Feature Meet The Unsung Hero Behind The Vectrex

When researching for this academic talk on the lineage of influences in games, one potential topic had been the earliest examples of regenerating health. Hydlide (1984) is perhaps the best known, but preceding it were Crisis Mountain (1982) on the Apple II and Polar Rescue (1983) on the Vectrex; the latter two being so close they were likely conceived independently.

Given that Polar Rescue is a pioneer of early survival horror, stealth, first-person shooters, and regenerating health (we'll get into this later) it was worth investigating. This thread on the Vectrex forums meanwhile documented an Easter Egg in the code, revealing its creator to be Mark Indictor. As it turns out, Indictor is something of a Renaissance man who has spent his life on the cutting edge of technology. Admittedly, much of his talent was expressed outside of games, but even so, we feel you'll enjoy reading about his adventures.

Born 17 September 1955 (this interview actually began on his 69th birthday), Indictor's technical skill was self-taught. His first love, though, had been music, not technology, and he plays the fiddle professionally. "I have always been a fiddler since I was about six years old," he tells us. "My first 'gig' was when I was still in my single digits. I was in a bank commercial as part of a kid's orchestra. We were so good they had to de-tune our instruments to make us sound like little kids. That was humiliating. Since then, I've been in many bands, played in a number of sessions, and been on stage with Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, and a few others. <lists various bands> A lot of side-man gigs."

This passion for music would guide Indictor's early life and become a recurring theme in events. As he revealed, he never actually got a university degree. After high school, he worked at The Great American Food & Beverage Company in Santa Monica, a restaurant that employed musicians as staff (waiters, bartenders, cooks, cashiers, et al). It was so much fun he took a year off from school to do it. He did eventually attempt university though. "I attended UCLA for one quarter in 1974. I'd promised my parents I'd go to college, so I transferred my acceptance at UC Santa Cruz to UCLA, and without assistance from any college counsellors, took on a ridiculous freshman curriculum of Calculus, Physics, and Computer Science. I got an 'incomplete' in either Physics or Calculus - can't remember which - and got an 'F' in the other one. I got an 'A' in Computer Science, and then dropped out altogether with a 'C' average. <laughs>"

This was an exciting period, seeing the intersection of revolutionary developments in both technology and pop culture. The year 1977 alone would see release of the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 computers, the Atari VCS console, plus the first Star Wars film. What a time to have been alive! Before all that, though, Indictor was getting his jam on.

"In 1974, I co-founded a band called Hot Lips & Fingertips," he begins, adding, "We played at a local Irish pub called O'Mahoney's Irish Whip for over seven years, with lines around the block. During this time, a store opened in Santa Monica called The Computer Store (TCS). It was the only store of its kind in Los Angeles for quite some time. I would rehearse with Hot Lips during the day, and then, on the way to the pub, I'd drop into TCS and play around with the Commodore PET and Apple II. Then, I'd head over to the pub and play until 1:30 AM, four nights a week."

Several band members came and went, while a change in music genres eventually led to Indictor quitting the band - but he continued to occupy himself with those burgeoning computer models, and friends started to take notice.

Getting into the Industry

"I was lent a TRS-80 to play on, the Radio Shack computer, and I continued my obsessive behaviour. I programmed a Crazy-8's game using abominable software architecture. The cards in the deck were identified by text strings that contained their full name, so 'Queen of Hearts' and so on. It really didn't matter though, because it wasn't terribly processor intensive. But it worked! Later, I purchased my own Apple II computer and, much to my wife's chagrin at the time, started collecting floppy disk drives, extra RAM, and so on. I was hooked. I had a friend that knew I had an Apple II. He was working for a company at the time called Western Technologies, and they were doing some reverse-engineering of the Atari VCS system, which was powered by a 6507 processor - a 6502 with 128 bytes of RAM. He wanted to 'rent' my Apple II for researching the reverse engineering task, since Apple II had a 6502 processor. Within days, one of his employees named Richard Moszkowski, also known as 'Mouse', fried my motherboard with a hardware experiment. My friend informed me of this faux-pas and had my computer repaired. He then offered me an hourly position as a 'caretaker' of my equipment. I accepted."

This then led to Indictor becoming part of the Atari VCS reverse engineering team. "I don't remember the sequence of events, but Paul Newell and John Hall joined the team, and we had some help from a fly-by-night company that had published information on how to access the hardware registers that controlled the behaviour of the Atari VCS. The VCS system did not have a video controller, and required programmers to count the cycles required by their code, and poke various hardware registers at precisely the right time to locate pixels horizontally on a single raster scanline. The game state was stored in 128 bytes of RAM; game cartridges started at 4KB, and then 8KB. There may have been some larger cartridge sizes, but I never had that luxury."

So that fortuitous misfortune by Mouse ultimately resulted in Indictor becoming an employee of Western Technologies, thus accidentally falling into the industry and making games professionally. "Pretty much," agrees Indictor, adding, "I actually was not much of a gamer, ever. As a matter of fact, the games that I wrote, I pawned off to my family to test. I had a young son who thought Vectrex was cool, so he played a lot of the games. My wife actually did, too! <laughs> But I didn't have much patience for actually playing games. I just liked writing them."

