep writing
(23:33):
Dune books because Well he died, so his son Brian
took up the mantle. In video games, some players become
programmers and their hobby becomes more participatory. So, following the
Great air World scandal, Ken van Muzbergen decided to become
the Bogdanovich to Todd fryes orson Wells, he decided he
(23:56):
would complete air World. He had been planning on a
home brew or homemade game for a while.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Then I was thinking to myself, Okay, what game should
I do? So I had to look back and think, okay,
sword quests Airworld never came out.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Ken reached out to Todd, the real Todd for advice.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Hey told me the air World was based on the
Eaching because all of the short quest games were based
on something. Earthworld was on the zodiac, Fireworld was the
Tree of Life, and I forget what Water Word was
based on, but it was it was something similar in
those veins. So Airworld being, you know, the Philosopher's Stone
was your prize that the e Ching was chosen as
(24:39):
the basis, and the different trigrams and there's sixty four
different texagrams and then things of that.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
This was a radical undertaking. Precious little of the game
had been made, and what there was had to be
described by others. For another thing, the narrative which had
been provided I did by DC Comics was canceled right
along with the game. Ken wanted to see if that
lost comic had ever been completed.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Like if I'm going to do air World, it has
to have a comic book, because the first three did
and the story was left kind of hanging there. I
always wondered what happened to those guys. So I got
in touch with Dick Giordano over at DC Comics. He
was still working there. He was the producer at the
(25:29):
time back then of special projects, and sword Quest was
one of those projects they did for Atari because at
the time they were both owned by Warner Communications, and
The Franklin Mint was also owned by Warner at the time,
so that stories of how that connection worked, and I
asked him was the fourth part ever written? Because I
did a little research on how comic books are created,
and usually the story is scripted out first, then storyboarded,
(25:53):
and usually all the parts of the story are done
before they start even beginning on the artwork. So figured, well,
maybe it was boarded and scripted and just never came out.
No such luck, he assumed there was. It was archived
there somewhere. He couldn't remember the details at all, but
he was going to take a look and let me know.
Well ended up never getting back to me, although I
(26:14):
did also get kind oft with George Perez, who was
the artist for the sword Quest series, and pretty good
art it was, and he told us that no artwork
for air World was ever begun or drawn. He said,
the authors may have done something in platform, but it
never got to the point where our work was required.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
But if Ken could make a game, he could make
a comic too.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
It ended up happening. Someone did respond to that challenge,
Amy Tait, now now Dingman. She offered to draw the comic,
and I said, peck, yes, let's let's see what we
can do with that. So we had to flesh out
a story. So me and her we fleshed out kind
of a story where the twins arrive in Airworld, they
(26:57):
wandered around. We noticed the first three stories follow a
certain pattern. They arrive, they get separated, they talk to
Mentorum and Tara, they go onto the quest, they get reunited,
and they ultimately find the prize. Right, so we went
along the same thing, although we had to put in
though the final confrontation because Conjero and Tarrannus are joining
(27:17):
them in air World, and that's going to be a
fight to end off fights in my opinion. But what
I ended up happening in the plot for mine for
ours actually was that they would get separated in battle
and Tara would face Conjiro and Toora would face Tyrannus
in one on one combat, and that Tara would definitely
(27:40):
be overmatched against Conjero. He's a very powerful sorcerer, but
Taranna's and tor could pretty much go even. So we
had to work that in there somehow, and we thought, okay, well,
Tara can be holding her own and dodging, but she
has to come up with some magical object that would
even the odds for her and be able to defeat Conjero.
So our theory was Herminus is still involved here, and
(28:04):
he finally decides whose side he's on, and he helps
Tara by giving her this object like tossing a turn
in the midst of battle and distracts Kunjero for him
for a moment. On the other side of air World,
you have Tyrannus and tor battling it out, and it's
got to the point where Torre has Tyrannus hanging off
a cliff where he's going to fall to his doom.
(28:26):
But even Tor is not going to kill Tarannus, so
he offers to help him up. But of course, what
does Tyranna's do. He grabs his hand, tries to pull
Tor over as well. And that's what we had there,
which I thought was a pretty good story, and that's
probably where it stood at that point. We had a
basic outline of what we wanted to do, and when
we see if we can actually get it done.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
In a sense, the sword Quest saga was Ken's to finish,
not in any official way, mind you. Unlike the eBay seller,
Ken wasn't pulling any kind of fast one on the community.
A World was transparently a fan effort, something to satisfy
those who wanted a complete set of sword Quest games,
(29:07):
but it would still come in a box, in a
cartridge and with a comic. All Ken had to do
was find the right programmer, one ideally suited to an
Atari Homebrew.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
And more help arrived in the form of Ryan Campbell,
who was a programmer who basically took the skeleton that
I had written and added more stuff to it and
actually got it where we had rooms and objects and
a character that could run between the rooms. We actually
had it a basis skeleton of a program there, and
(29:39):
it was coming along.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
The community reaction was positive. Air World seemed like it
would be moving forward. Then in two thousand and two,
Ken encountered his first hiccup.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
But then Ryan disappeared. He ghosted me, yes is the
term you'd use now? And I don't know what happened
to him, and I knew it and complete without them.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
This was a bumpier road than Ken had anticipated, and
there was an even bigger issue at play. Fan fiction
can run into copyright issues with the original manufacturer. Some
treat it as a part of fandom. Lucasfilm, for example,
has long champions Star Wars fan films, while Paramount tends
to be very strict about Star Trek fan films. Though
(30:24):
it had changed hands several times over the years, Atari
was still the rightful owner of sword Quest, and Ken
began to get a sense that they may not be
totally on board with his homebrew project.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
I rightly don't blame him, because if you don't protect
your property, you're going to lose it. I mean, you
have to protected. Now. Our product was not on sale yet.
