THE MAKING OF CIRCUS
It might be 45 years ago, but Howell Ivy clearly remembers the evening of 4 July 1977. “I was working on Circus late into the night,” he recalls, wistfully, “and I wandered outside and all the fireworks were going off. I remember thinking, ‘It’s Independence Day. Why am I working on a holiday?’ But I had to get the game done and shipped. That is what you have to do when you own a company.”
The company in question was variants such as , had crashed into the public imagination through its 1976 release, . The game required you to drive your car over pedestrians - sorry, ‘gremlins’ – and was dubbed the first ‘videogame nasty’ by a febrile media, which of course helped sales immensely. We wonder if the family friendly theme of was chosen to distance Exidy from the controversy and show a more wholesome side to its output?
