Lucasfilm, Fractals and Videogames: Rescue on Fractalus

With all the interest in Vol Libre, I thought it would be interesting to show some of the connections going on behind the scenes that I discuss in the book. For instance, in 1982 the Lucasfilm computer guys were moving around the Lucasfilm "complex" trying to make room for some new guys that were hired to start to develop videogames after a deal was struck between Lucasfilm and Atari. David Fox, one of the three initial developers on games, found himself sharing an office with Loren Carpenter, who was still exploring the fractal algorithms he had pioneered. In their first day in the office, Fox and Carpenter wondered if there was a way to combine their interests. From DROIDMAKER, Ch 18 "A Hole in the Desert":

"David Fox grabbed Peter Langston and they wrestled up a spare Atari 800 computer and a couple of ring-bound volumes on programming the 6502 chip. Loren Carpenter went home again. Three days later he came into the office beaming.
"I want to show you something," he said to Fox, who pulled his chair over to Loren's computer. He had done it. He had recreated, in primitive form, the fractal generation of mountains, just as he had done in Vol Libre, just as he did as an element in the Genesis Effect, but in real time."

He was generating shapes and handling the hidden surfaces in real time on the tiny tiny CPU in an Atari videogame console.

"Do you think we have a game?" asked Fox.
"Absolutely," Langston replied.

Their experiments worked and Fox went on to design a game around the idea*, one of the first two games from the new Games Division at Lucasfilm (a team that would eventually become Lucasarts Entertainment): presenting Rescue on Fractalus (watch and compare it to Vol Libre):



* Carpenter and Fox were eventually separated at least in part because they continued to enjoy distracting each other (chuckle) and mostly because their office space in E Building was ready...While Fox was developing Fractalus, Loren Carpenter was inventing and refining his rendering software, a tool that eventually became Pixar's "Renderman."

For more on Fractalus, check out David Fox's website, Electric Eggplant.