Although part of the Atari reverse-engineering team, Indictor didn't complete any games. Despite much progress, Western Technologies stopped the Atari project and began on the Vectrex. We asked what he remembered of this - how did this take place? Why did the company abandon plans for the Atari, which was still riding high at that point? To facilitate answers, Indictor contacted his friend and colleague from the team, Paul Newell.

"I was hired in around June of 1981, and it was the two of us plus a summer intern named Steve Morris," says Newell. "Either around the time Steve left or shortly after, John Hall was hired. Western Technologies did not change direction to go to the Vectrex - Kenner killed the Atari project. I don't remember ever being given an explicit reason, but I think it was a combination of threats from Atari - the Atari lawsuit against Activision was filed in 1980 and not settled until 1982 - and Kenner getting cold feet on entering the video game world. The latter view is based on not being able to see any video games by them for any system when doing an online search. Mark's Atari game was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and it was moved over to Vectrex - I suspect Kenner got the original license but have no idea how it legally migrated to Vectrex."

Indictor adds: "I didn't actually finish any games for the Atari 2600, but Star Trek was about 50% complete when we switched our focus to the Vectrex. First of all, I think it was a concession that Activision had made so many strides in making games for the Atari VCS, that we didn't feel we had the technical knowledge yet to make really good games. Now, Paul pretty much ignored that - because he was very much involved in that maze game, which became Towering Inferno. So I think he finished working on it, kind of under the table. <laughs> But it eventually got released."

Newell offers more detail to the Atari side of things. "The original maze game algorithm by Duncan Muirhead and myself - for Duncan's sake, he should get credit - was halted by Western Technologies, though I did clone the code to create the flames in Towering Inferno. The maze game continued 'kind of under the table' until we started the Vectrex project. The original Vectrex games were introduced at Summer CES in Chicago in June 1982. After the initial release of the original Vectrex games, a lot of people quit, including John, Mark, and me. However, WT convinced me to consult to get Towering Inferno done for U.S. Games. They wanted me to figure out a game for the original maze, but I elected not to do it as I knew I was heading up to Simutrek. So, I handed WT a stripped-down version of the maze game, to be the algorithm and just the algorithm, and had WT pay to have Steve Sidley take me out for sushi and do a couple hours of 'teach him what was there'. That included an intro to 6502 and Atari hardware, as he knew nothing, and then I left it to him. This then got released as Entombed."

The Vector to Vectrex

Indictor then describes the start of the Vectrex venture: "It was just kind of, one day we walked in and they had this great idea for a new type of game console, that was vector based. John Ross designed the sample and hold circuitry, which was basically a capacitor which would store a charge that was controlled by a number between zero and 127, and that would control the intensity of the beam, and then another number in the same range to control a timer. So you could alter the line that was drawn, either by changing the beam's intensity, speeding it up or slowing it down, or making it longer. As for our late, fellow programmer Duncan, he was a brilliant mathematician and programmer. He helped both me and Paul with various algorithms. He co-created with Paul the algorithm for the maze creation in Entombed, and he co-created with me the algorithm for collision detection in Spin Ball."

At this point it's worth linking to the Vectrex FAQ 6.0 by Gregg Woodcock, which provides supplementary info based on direct emails with various people. It describes the team: "Autumn 1981, the Atari project is cancelled and the three Atari people (Mark Indictor, Paul Newell, John Hall) start work on the Vectrex project. John Ross designs the hardware, Gerry Karr works together with John Hall on the system ROM (called The Executive)."

The document also contains a direct quote from Jeff Corsiglia, who was the designer on multiple Vectrex games and also Indictor's former brother-in-law. As Corsiglia states: "John Ross was the 'Father of Vectrex'. He conceived the system, proved the concept, and developed the hardware, directing much of the firmware development. He also brought me the idea for the 3D Imager and helped tremendously with its early development. Without John Ross, there would be no Vectrex!"

While Ross defined the hardware, Indictor would help create the tools that allowed games to be made for it. We pressed him on his involvement and the creation of an In-Circuit Emulator (ICE), allowing a Vectrex to be hooked up to the development systems of the time.

"I wrote the entire debugging system for the Vectrex," admits Indictor. "It was written to run on a Zilog Z80 processor - which was the CPU for the Ithaca InterSystems S100-based computer system we used to develop the code. We developed an S100 card that contained a 6809, and a ribbon cable that plugged into the 6809 socket of the Vectrex. It had hardware breakpoints, and a complete 6809 disassembler, which I wrote from scratch. At one point, I had to do some hardware debugging with an oscilloscope because the hardware breakpoints weren't working properly. I had to teach myself how to debug TTL circuitry. That was a lot of fun, and it was very satisfying to see so many people - including me, of course - using this software to build the games. It was based upon the CP/M 'debug' program. CP/M was the OS of the InterSystems S100 based computer. They weighed a ton, had an 8-inch 10 MB harddrive and an 8-inch 1.2 MB floppy drive - both in a separate cabinet that was bigger than the computer itself. And, of course, it had countless LEDs and lever switches on the front to do brute-force machine language programming - which occasionally came in quite handy."

