Games by Apollo

~ the obituary ~

Games by Apollo was a side business of a company that made educational films. Pat Roper was president of National Career Consultants in Richardson, Texas, knew nothing whatever about the games industry, and worked out that there was money in it while playing NFL Football on an Intellivision in 1980. He chose the name Apollo because it read as a symbol of youth and activity. Rather than hire designers away from Atari or Mattel the way other new publishers did, he took out an advertisement for programmers in the Dallas Morning News and the San Francisco Chronicle.

A friend mailed a copy of that ad to a young programmer in Iowa named Ed Salvo, who had written a skeet shooting game for the Atari 2600 in about four weeks. Roper flew him to Dallas and offered him the lead developer job; Salvo thought it too risky and went home. Roper then offered $5,000 for the game by itself, which Salvo took, along with a contract for a second one. Skeet Shoot was the first cartridge Apollo shipped and ten more followed, among them Spacechase, Space Cavern, Lost Luggage, Racquetball, Wabbit and Guardian. Writing in the spring of 1983, Creative Computing put Apollo second only to Activision among the 2600's independent publishers.

The end has a date on it because a trade magazine wrote it down. Billboard of 4 December 1982 ran an item headed "Vid Game Firm Apollo Files Chapter XI", reporting a bankruptcy filing three weeks earlier, on 12 November. The company was thirteen months old. It owed its advertising agency, Benton & Bowles, $2.5 million, which the magazine said was "only half of the year-old firm's total debts". Wikipedia files the company's death under 1983, along with everything else the crash took, and gives no source for the year; the November 1982 filing is the only dated event anybody can point at.

~ the case file ~

~ five thousand dollars for skeet shoot ~

What Salvo got paid tells you what the business looked like in 1981. One programmer could finish a 2600 cartridge in four weeks, and $5,000 bought the finished thing outright. Having worked that out, Roper made Salvo director of development and gave him one job to start with: hire twenty-five more programmers.

The games themselves were ordinary and occasionally better than that. Space Cavern picked up an honorable mention at the 1983 Arkie Awards. Electronic Games reviewed Lost Luggage in its November 1982 issue and found it short of "the spark of greatness" while calling it solid and playable. The marketing had better ideas than the catalog did: Apollo offered a monogrammed cartridge with the buyer's own name on the label, sold fewer than ten of them, and handed several to the press instead, one of which went to Arnie Katz at Electronic Games.

~ the shark ~

The one Apollo title anybody still chases is a mistake. Lochjaw was a shark game released in 1982, and MCA and Universal, who owned Jaws, took exception to it. Roper pulled the cartridge and reissued the same game as Shark Attack, so the few boxes carrying the original name are now among the rarest cartridges on the format. No source anywhere dates the legal threat, and the story is repeated in identical wording across every fan history without a document behind it.

~ what benton and bowles wanted ~

The agency went to court first. It obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting Apollo from disposing of its inventory in any way, because it wanted to sell that inventory itself and take the $2.5 million it was owed for ad services out of the proceeds. Apollo did not appear in court to respond. One week later it filed Chapter XI instead.

Roper told Billboard he expected the company to reorganize and come back smaller, and it never did. Larry Martin, who had just sent Guardian to manufacturing, remembered creditors turning up with court orders. Salvo, who had walked out with three others that autumn, said the stock Roper had built was sized for $27 million of sales. The warehouse was the whole story: Apollo had manufactured into a Christmas that the entire American cartridge business was about to lose.

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