THE MAKING OF: THE SIMPSONS: BART VS THE SPACE MUTANTS

Let’s begin right at the beginning. Before The Simpsons, before the NES, there was a man called Garry with two ‘r’s. Garry Kitchen wanted to be an artist. He’d been drawing and painting all his life, and in the late-Seventies, he began studying art at his local college. But in his second year, he was suddenly drawn away from his life’s passion by the rapidly developing realm of electronic entertainment. He would soon set out on a path that would see him become a leading light in 8-bit game development.

He had begun working part-time for the electronics firm Wickstead Design Associates as a technician, doing odd jobs like soldering circuit boards – and he was so drawn into this world of chips and wires that he switched his college degree to electrical engineering. But his college courses lagged behind what was happening in the real world. This was the age of the new-fangled microprocessor, yet his course was still teaching mainframe programming with FORTRAN. He found he was learning more on the job than at college – and he had to learn very