While Indictor would tinker and create various tech demos for the Vectrex, he would complete five main games. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an official film licensed in the US, released in 1982, later rebranded Star Ship in Europe and Harmagedon in Japan. Precise dates down to the month are difficult to ascertain. In 1983 there was Spin Ball (possibly July), a pinball title, and Polar Rescue (possibly November), which deserves its own section. Later, there was also Mail Plane and Tour de France, both finished but unreleased; in subsequent years, fans would acquire, dump, and release these online. We list all his known works, asking how long each took. Indictor explains: "Between one and six months. Spin Ball was around six months, or more, while Mail Plane was around one month. I had forgotten about Tour de France, nice research!"

Star Trek and Beyond

For his first commercial release, based on a large licensed property, Star Trek was simple but fun. Players move a cursor in first-person shooting down Romulan and Klingon ships, aiming to clear stages and reach a final boss; there's also a black hole that warps players right to the boss. It's a solid score-attack game for the era, but we were keen to learn about the bureaucracy behind it: how much did the license cost? What was it like working within the constraints of someone else's intellectual property? Did Paramount Pictures or Gene Roddenberry have any oversight? Did Indictor reprogram the European or Japanese releases which removed the license, and does he know why it was lost? Is he a fellow Trekkie?

"Yes, I wrote Star Trek in just 4KB," laughs Indictor, "I don't know how much licensing cost. And no, I did not recode the European and Japanese versions. Yes, I was - and still am - an avid Star Trek fan. However, not a fanatical one. Working on someone else's IP never really crossed my mind. The game was so simplistic that the only thing that resembled Star Trek were the Klingon Birds of Prey, very simplistic shapes, and the concept of Phasers and Photon Torpedoes. Did the studio have any oversight regarding the content? Not that I know of. As an anecdotal side note, I have been a guest fiddler with the Enterprise Blues Band, which is a band consisting of former Star Trek actors / musicians that are hired to perform at Star Trek conventions and on Star Trek-themed cruise ships."

One thing we've always been curious about is how the Vectrex colour overlays came about. With the screen being black and white, these transparent rectangles of plastic added sections of colour and also information pertinent to the game, for example, controller functions and what specific gauges meant. IE: Star Trek's overlay annotated the Fire Power and Shield Strength bars, saving the need for on-screen text, while also highlighting your weapon's area of effect. The question is, were overlays considered from the start as games were conceptualised, or was it done later, like the box art and marketing materials? The Vectrex FAQ gives a clue, stating: "Miva Filoseta designed many, if not most, of the colourful overlays." The implication of this is that overlay design was separate from the designers and programmers, and thus, after the fact.

Indictor's recollections back this up. "Miva sounds familiar, but I don't remember. My former brother-in-law, Jeff Corsiglia, he designed many of the games that were written. Star Trek, I believe he designed. Actually, I think for Spin Ball, I designed the playing table. It had a lot to do with practicality, as far as programming was concerned. But it was approved by the game designers. As for the overlays, I think they definitely had to be done after the game was complete. I don't remember precisely when they were done, but logically they really couldn't know where all the drawing was going to be until it was actually done. I suppose during the latter portion of the game design, when the board was fairly stable, they could have done it 'early'. But at that point the position of the vector graphics had to be finalised."

Indictor's reply raises an interesting point on the dichotomy between designers and programmers, which is elaborated on in the Vectrex FAQ. Corsiglia is quoted, saying: "I had responsibility for game design for Vectrex - many of the ideas and effects in the games came from the programmers as well as me, in varying proportions. Some programmers liked to work from a tight spec, others made major design contributions. The atmosphere was collegial, and the teams were highly cooperative. Ideas flowed, enthusiasm was high, and the overall level of creativity was astonishing. Our system was to team the designer, usually myself, with a programmer. My responsibility was mostly for the concept, the storyboards, definition, and pitch to the client. While I had some input on [Mark Indictor's games], I was mostly in the role of Producer at this point. Mark should get design credits for these. He could both design and code with equal brilliance."

Moving on to Spin Ball, it's evident Indictor takes a lot of pride in its creation, partly in how much time he invested compared to other games, and the elegance of the maths required, within the constraints of the hardware. Enthusiasts who've since dug through the code were impressed. Professor Peer Johannsen, of Pforzheim University in Germany, conducted some digital archaeology by dissecting and analysing Spin Ball.

According to Johannsen: "Spin Ball is a very well-written and designed piece of software. Deciphering that large 3KB bulk of data-bytes felt like walking through a maze. From the inside, a maze is confusing. But when looked at from the top, the structure of the maze becomes clear. The 'data maze' is well structured. The lists pointing to lists is not chaos, but the way he organised the stuff needed to draw the playfield and do the trajectory computation of the ball. It's a very sophisticated way to bundle the necessary data. Vector data and collision-specific data is mixed - vector lists contain not only vectors, but also pointers (references) to the addresses of the corresponding collision-check information of each vector. This collision-check data then itself contains pointers to information about how the ball is to be reflected. The low frame-rate, in my opinion, is [because] there is some heavy maths going on - lots of mathematical subroutines, which are used to compute trajectory, and which are computationally expensive. He tried to make the mathematical model as accurate as possible; it uses 16-bit precision computations, of which 8 bits are for the fractional part. [...] Also, if you achieve a high-score and the last five digits are 91755, the name MARK INDICTOR appears."

