California Pacific Computer Company

~ the obit ~

Alvin Earl Remmers was born in 1942 and had been selling tie-dyed shirts when he started using one of the first microcomputers to track his stock keeping units. Driving between computer stores in California in 1979, he came across a copy of Super Invader for the Apple II, worked out that nobody was distributing it properly, and founded California Pacific Computer Company in Davis to do that job. Super Invader went past twenty thousand units and was named the highest-selling Apple II program by 1980.

The decision that mattered came next. Remmers decided to promote the names of the people who wrote the software, which was not how the business worked at the time. Bill Budge, whom he met while looking for someone to copy-protect the floppy version of Super Invader, got his name on the label twice over: Bill Budge's Trilogy of Games in December 1979 and Bill Budge's Space Album in March 1980. The packaging art came from Michael Pondsmith, who would later create the Cyberpunk tabletop game, and Denis Loubet, who went on to Origin Systems. Steve Gibson wrote the copy protection on the later titles. The games shipped in sealed plastic bags rather than boxes, and the advertisements carried the label "Top of the Orchard Software".

Royalties ran as high as fifty percent, which was generous then and generous now, and that is how California Pacific held on to the people who wrote for it. Then in late 1980 Remmers called a university student in Houston about a dungeon game called Akalabeth.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the author's name on the bag ~

Akalabeth had reached Davis either through a helpful ComputerLand manager or through piracy, depending on which account you take, and Richard Garriott has said the second one. Remmers flew him out, signed him, and then suggested that the game be credited not to Garriott but to his in-game persona, Lord British. Remmers said afterward that the name was his idea. California Pacific's release came out around late October or November 1980 at thirty-five dollars, up from the twenty Garriott had been charging for the copies he sold himself at a computer store.

Remmers then ran a contest with Softalk magazine in which the magazine published cryptic clues and readers were invited to guess who Lord British was. "He and his home city are closely related to present and future blastoffs" was one of them, Garriott's father being an astronaut. Nobody who was not already an acquaintance solved it, the thing fizzled into consolation prizes in the May 1981 issue, and the next issue simply ran a profile revealing him. Ultima followed in April 1981 and sold twenty thousand copies in its first year.

~ thirty thousand copies, or twenty ~

The Akalabeth sales figure has never settled. Garriott has long said thirty thousand copies and at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to him. Jimmy Maher's accounting pulls against it: Akalabeth made only two appearances in Softalk's top thirty, at twenty-three in January 1981 and twenty-six in April, and it went off shelves for good in 1982, while Computer Gaming World's mid-1982 survey has California Pacific claiming Ultima as its biggest seller at twenty thousand. Collectors ask a plainer version of the question, which is where the thirty thousand disks went, because the California Pacific Akalabeth is one of the rarest Apple II artifacts there is. Every number here comes from a publisher survey or a store poll, so none of them are audited, and the disagreement is probably just bad record keeping in a business that kept none.

~ hollow by the end of 1981 ~

Publicizing authors without employing them turned out to weaken the publisher's hand at every renewal, and the economics of software distribution were changing underneath the company at the same time. Remmers was also fighting an addiction, which strained his relationships with the people he published, and by the end of 1981 the company was effectively hollow. A few more games came out, the last of them under a label called Progame: Brainteaser Boulevard in May 1983 and Lady Tut that July. Wikipedia's lead still says the company was active until 1986, which may be true of the paperwork. The catalog stops in 1983.

Remmers got treatment, left the industry, became a documentary filmmaker, and died in 2022.

The only part of this I have any standing in is the far end of it. Ultima Online private shards are where I spent real years, on reverse-engineered servers that were running somebody's reconstruction of code Origin shipped in 1997. The line back from those servers runs through Origin to a plastic bag in Davis, California with a student's pseudonym printed on it because a former tie-dye salesman thought the author's name would sell copies.

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