That's probably why I didn't get anything directly. There are
some friends of mine who are producing homebrews of Atari copyrights,
and they were getting seasoned desist letters, season desist, copyright infrigement,
(30:58):
trademark dissolution, whole bunch of nasty evil stuff. So at
that point, like, well, we're kind of struggling now anyway,
why not just shut it down for a while, And
that's what we did.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
So in two thousand and two, Ken announced there wouldn't
be an air World. That was, if we're keeping count,
the third time the game has been declared missing. But
for Ken, the project had the same effect as his collecting.
It was something that had helped him come to terms
with his mother's illness. She had gotten ill in nineteen
(31:33):
ninety six. The air World saga Good and Bad came
in the wake of what happened.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Next to take your mind off the inevitability of what
was going to occur. As would turn out, she would
only live for an her two years. She passed away
in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Ken's Airworld failed to take flight. But did it matter
The work itself, even the work of debunking the fake game,
had occupied his mind, and it helped. You're likely wondering
why wouldn't Todd Fry simply finish the game. It's complicated.
For one thing, it's not really commercially viable to make
(32:12):
a game for an extinct gaming console. For another, it
can't be hard to go back and replicate how those
games were made. It's not unlike going back to the moon.
It's not that NASA forgot how. It's just hard to
retrace your steps.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
You know, it's hard. Look, the fact of the matter
is that Airworld is my brain child. A sword Quest
is my brain child. Only I can do air World.
You can do a bunch of things that are eaching
informed Atari to twenty six hundred adventure games, but it
won't be air World unless I do it. You can
(32:50):
call it whatever you want, and Atari gets to call
it as a trademark owner gets to call it whatever
the heck they want. I've thought about making an air
World cartridge, but boy, it is way too much work.
I've gone back and done Simtari twenty six hundred coding.
It is so hard. I forgot how hard it was.
I mean, you can say, oh, yeah, that was really hard,
(33:12):
but I remember the fun parts. I don't remember the intense,
amazing tedium. There is a reason that we smoked pot.
It was hours and hours and hours of incredibly hard work,
incredibly tedious, detailed, unforgiving, relentlessly difficult, mind numbing work. It's like,
(33:37):
oh my god, And that sounds I'm grinning when I
say this, because that sounds like a good time, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Like most everyone familiar with the sword Quest saga, ken
Vin Murzbergen has a theory on where the prizes may
have ended up. In fact, as an Atari historian himself,
he's looked into it. Like some collectors. He believed the
Franklin mint which made the prizes, took them back and
melted them down. We mentioned this in the last.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Episode, probably gone yeah, from the research we had done.
I just don't believe they exist. Please prove me wrong
out there, but I don't think they exist.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
There's a kind of trinity of theories that have endured
over the years. One is that the prizes were returned
to the Franklin Mint, then melted down for their material value.
That's what Ken thinks. Another is that someone at Atari
walked out with the prizes during its transfer of ownership
in nineteen eighty four. The third and most pervasive theory
(34:37):
is that they never disappeared at all. They were just relocated.
In twenty sixteen, a number of former Atari employees came
together for a tech convention. They fielded all of the
usual questions. Then a kid stepped up to the microphone
and got real. He asked them if they knew what
(34:58):
had happened to the sword question surprizes. Former Atari employees
got this question a lot, and the panel gave the
usual answers. Could have been an employee, could have been
an inventory oversight. But then, as one member of the
panel was talking, someone in the audience spoke up and
offered a name. Tremmel, a name that comes up over
(35:23):
and over in sword quest lore. A man who loomed
almost as large in gaming history as Mario, someone who
scared some people and who even considered buying Apple. It's
time to meet the man who conquered Atari, and who
may have held the sort of ultimate sorcery up in
victory after he canceled the contest.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
Oh, it's impossible, it has to be a lie.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Ha ha.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Foolish children, your search for the sword has led you
to me. I am the king, and the king he
must have his crowd. Tod decarve you both up like
a holiday.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Ham a, that's next time on sword Quest.
Speaker 5 (36:17):
The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart
Podcasts and School of Humans. This episode was written by
Jake Rosson and hosted by Jamie Loftus producers are Miranda
Hawkins and Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, L. C. Crowley,
Brandon Barr, and Jason English. Our show editor is Mary Doo.
Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by
(36:41):
Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson. Original score by Jesse Niswanger.
This episode was sound designed by Jonathan Washington, with additional
editing by Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Miranda Hawkins.
Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Voices in this episode are
provided by Josh Fisher, Hayley Ellman, and Graham Parkard.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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