Johannsen also pointed out that the ball is drawn not with vector lines, but printable strings taken from the BIOS. In other words, think of it as similar to ASCII symbols, except in this specific instance, it's printing the 0x65 character, a filled circle. We show Indictor all the analysis and the assumption that the high score relates to his birthday, to which he responds: "Fascinating! I can shed some light on my choice of data organisation and physics algorithm, though the fine points are lost in my memory. They are correct that the 'intensive math' was a simplification of a floating point dot-product algorithm, using 16-bit, integer / fractional parts, so you did not have to use the incredibly expensive MUL instruction. And you are correct, the 91755 is, in fact, my birth date. It's a great coincidence that today is that date. The raster generation algorithm was created by Gerry Karr, and included in the Vectrex's ROM, callable from any game. Gerry wrote most of the ROM (BIOS) routines, but I had a hand in it. In retrospect, I think it might have been more efficient to generate the ball as a vector object, but if memory serves, I was desperately trying to make enough room to add my Easter Egg. <laughs - whispers 'shhhhh!'>"

The Easter Eggs hidden in nearly all his games are significant. Warren Robinett's famous signature in Adventure occurred only a few years earlier in 1979, as a means for him to be credited, despite Atari forbidding this (though the history of Easter Eggs goes even further back). Was the inclusion in various Vectrex games for similar reasons?

"That's basically what it was," confirms Indictor. "We were not getting any personal credit for these games, and it was one's way of branding the game. We knew that nobody was going to look at the code, that was before any kind of code reviews were commonplace. Matter of fact, there's a funny anecdote. There was a guy who was kind of the manager of the project, name was Gary Niles. And he smoked cigars, and he would come into where we were working, and we had these huge InterSystems. You know, between the CPU and the disk drive box, they probably weighed 50 lb, or possibly even more; I dunno, I carried the thing around quite a bit. <laughs> But it had a floppy disk drive and a hard drive, and the smoke was a real problem for the floppy disks in particular. And he just thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. And he'd come over to our workstations every once in a while and blow smoke in our hard drives, just to prove that he somehow was better than us and didn't believe anything we said. <laughs>"

At this point, we interrupt Indictor because this sounds horrifying. Smoke damage from the residue it leaves behind is a serious problem for technology, which should be common sense. As for Niles, according to the Vectrex FAQ: "Vice president at Western Technologies during Vectrex era; from there went to Sega, then Revell, and as of 1996 was with Galoob."

"It was ridiculous," agrees Indictor, adding, "But I think that probably spawned our desire to at least make our mark on the software. Even though we weren't supposed to do it - we were explicitly forbidden from doing so."

The Masterpiece, Polar Rescue

This brings us to the third of Indictor's commercially released games, and the reason for this feature, the phenomenal Polar Rescue. Of all the early releases on the Vectrex, Polar Rescue is one of the more sophisticated. Ostensibly a pseudo-wireframe vehicular FPS score-attack game akin to Atari's Battle Zone, players are tasked with shooting enemy subs, avoiding mines and icebergs, while using the sonar to locate and rescue a survival pod. But it's so much more than this. If you decide to play it please, PLEASE read the manual, because the complex mechanics are not intuitive.

Manbiki Shounen (1979) is the earliest known stealth game, followed by others (notably 005 and Castle Wolfenstein in 1981), and while not the first, Polar Rescue deserves a place among these progenitors. You can spy hidden subs on the sonar (solid dots; icebergs and mines flash); if enemies are alerted a klaxon sounds and you're in "battle mode" as they attack. You can avoid detection by not travelling too fast; instead of holding the thrust button, which noisily increases engines to maximum, holding forwards and reverse at the same time locks the engines at a lower (quieter) strength. Enemies can still become suspicious though and follow you slowly, leading to a cat-and-mouse game where you weigh up running or fighting.

This stealth aspect overlaps with an early "survival horror" framework. You have limited oxygen which is used more the faster you travel; torpedoes are finite; taking damage from ice chunks will gradually hobble your sub, reducing functionality. With nothing more than a black screen and a constant sonar ping showing nearby enemies, Polar Rescue creates surprisingly high levels of tension - it's strongly reminiscent of the tracker scene in the film Alien (1979). When you finally engage an enemy it's frightening because a single hit will sink you - however, enemies only have five torpedoes each, and defeating them will gain you their remainder plus more oxygen. So there's a constant balancing of finite resources and scavenging more.

