JOHN CALHOUN
John Calhoun became a well-known name in Macintosh circles following the release of his acclaimed game, Glider, published as shareware in 1988. Forming his own company (Soft Dorothy Software – a nod to The Wizard Of Oz since he grew up in Kansas), John also created other innovative Mac titles. He struck a deal with publisher Casady & Greene and became a full-time games developer, too. By the mid-Nineties, however, he landed a job with Apple, before Steve Jobs returned and created a powerhouse of a company. Being employed by Apple effectively ended his gaming endeavours (except for a brief period when he produced iOS titles) but, now he’s retired, he can be found blogging and working on projects at engineersneedart.com and he doesn’t rule out a return.
Can you remember when you first became interested in computers?
A friend of the family had a TRS-80 and we were starting to see computers in the movies and in shows such as Star Trek. One of the games he had was Trek-80, programmed in BASIC, and it was the first time I’d seen a game running on a personal computer. I remember thinking, “Now that’s really cool.” I guess the idea of computers and games ignited something in me.
Did you then begin coding yourself?
My high school was progressive enough to have a computer-science class which I took in my junior year. Since this was 1980, the teacher told us to buy a stack of punch cards and said we were going to learn COBOL or Fortran or something like that. Then, a week or two later, half of the classroom had Apple II computers and the teacher said, “Forget the stack of punch cards, you’re gonna have
