Epyx

» see epyx.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed Epyx by about a decade. The company was already in bankruptcy court when i was five and fully gone before i ever touched a machine that could run the things it made. What reached me was residue: California Games as a name that kept surfacing on later hardware, long after there was any company attached to it.

It started in 1978 in california as Automated Simulations, run by Jim Connelley and Jon Freeman. The first product was Starfleet Orion, sold in a ziploc bag. Temple of Apshai came in 1979 and moved over twenty thousand copies, which for a home computer game at that point was a serious number. Epyx was originally just the label they put on the action titles. By 1983 the action titles were the whole company, so the company took the label's name.

Summer Games in 1984 is where it turns into the studio people remember. The format was a run of short events, each one with a different control scheme, played by up to eight people passing a joystick around at one machine. Winter Games and World Games followed the same template. California Games in 1987 dropped the flags and the anthems for a skateboard and a beach, and became the one that kept selling.

There was more to it than the sports line. Impossible Mission in 1985 handed the commodore 64 one of the few genuinely unpleasant sounds it was capable of producing, along with a line of speech people still quote at each other. The Fast Load cartridge, also 1984, was a piece of hardware that made the C64 disk drive several times less painful, and it sold to people who bought no games at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the handy ~

In 1986 Dave Morse, who had been part of the team behind the Amiga, arrived at Epyx and began work on a portable console. The project was called the Handy. It had a color backlit screen and hardware sprite scaling, both well ahead of anything then shipping, and units could be linked together with a cable.

Epyx could not pay to finish it. Morse took the prototype to the winter consumer electronics show in january 1989 looking for a partner. Atari took it, bought the design outright and shipped it that same year as the Atari Lynx. Epyx got a contract to make games for the machine it had invented.

~ the postmortem ~

On paper 1988 had been the best year, thirty six million dollars of sales against twenty seven the year before, a hundred and forty five people on staff. The profit was not there. The Handy had cost too much to develop and the market it sold into was collapsing under the NES.

Layoffs through 1989 took the company under twenty people, and chapter 11 came at the end of that year. Then it refused to finish dying. It sat in bankruptcy for three more years delivering Lynx titles under the Atari contract, which is the strangest stretch of the story. The company that designed the machine spent its afterlife as a work-for-hire vendor on it.

In 1993 the eight people still there decided to sell what remained. Bridgestone Media Group, a christian media publisher, bought the assets. The trademark has moved around since and turns up on compilation releases.

~ what remains ~

The Lynx is the obvious inheritance and it is not the important one. Atari sold a few million and lost the handheld market to a Game Boy with a worse screen and much better batteries. What Epyx actually left behind was a format: short events, one machine, four people waiting their turn on the couch.

Every party game console since has been running that shape. Mario Party, Wii Sports, the whole genre of things you buy so a room full of people has something to do. Epyx worked it out on a machine with sixty four kilobytes of memory and a tape deck.

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