From David Karam, author of To Preserve Quandic.
May 29th, 2012

I started working on To Preserve Quandic in 1982, about a year or so after I
got my TRS-80 Color Computer. I was 13 years old. I subscribed Rainbow
Magazine. It provided source code to a variety of programs which I dutifully
keyed in until they worked. The magazine also advertised commercial software
from Tom Mix, Mark Data, Prickly Pear Software and others. I became hooked
on adventure games and played as many as I could "find".

To Preserve Quandic went through many variations. I don't remember when it
changed from a hobby to a commercial endeavor. Initially it was a simple
text based game. The player had to escape from the house, but there wasn't
much of a story. My friends and I came up with the story at computer camp in
the summer of 1983. After completing my homework (my sophomore year of high
school) I would work on the game. Much of the game is written in BASIC, and
some in Assembly Language.

In order to bring my game to a professional level, I had to overcome two
major issues. The first was in creating a drawing application. There was no
commercial program at the time that provided what I needed to create the
illustrations for each room. I wrote a keyboard based drawing program with
fill routines that exploited the "artifact" colors produced in high
resolution. My second problem was that there was no official graphics mode
that included text. The unofficial solution was unattractive and provided no
lower case character set. I based my final solution on a Rainbow magazine
article that published the (Assembly) source code for a character display
routine that worked in graphics mode. It allowed me to develop my own
typeface which I integrated with the drawing program.

Prickly Pear Software accepted the game and advertised it in Rainbow in 1984
and distributed it for about 3 years. The game was featured as a suggested
Christmas gift by Rainbow in 1985.

In 1993 I founded Post Tool design which has developed many graphic games
and applications. Of note is the installation, Variations, which was
exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Post Tool has
developed games and interactive media for Nokia, Warner Records, Sony, and
others.

In 2009 I founded Postera, a web based service that provides a web site
(portfolio) builder for artists, photographers and other visual people. In
2010 I became CTO of Sparkwise, a web based data aggregation dashboard. We
are currently working on a music based game which will be released for iOS
in 2012...

Some links:
http://posttool.com
http://posttool.com/variations
http://postera.com
http://sparkwi.se