On top of this is the regenerating health. While it came out some months after Crisis Mountain, Polar Rescue's system is far more complex. Different levels of damage disable different aspects of the sub (the four torpedo tubes, sonar, engines, docking clamp, etc.), sometimes requiring you to power down engines and remain silent, hidden in the darkness, slowly healing, ever watchful of enemies on the sonar. It calls to mind the film Das Boot (1981), as the submarine crew languish below, repairing their vessel.

These varied mechanics have depth and realism, overlaying to create an emergent gameplay sandbox (both puns intended). The presentation, meanwhile, is almost cinematic - after docking with and rescuing the survivors, there's a simple cut scene where the game plays itself, returning the submarine to its base. Over the last 40 years, you'll have seen everything Polar Rescue once offered, but for 1983, it is a masterpiece of innovation.

We convey all of this to Indictor and there's a mildly awkward pause, after which he politely disagrees with us.

"Wow, uhm..." he finally begins, pausing again for a moment. "I am trying to figure out where... Trying to remember where the idea for this game came from. It was another math-intensive game. Not very good gameplay, in my honest opinion. It started out as an experiment in rendering 3D-esque vector shapes in a perspective-based way. If I remember correctly, I actually designed that, so I can't blame anyone else for the less-than-compelling gameplay. But it was an interesting concept and problem to solve. The 'regenerating health' was a gameplay strategy created by Jeff. The concept of the game was fairly simple. There were landmines and there were enemy subs, and you had to avoid the landmines and shoot the subs, and that was pretty much the only thing that I was thinking about as I was building the game. I was fascinated by the idea of viewing this vector graphic pseudo-3D object from different angles, and doing the calculation of how to modify the perspective, using mathematics, depending on where it was relative to the object. It was pretty limited, how far I could do that, but it did somewhat convey the experience of travelling through space - or water in this case."

Discussing the technical aspects, we mention liking how - because of the way the Vectrex displays lines of varying brightness - enemy subs would suddenly emerge from the ocean darkness, first very dimly and then becoming brighter.

"Right!" agrees Indictor. "Yes, I definitely used the distance variable to control its intensity. It was pretty straight forward as far as programming was concerned - in retrospect I don't think I considered physics about the intensity of light versus distance, the square of the distance, I don't think I did that math. It was pretty much linear. <laughs>"

Discussing the merits of the game it highlights how creative people can sometimes judge their own works more harshly than their audience. We go to great lengths assuring Indictor that 40 years later, critics have been kind to Polar Rescue and the community still enjoys it, even making it part of the annual Vectrex tournament.

"That's really amazing," laughs Indictor, surprised, admitting that, "It was one of the games that I felt least confident about, because it was kind of my own idea, and I think that Jeff provided some input, but really it was all spawned from the 3D experiments that I had done. So it just kind of materialised out of that."

Indictor's last two games, Mail Plane and Tour de France, would be completed but go unreleased until fans found and shared prototype copies. But first, it's worth exploring the "cabin in the woods" story. The Vectrex FAQ stated: "Mark Indictor and his family move about two hours out of Los Angeles and he writes games in the seclusion of a pine forest at 5,000 feet. He even has an NBC news crew come up and interview him for a news show on weird computer hackers and their lifestyles." Some members of the Vectrex forum recall watching the documentary, but so far, the community has not found any archived footage. So we ask Indictor to describe events.

"Well, it was Lake Arrowhead," he corrects, before elaborating, "Which was not the wilderness. It's basically a mountain community. This was like 1982? Something like that. I was fascinated by the idea of remote working. I was one of the first people I knew to put up a FidoNet, an early network protocol that ran on a CP/M computer. It ran on the InterSystem, which was on 24/7. It would hook up to a US Robotics 1200 baud modem, and would schedule a call to another network node and transfer information. It would be delivered asynchronously, not in real-time, but it was kind of like email. Way ahead of its time. The government hooked this thing up to DARPANET, before there was internet. So that gave the whole system a boost. You could call a node that was connected to the DARPANET, and that would propagate your message through the network, and back onto the FidoNet. It was quite an interesting time to be messing with computers! <laughs> Of course, my first phone bill after I got my modem was $800. Because I lived in Lake Arrowhead, and back then, any phone call that was not on the mountain was a toll call. So I was racking them up."

This was how Indictor was able to work up in the mountains, but the reasoning behind it was a little more romantic. As he explains: "So why did we move to Lake Arrowhead? Well, back when I switched from music to computers, I also switched wives. I met this woman at a bar I was playing at, and we fell in love, and I ended my first marriage, and started my second marriage, and we've been married 43 years now. She was in the film industry - she often worked in Los Angeles, but also on location. And I was working in a job I could telecommute, using this modem technology. So we thought, let's see if we can get out of the city - and for several years we lived in Lake Arrowhead. It worked quite well. I just modem-ed in all of my code, and maybe once every two weeks I'd drive down and visit the office, and we'd have a meeting, and discuss what was going on."

Mail Plane and Other Unreleased Games

The saga of Mail Plane's public release warrants a standalone article. The seller resorted to shady methods, which we'll explore later, but ultimately Chris Romero purchased, verified, and shared the ROM. Previous known dumps were in various stages of completion, and so the community asked that we ascertain if Indictor had finished the project.

