A Website Dedicated To The Only Two Games Ever Produced By Entertainment Sciences
BOUNCER and TURBOSUB
Mark Mabry
(Programmer of Bouncer and Voice of 'Romeo)
I was the first "game programmer" hired by Rob when code development started for Bouncer (I was actually just a code jockey with no gaming experience who could crank out code... Geez - this thing was written in 6809 assembly language wasn't it?! Ah, the good old days of "manly" programming). I stayed through the "life" cycle of that game and after Rob left to join Sega, I started preliminary work on what was then called "Turbo Sub 2000", but I
was not in on the real development of that game. Fun fact: I was the voice of Bouncer's Romeo.
The company was bleeding money at the end of 1984 (mostly Bob Rauch's as I recall). Entertainment Sciences was way ahead of it's time in many ways -not just technology! Reliance on venture capital funding and employees paid in part with stock options and deferred salary with promises of astronomicalpayoffs for everyone...yes we were very bleeding edge by about 15 years.
I was the first of tech staff to leave after it became apparent we were in financial trouble...they had to pay me my deferred salary because of the scrutiny of the rest of the tech staff. I hear I was the only one to ever see that money. I think I even ran across my stock option certificate when I was moving about a year ago!
In any event, it was a strange time but much fun with a lot of very good people. If anyone has EPROMS laying around I certainly don't know about it. I am truly surprised that anyone (including myself) remembers Bouncer at all...
I have looked through your website this morning for a while as well as Googling a few others. Who knew people remembered or cared about this?? Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I take it you know who the whole cast of characters were besides Ulrich & Rob & Bob. Lars, David, Lonnie, Craig... I'll see if I can reach far
enough back into my memory to dredge up something of a narrative of the story of Bouncer & ES while I was there.
Lonnie was a second programmer that Rob hired some time after me, making a total of 3 game programmers for Bouncer. He was a recent transplant from
Illinois (maybe Iowa) who had previously worked for Bally (I think) doing mostly pinball stuff (I think). For the life of me I can't remember when he left. I think he might have voiced one of the other characters. Obviously my memory is quite fuzzy on a lot of details.
In all honesty, it was a great storyboard concept, but the game play was a bit redundant - higher levels simply got faster/harder - not more complex or
varied.
Wow...i just remembered...at some point you would hit a certain level of advancement, and the announcer would say "The Challenge Round!" - don't
quite remember what precisely the challenge round was however. Just remember it was a good five years before I could get that voice out of my head!
