It was 1979 and Mike Lorenzen had barely got his foot in the door at Atari Inc when he was asked to visit a shop and play a rival system. “I arrived on my first day and someone at the company had seen a golf game,” Mike tells us more than 40 years on. “They gave me an address to a store where you could play it in the lobby and said, ‘Implement that game exactly on the Atari 2600.’ I said, ‘Excuse me? That sounds illegal, immoral.’ And they said, ‘No, it’s on a different system so it’s wide open.’ That was the thinking in 1979.” Mike concedes that his memory of the exact other release is hazy, but he agrees with the suggestion it was probably the 1978 game Computer Golf for the Magnavox Odyssey. That would seem to make sense, as while his Atari game would end up being more advanced, there are similarities between the titles. And aside from the largely text-based Apple II game Pro Golf 1, there were simply no other contenders out there that could have been mimicked. Golf was one of the very first golf videogames.
In a stroke of good fortune, Mike had landed his job at Atari after a phone call to the customer service desk. “I called them asking for Atari 2600 hardware manuals,” he explains. “The receptionist didn’t know what to do with and to understand how they worked. “George Simcock, the manager of all Atari 2600 software engineers, answered,” Mike continues, “and he said, ‘That’s very interesting. How did you do that? We want to meet with you tomorrow’. It was a three-hour drive and I met with him, David Crane, Al Miller, Larry Kaplan and Bob Whitehead.” Three months after he joined the company, those other engineers would famously leave Atari to form Activision, the world’s first third-party game development company. Eventually Mike would go on to join them.