"I did," he confirms, before describing events. "I was contracted to do Mail Plane. I'd stopped working for the company and I was living in Lake Arrowhead, and I had gotten a small office on the rim of the world, on Highway 18. It was a little bungalow, almost like a shack, and I was freezing to death in the thing. <laughs> It's a mile high or more, 6,000ft, and they gave me I think $25,000? Lump sum, to write this game. This was also designed by Jeff. I had to codify a map of the United States into a vector array, and then had separate points for the capital of each state. I traced a map of the United States from a large, translucent sheet of graph paper. I labelled the axes and my wife helped me capture all of the coordinates for the vectors; she had a list of coordinates and entered them all in. I taught my wife how to enter these into the computer - so I didn't actually do that part. It used the Vectrex lightpen, which was a pretty cool innovation. The lightpen stuff was fun to do. Basically, there was a scanline that was going across the screen, and when you put the lightpen on, it would know where it was because of where the scanline hit it. So that's how it did its magic. I did finish it and it was a fairly simple game - it was designed pretty much for children. You just got in your plane and you went from the capitol of one state to the capitol of another state. That's about all I remember of the gameplay. <laughs> I wasn't aware Mail Plane was never released. Once I finished the game, they paid me the $25,000, and I never heard what happened to it."

We don't know the specific reasons it never hit retail (most likely the hardware being discontinued), but its arrival post-2013 involves the infamous Floyd Wilk, AKA "eBayZilla" online. For a time, he dealt with the Vectrex community, selling expensive rarities. It's believed he has since passed away, so there's no risk of libel here - but no one spoke positively of Wilk, including allegations of outright theft.

"He was questionable to deal with at all stages," says Chris Romero, "And also ended up stealing and reselling a 3D Imager I had loaned for testing some 3D carts he had at the time. Wilk also provided bad dealings with Sean Kelly. One I was able to rectify by providing Kelly a dump of my purchase of Tour de France from Wilk. Thankfully that copy was a good one. Not a nice guy to deal with."

Wilk was only able to acquire Mail Plane and Tour de France to resell in this manner thanks to acquiring them from Indictor. We asked him for his side of events.

"I relinquished all my floppy disks and code printouts along with the original development system to a purchaser for $2,000. He did not treat the information ethically, and I now regret the sale. I had this entire development system - a Vectrex that plugged into the system and a prototype Vectrex, and a commercial Vectrex - I had all this stuff, and it was just sitting in my attic. It had been there for years, along with listings and floppies, and I'd never even bothered to look at it. Finally, I just went, you know what, this is just taking up space. I don't think I'll ever use this again, and I got a call from this guy. Computers had progressed considerably by this time - Windows and stuff like that. And this was a CP/M computer that was slow, comparatively, and had no graphics capabilities. And I thought, well, this thing is probably a piece of junk. So I get this call and he wants to give me $2,000 for this computer and all the stuff. Which, in retrospect, was a really good deal for him. At the time it was like, pfft, I got a piece of junk in my attic, I can sell it for $2,000 - it's sold! Then he turned around and hoarded the information, and started trying to sell it. There were a lot of people who knew he had it, he was extremely elitist about it, and used it just to make money. And maybe he had a penchant for fame, I don't really know. But he was not a very nice man. <laughs>"

Digging through the entire story, with anecdotes from community members, was both saddening and frustrating. It also isn't the only example of predatory community members contacting developers to profiteer from their old materials. In the interest of solidarity, we share with Indictor a similar story regarding IMSA Racing for the unreleased Panasonic M2. In that instance someone acquired the unreleased game from the programmer, who asked it be shared, only for the acquirer to lie to the community, saying they were told not to share it.

While Mail Plane and Tour de France would be freed from Wilk's grasp thanks to Chris and others buying them back, that Ithaca InterSystems computer sadly vanished, along with all the programming data. As Chris points out: "I still leave messages on public boards about the InterSystems development system that Wilk sold to someone. It's not so much about the system as it is about the hard drive that contained a lot of Vectrex code. Supposedly it was sold to a person who collects old systems. So it's still out there somewhere. If that person is both still alive and hasn't done a clean out. I would have tried harder [to buy it] but was budget-limited at the time, and the price was way up there. I would guess Wilk probably tried to increase the sale value by mentioning such information to the buyer. But from what he said before the sale and after the sale, the person really wasn't interested in the contents of the hard drive. Nor the 6809 card that was included as part of the system. They just wanted it for the base system itself. Plus the expansion RAM and such. It was the Ferrari of S100 systems after all. The drive also had stiction problems. So the person who bought it might have considered the drive as trash when they got it, rather than trying to tap on it for stiction release and dumping it. Or going through full data recovery using an external company."

We asked Indictor if he'd worked on any other games besides the five discussed, which perhaps went unreleased, and if he could recall any unreleased games by colleagues. He could not recall any. The community also wanted to know if he knew anything about A Crush of Lucifer, another unreleased game from 1983 which was later found and reproduced. Sadly he replied, "I have never heard of it."

