Chris Crawford on Game Design

Coda

All in all, Scram was a stupid game devoid of entertainment value. But it was loaded with clever graphics stunts (I even showed the water flowing through pipes with little moving bubbles) and boasted plenty of good sound effects: rumbling earthquakes, clanging metal, insistent klaxons, and so forth. I could hide behind the fact that software in those days was mostly bad. Indeed, at about the same time that we released Scram for the Atari HCS, somebody else released a game called Three Mile Island for the Apple II. This may be hard to believe, but Three Mile Island was considerably inferior to Scram. As a simulation it stank, its display was dull, its input structure was completely confusing, it had no sound effects, and the gameplay was, ...