

*********

The Project 64 etext of the Hacker help file. Extracted from original
Windows(R) help file GAME05.HLP obtained from the Activision C64 15
Pack. Help file supplied by Fandango. Converted by the Basic
Bombardier. Some of the information in this etext is assumed to be
close enough to the original hardcopy version until an original can be
converted, which is likely to be called HACKR10B.TXT.  Windows(R) 95
version information removed.

HACKR10A.TXT, February 1996, etext #15

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Hacker

Contents

 General Description   [ 1.0 ]
 How To Play           [ 2.0 ]
 Game History          [ 3.0 ]
 Commodore History     [ 4.0 ]



[ 1.0 ] General Description

Temptation.

To stumble into someone else's computer system.  To be someplace
you're really not supposed to be.  And to get the strange feeling that
it really does matter.

"LOGON PLEASE:" is all you get to start with.  That's it.  From there,
it's up to you.  If you're clever enough and smart enough, you could
discover a world you've never before experienced on your computer.

Very tempting...

H A C K E R



[ 2.0 ] How to Play

Basics

LOGON PLEASE:

What's going on here?  Who are these guys?  What are they doing?  What
am I doing?

In Hacker, it's up to you to figure it out.  We can't tell you.  We
won't tell you.

For as every hacker knows, there just aren't any instructions for this
kind of thing...

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[ 3.0 ] Game History

Brad Fregger, Producer

"The original inspiration for Hacker was this: one day there were a
bunch of us sitting around talking about how hackers work. The people
who worked with computers knew that hacking was just boring number-
crunching and very tedious work.  Of course, this was at the time when
hackers were just starting to appear in the media, if not before, and
the people who were not into computers had this really romantic idea
of what a hacker does - cracking codes, getting all these nifty
passwords, and so on.  So Steve [Cartwright] said 'Hey, that's a great
idea - let's base a game on that romantic idea'.  He started plugging
away, and before we knew it, we had Hacker."

Management was very different in those days.  The relationship between
a programmer and a producer was more like that between an athlete and
his or her trainer than one of employee to boss.  "I was a producer, a
manager, but not a programmer. I was sort of a 'Creative Manager', who
helped things happen, who would keep management off the 'creative
element's back, but each programmer was responsible for their own
project."



Steve Cartwright, Designer

"Most games designed back then evolved out of little more than an
excuse to move objects on the screen.  Hacker, for example, started
out as a robot delivering mail through underground tunnels.  That, of
course, was not very exciting. What it really needed was a more
interesting story."

"At the time, David Crane was working on Ghostbusters.  Part of the
gameplay of Ghostbusters involved 'creating a user account'.  Knowing
virtually nothing about computer networks at the time, I was really
intrigued by people who could 'Log on' to computers remotely.  So I
took that element of Ghostbusters and made it the front end of Hacker.
Next,  we needed a story to explain why this robot was going around
the world.  We hired a writer to come up with the plot.  The title
itself was the last thing put on the game.  At the end of its
development, Brad [Fregger], the game's producer, said 'Let's call the
game Hacker'.  I was against it, because that word itself meant
nothing to me at that time.  Brad, of course, prevailed, and by sheer
luck, the release of Hacker coincided with the news of hackers
breaking into Universities and secret government computer systems.
The whole thing was very lucky."

To promote it, Steve went on a very interesting press tour.  The idea
was to promote the dark and mysterious aspect of the game.  "We called
in computer experts to tour with us  to verify that the game was safe
to play and was indeed just good clean fun."

"The first time the game was shown to the press, though, I pulled a
fast one that even fooled the people on the press tour with me.  In
the middle of a room full of reporters, I announced that I was going
to log on to Activision's computer to download the latest copy of the
game.  Of course, I DID have the latest version.  So when I pretended
to dial up Activision and was presented with the now-famous 'Logon
please:', nobody suspected that what seemed to be a hacker at work was
really just a game."

Disclaimer:  This program simulates the experience of being a computer
hacker and is intended solely for entertainment purposes.  Activision
in no way endorses or condones any activities associated with gaining
illegal entry to computer networks or files.



[ 4.0 ] Commodore History

Birth of a Legend

Commodore International Limited was founded in 1958 by Jack Tramiel, a
typewriter repairman from the Bronx, New York. It received much of its
financing from Canada's Atlantic Acceptance Corporation and quickly
grew to include typewriter manufacturing. However, Atlantic went
bankrupt in 1965, threatening to take Commodore with it.

To save his company, Tramiel began hunting for a new source of funds.
He found it in Irving Gould, a Canadian venture capitalist, who
supplied the ailing company with $400,000 in exchange for 17% of the
company and Tramiel's pledge of all the receivables.



Price War and the Lean Years

By the 1970's, Commodore Business Machines had grown further,
branching into calculators and other office machinery. Business boomed
until Commodore lost in a brutal price war with Texas Instruments.
Commodore had been assembling pocket calculators with TI
microprocessors. The chips cost Commodore about $50 per calculator,
and the final product sold for about $100 each. In response, TI came
out with a competing calculator of its own manufacture using the same
chip that sold for only $49. Commodore lost $4 million on sales of $56
million and nearly sank.

Tramiel learned a valuable lesson. In 1976, Commodore bought MOS
technologies, a failing semiconductor manufacturer, for $800,000,
ensuring that it would no longer be dependent on outside vendors for
needed parts.



Growth

Under Tramiel's deliberate guidance, Commodore grew into a $1 billion
company, growing sevenfold from 1981 to 1984. It was one of the
largest suppliers of home computers in the world.