The community also wanted to know about Pole Position, and if Indictor knew who was behind The Kid Easter Egg hidden within. He replied: "There were some young programmers who preferred working in a room with no windows - we called it The Dungeon. I can't remember all of their names, but I believe one of them wrote Pole Position, and he was 'The Kid'. I've asked a friend about his identity, but I'm not sure he knows either."

A lot of our discussion on Skype relates back to the passionate Vectrex community, who have gone to great lengths preserving and releasing lost games, and dissecting the code as a form of digital archaeology. New Vectrex games continue to be made and sold on cartridge, which is mind-blowing when you consider the tiny install base for the hardware. We ask Indictor, who left this technology behind 40 years ago, what he thinks of all this.

"I honestly do not understand the continued interest in this machine and its games and code," he says with a warm laugh. "I presume the fact it was the only truly Vector-based home gaming console is significant, and the fact it was affordable enough for the consumer. Its promotion into fame is amazing to me. Over time, I realised I would never really use or refer to the code or even the hardware, and I donated all of my remaining paraphernalia to the National Videogame Museum. As far as 'digital archaeology' is concerned, I can see the interest. Many of these games leveraged the existing technologies far beyond what they were intended to be able to do. It was an exciting challenge, and I was green enough behind the ears to not appreciate its significance at the time. It's so strange that the Vectrex has persisted for so long, and so enthusiastically. I know my friend Paul Newell has been much more involved in the aftermath of the Vectrex, and has helped several people with code analysis. The formal field of study for the academic papers he's involved with is referred to as 'archeogaming' - an archaeological approach to viewing videogame software. I know there's a whole group who are trying to understand the architecture and the concept that we had, when we were putting together these games. It was pretty much from the hip. It was an interesting time, and an interesting series of events, and a very interesting product. Too bad it wasn't actually financially viable. But it's become kind of a living legend. I'm amazed that you can play Vectrex games on your iPhone now. It's hilarious."

A Life Beyond Games

At this point, we've exhausted Indictor's career with game creation, and it's understandable if you choose to stop reading here. But given how unusual some of his other adventures have been, we'd like to document them. Be it Hollywood, NASA, or roaming the seas hoping to find a box with a million dollars. It's been a life well lived.

If you've not heard of the 1982 film Android, that's OK; it's fairly obscure. But from around the 4-minute mark, there are some Vectrex graphics showing nearby passing ships created specifically for the movie.

Indictor described the project: "My recollection is Jeff knew somebody who was doing this, and they went to him as a designer, to come up with some graphics. It was a low-budget film, and he gave it to me, and he'd drawn a bunch of graph paper mock-ups of these ships. It was pretty much his artwork, and I just put them into code, and made it so he could choose between four different scenarios. Honestly I don't even remember who was doing the film - I don't recognise any of the names. I don't even remember if I got paid for it at this point. I probably did. It didn't take long to do. There was not a whole lot of animation, it was just rendering a line drawing, which is pretty easy to do on a vector graphics display."

Still, we suggest, it got his name listed on IMDB, and it's fun to say you were part of a film, if only peripherally.

"Yes!" agrees Indictor, laughing. "I've been a sideline participant in other films - I appeared in the film version of The Crucible. I was a featured extra. My wife was working on that film, on Hog Island, Massachusetts, and I was visiting. Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder were the stars. I was sitting at the craft service table, smoking a cigar, just watching the set, and she walks by, and saw me looking at her, and decided at that point that she was going to kick me off the island, because I was bothering her. <laughs> So the director got wind of this, and he said: 'Oh, well, don't worry about it, I'll just put you in the movie!' <laughs> So I'm one of the thugs that's holding a pewter mug in a bar, leering at somebody's house across the street. I have really long hair."

After getting out of games development his next software engineering project was with Quick Tally Systems, creating a means of polling people for market research. Notably, this technology was long used on America's Funniest Home Videos for counting the votes of the studio audience. (Seen here at the 20-minute mark.) While mainly used to see reactions to things in a studio, there were limited cases where people had handsets at home, connected via modems and phone lines. We can't help but feel a sense of melancholy that such inventive skill would shift to other ventures - we ask Indictor if he'd had any desire to remain in game development?

"No, no, I was fascinated with the technology," he admits, explaining that "Games were a really great medium for programming. Quick Tally was an interesting experience, it was way ahead of its time. It's kind of like a video game. <laughs> It was on Funniest Home Videos for years - much longer than I was with the company. It was a series of up to 1,500 handsets that had a keypad and a slider. They were all connected in this ring configuration to the computer; the hardware was before WiFi. This would poll all of these handsets for input, and also had a video component for market research. People would come and watch commercials, or a movie, and during this they could move the slider between zero and ten, to indicate how much they liked it at any given instant. The buttons were for questions that had multiple-choice answers. The results of all of these handsets were compiled and displayed graphically over the program material for the market researchers. So they could watch the material and see the reaction of the audience in real-time."

In today's technological world, something like this would seem simple, maybe even archaic. But Indictor was with Quick Tally between 1987 and 1991, when connectivity was limited. This was the cutting edge. As you'd expect, things sometimes went wrong.

