THE MAKING OF KRULL

At Retro Gamer, we go the extra mile. In preparation for this piece, we watched Columbia Pictures 1983 fantasy epic Krull for the first time. [I’d already seen it - Ed] It’s two hours of our life we’re never getting back. We wonder what programmer and game designer Matt Householder made of Krull on initial viewing.

“I’ve never actually seen it,” Matt replies. “I would have gone to the premiere but I wasn’t invited. Many years later I saw it was on TV and watched… for five minutes.”

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the source material Matt was handed for his own premiere as an arcade game creator at Gottlieb. He had previously had a bit part in the coin-op industry at GDI, a company better known for producing slot machines, which was trying to find a way into the burgeoning videogame business. Matt worked on an unreleased video-poker machine and also helped tune Oli-Boo-Chu, a strange maze game licensed from Irem in Japan, for the North American market, but after less than a year at GDI, he and his colleague Chris Krubel saw Gottlieb was hiring.

“Chris and I were, and it had to be done for a deadline – before the movie came out. He was also clear that if we didn’t do it right and do it quickly, we’d be out of there. Fired.”