Commodore 64 Era

By early 1982, Commodore had five new products in development, one of
them being the infamous Commodore 64. Believing he had a winner,
Tramiel took a gamble. He sidelined the other products and built up
massive inventories of the C64. Then, he flew in the face of the
computer industry by enlisting the same mass merchandisers (K-Mart,
Toys "R" Us, Target, and others) that sold the Vic-20 to market the
C64. By doing so, he proved that computer buyers didn't need to rely
on the hand-holding of an elite class of computer-literate salespeople
and their specialty store prices.

The C64 was rushed to market with haste bordering on recklessness, and
about 1/4 of the machines shipped didn't work. Commodore's solution
was a no-questions-asked policy on the exchange of defective machines.
After several months, the defect rate had been whittled down to a more
acceptable 4-5%.

By 1984, about 4 million Commodore computers were in use around the
world, and 300,000 more were being sold per month. However,
Commodore's leadership believed that market saturation was still a
long way off, since only about 6% of U.S. households owned computers.
This was far less than the 20-25% that owned video game players during
the peak of the home video game craze.



Tramiel Leaves

Tramiel had been known for his iron-fisted style of management. He was
involved with every aspect of the company and anything or anyone he
didn't like was changed or removed. This led to a class action suit in
November of 1983, which charged that Commodore failed to disclose
information about its operations and did not build a strong management
team.

According to a statement released in January of 1984, Tramiel said,
"personal reasons prevent my continuing on a full-time basis with
Commodore." Gould recruited Marshall F. Smith from Thyssen-Bornemisza
NV, a conglomerate based in the Netherlands Antilles, to replace
Tramiel.

At the time of Tramiel's departure, the home computer market was
failing, causing Mattel and Coleco to leave the business. Another
company that decided to leave the industry was Warner Communications,
which sold Atari to the newly unemployed Tramiel for a pittance.
Shortly thereafter, a stream of Commodore executives followed him.



Smith

In an effort to make Commodore profitable, Smith took to downsizing,
cutting the payroll by more than 45%. Though the company had an
impressive $339 million in 1985 holiday revenues, it made only $1
million for the quarter after paying off about 1/4 of its bank debt.

Commodore suffered through Fiscal Year 1985, losing $237 million, and
getting into trouble with its creditors. The banks granted a much-
needed one-month extension on Commodore's loans, and, with the success
of the company's second-best Christmas sales ever behind them,
Commodore defied the Gods of Bankruptcy yet again.



The Rattigan Years

In March 1986, Thomas J. Rattigan replaced Smith as Commodore's CEO.
Rattigan was hired in April of 1985 with the understanding that he
would replace Smith, who remained on as a director. Rattigan's
objective during the first few months of his leadership was clear -
cut costs in order to stabilize Commodore's position, allowing it to
rebuild. Once again, the payroll was trimmed from top to bottom, and
three plants were closed in five months. New controls were added in
the finance department to prevent the sloppy reporting that had
undermined Smith's leadership.

Commodore continued to sell respectable numbers of its $150 C64
throughout 1986. The Commodore 128, a successor to and more powerful
machine than the C64, was selling for $300 at the time, also helping
to keep the company afloat.

Rattigan's policies worked. By March of 1987, Commodore had caught up
on its loans and posted a $22 million earning in the quarter ending
December 1986. It also had $46 million in the bank, the most cash
since 1983, its most profitable year.



Amiga

Commodore's next move was to release the Amiga line of home computers.
Code-named 'Lorraine' during development, Amiga was quickly dubbed the
"save-the-company machine." The Amiga was packed with computing power.
At its center was a Motorola 68000, the same chip that powered Apple's
original Macintosh. The Amiga had an additional set of three custom-
designed chips, one to handle stereo sound, one for graphics and one
for animation. The Amiga was also one of the first computers to mult
-task, performing several different computing jobs at once - such as
word processing and game playing.



The Post-Rattigan Years

On April 22, 1987, Rattigan was replaced by Chairman Irving Gould, the
venture capitalist who had been involved with Commodore for over 20
years. It is unclear as to why Rattigan was replaced after turning the
company around and posting $28 million in profits over the four
quarters ending in March 1987. Rattigan himself claimed that he was
forced out by Chairman Gould due to personality conflicts and that
Gould was upset about Rattigan getting credit for the company's
turnaround. Gould argued that the comeback in the U.S. was
insufficient compared to its rebound in overseas markets, which
accounted for 70% of its sales. In fact, despite its profitability,
Commodore's U.S. revenues had declined by 54% in the same four
quarters.

According to Gould's ideology, the North American operation was to be
a sales and marketing extension of the company, rather than the
unwieldy, semi-independent entity it had become. For the third time in
Commodore history, a new leader began his term at the helm by
drastically downsizing. Under Gould's reign, the payroll was cut from
4,700 to 3,100, including half the North American headquarters'
corporate staff, and five plants were closed.



Current

On April 29, 1994, Commodore International announced that it had been
unable to renegotiate terms of its outstanding loans and was closing
down the business. The liquidation process lasted for months, owing
largely to the far-reaching size of the corporation. In addition, the
fact that the company was incorporated in the Bahamas while a large
share of the creditors were from the United States made legal
proceeding tense and drawn out. On April 20, 1995, almost a full year
later, Commodore was sold to the German company ESCOM for
approximately 10 to 12.5 million dollars.

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End of the Project 64 etext of the Hacker help file.

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