• 20+ year veteran of game industry with 18 published titles
  
• 1st game programmed and published for Apple II computer in 1980.
  
• Apple II games included Sneakers and Beer Run.
  
• Designed fast & furious Atari VCS game cartridges.
  
• VCS games included Fast Eddie and Turmoil
  
• Worked for Activision during the heyday and decline of the business in the early 1980’s
  
• Worked with Hasbro in late 1980’s on an interactive videotape based system, trying not to create interactive movies
  
• Began designing coin-operated video games for Midway (Williams Electronics) in 1989. Mark’s approach was to design high adrenalin, fast paced, break all the rules type sports games.

Midway Games include:

• Smash TV
  
• NBA JAM - Earned over 1 billion dollars in the first 12 months, 1 quarter at a time
  - Sold over 5 million consumer cartridges
  
• WWF Wrestlemania
  
• NFL Blitz
  - Over 2 million units sold within 3 months of launch
  - Created a new sales category for sports product, while not impacting existing brands
  
• NBA Showtime – The NBA on NBC
  
• MLB Slugfest - #1 Selling PS2 Baseball game in 2002
• Now deeply involved with the inaugural version of NBA Ballers.

Mark Turmell is a legend in the gaming industry – look up the term “old-school” in the dictionary and you’ll find his smiling visage staring back at you. With a rap sheet dating back to the golden days of the Atari VCS, plus some of the hottest and most successful arcade titles under his belt, Mark’s seen it all and certainly has no qualms in sharing his views.

Gaming Age: First things first – thanks for taking time out of your schedule to answer our questions. With NBA Ballers and The Suffering heading down the home stretch, things have to be extremely busy for you right now. You’ve accumulated quite the rap sheet in the games software industry, going all the way back to the Apple II. Would you give us a recap of your development history?
Mark Turmell: Sure. When I was a young teenager, an Apple II was my first purchase with the intent of making video games, and it took me several months before I realized programming in BASIC wouldn’t cut it. It then learned assembly language and developed my first game, Sneakers, which became a big hit in 1980. Shortly thereafter, I began developing Atari VCS games, moved to CA from MI, and have never looked back!

GA: Describe the feeling of having your first game published.
MT: Great question. Walking into Toys-r-us and seeing my game on the wall instantly made all of the hard work worthwhile. Checking the inventory, asking questions, etc. Great excitement, but even more rewarding is when you put a coin-op game into the arcade for it’s first test. To see kids running back to the change machine, pumping quarters into your game, and screaming when cool stuff happens, is incredible. Simply seeing your game on the shelf pales in comparison to actually seeing the “buyer” enjoy your game. Smash TV was my first coin-op, and each quarter drop played a “bingo” speech call, so you’d always hear that as you entered an arcade. But NBA Jam will never be topped for sheer quarter munching. That game made over 1 billion dollars in its first year, 1 quarter at a time! At the same time “Jurassic Park” was dominating theaters, NBA Jam was tripling that movies box office, 1 quarter at a time! Locations frequently made over $2,000 per week, so the arcade operators were cleaning up financially (About a $4,500 investment to buy the game to begin with).

GA: Starting in the industry at a time when programmers didn’t always get the recognition they deserved, did that influence you in moving to Activision in the early days?
MT: Kinda, although I actually turned down an opportunity to be one of the first handful of EA designers. I had lunch with Bing Gordon and Trip Hawkins before they launched the company, but was more interested in developing VCS cartridges, and not the Apple II and Atari 400/800 games they were about to focus on. When they hit with their “rock and roll” approach to promoting their designers, I felt like I had missed out somewhat.

I moved over to Activision when they said they’d open up a Sacramento Design Center for a few of us. That was cool. I learned a lot while there and met a lot of people.