"It was an interesting programming challenge," says Indictor, "Because there was a bug in the software. I was responsible for the low-level drivers that read the handsets, and captured the data in real-time, and I tried several techniques. One was to just keep asking the same question and getting a different answer. And then I thought: why don't we just use an interrupt-driven technique, where the computer decides when to ask the question? And it worked perfectly - except, every once in a while it didn't, and then everything just crashed. We had a wide area network, it was very limited. Mostly it was for people in a single studio room. But there were a couple of celebrities, one lived in Colorado - he was the quarterback for the Broncos, John Elway. He had his own handset, connected to a computer and modem. We once used the system in New York on a national TV program hosted by Bryant Gumbel called The Race; we looked into people's reactions to race-related problems in the world. It was a national broadcast, we were live at the time, and they had some problems - it malfunctioned during the show. But we did get quite a bit of data out of it. <laughs>"

Indictor was also employed by NASA, twice. First from 2003 until 2007 and then from 2011 until 2022. Specifically its Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a flight software engineer, and later software systems engineer. From the Vectrex to NASA - we asked how it happened. With over 15 years, there's too much to cover, but Indictor shared his start: "I began working at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2003. My first project was getting a wheel to turn on a test-bed model of a rover wheel in a lab across the street. I had a webcam on the wheel, and it was attached to the lab's ethernet. I took this project over from another developer who had not been able to figure out how to control it. It took me a while, but I finally sorted it. We wrote a system around it to control an engineering model of the Sojourner rover - the same model that landed on Mars in 1998 as part of the Pathfinder program."

Another entry on his LinkedIn which caught our eye was Disney, between 2008 and 2010; he's listed as being a member of The Bootstrappers. It's only for a few years, but still unexpected. However, it dovetails nicely with his re-entry to JPL.

"We played sea shanties on Tom Sawyer's Island, got to fire the cannon at the steamboat and pirate ship, and playfully pick-pocketed and purse-napped the customers - we gave everything back!" jokes Indictor, before explaining: "I got this job because in 2007, I quit JPL to join a private start-up. Within several months that company went belly-up, and I was laid-off permanently, with only a weekend's notice. If you recall, that was the great recession, and JPL had a hiring freeze. I also had two different programming jobs during this time. One was with a company that wrote market trading software. I couldn't stand working for a company that wrote tools for the stock market, so got another job writing web-based email systems in competition with Gmail - not a great idea. One day in 2011, I got a call from a colleague at JPL who asked me to lead the team writing ground software - command and telemetry - for the Curiosity Rover that launched in 2011. I was so damned bored by what I was doing I said I'd be there next week; even though I had no experience with telemetry or commanding. In seven months before launch I implemented several ground system capabilities, and then during cruise-mode (after launch and before landing), I wrote a number of crucial systems, and took over management of the project before entry, descent, and landing of the rover in 2012. Much of the work I did at that time for Curiosity was also used for Perseverance in 2020. I also took over the management of that ground system."

When not helping humanity explore outer space, Indictor also works to protect the oceans, being part of La Mer Maids. Which is how we got in contact initially, by writing a physical letter to the group. As he explains it: "La Mer Maids is my wife's and my non-profit where we take small boats, less than 30ft, out into the marinas and open ocean in Southern California and pick up loose trash, usually Mylar and rubber balloons, flat trash like paper, chip-bags, and so on, and occasionally some really weird stuff like refrigerators and a balcony - we couldn't pick that one up. We're still waiting for the box with a severed head or a million dollars in cash. No luck so far..."

Officially, Mark Indictor retired from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2022 and now spends his time pursuing his original passion, music. Having done so much, we ask if he has any final thoughts:

"It was a time of new technology and pioneering, and I was just fascinated by the technology, and watching it grow, and being part of its growth. I worked on so many different kinds of projects, from starting in video games, later going into text compression and searching algorithms, before Google. Basically, I was doing the cutting-edge stuff but never quite got in on the companies that took it and made millions and billions of dollars with it. But I was part of the seed technology researchers that made that all possible. I'm trying to get back into music. I kind of abandoned it in 1980, and went into technology pretty much exclusively for 10 years, and then on my tenth wedding anniversary, I got invited to play at a party for a rich guy - Sam Winston, head of a tyre company. It was a country & western gig, and I said to my wife: I've been offered this gig on our tenth anniversary, and you can come if you want? <laughs> And so she did, and Sam opened up a Magnum of Dom Perignon, and toasted to us. And the entire band drank champagne. That was the beginning of me getting back into the music industry. I am now studying Scottish fiddle music, as well as some Swedish and Belgium styles. I took my fiddle onboard an Alaskan cruise recently and sat in with the jazz band in one of its many bars."

Many thanks to Chris Romero for detailing the Mail Plane saga; Mat Allen for certain box shots; and the Vectrex community for unearthing Easter Eggs and sharing information.

John Szczepaniak is a veteran writer of 20 years who has interviewed hundreds of people in the games industry. If you enjoy his work, please check out The Untold History of Games Developers Volume 5