TWZ: First, you said your latest Solitaire game for PC was based off of the NES solitaire?

LW: Yes I did mostly graphics. My latest release was Funsol 2002. It has 460 different games. It can be found on our site.

TWZ: My favorite Odyssey game was Deathbots. What did you do towards it, the NES version, Amiga version, or both?

LW: Yes I did that, the programming part and graphics for the Amiga. George ported it to the NES.

TWZ: Who originally thought up the idea?

LW: Art and I did, based it on another game, can't think of the name of it. It was a real old game, you fought in rooms, not Scrambler but similar name. We also made a Pacman and Breakout clone, Pacman was Byteman.

TWZ: Do you know how the Amiga version of Deathbots compares to the NES version, graphics and limitation wise?

LW: Yes, kinda. The NES version was pretty bad. 8 bit character graphics, yuck. George did that job.

TWZ: Byteman, never played it either. Did you do Jailbreak?

LW: Yes. We made a CDTV game called Super Games Pack that had all 3 of them and we made Spacewars, an Asteroids clone, kinda. It was on CDTV.

TWZ: When did you join Odyseey? 1991? I think Odyessey was formed around 1990, 1991, somewhere in there.

LW: Odyssey started in a bedroom like most companies of the day. It was called Northstar Software, formed January 1990 by Art Cestaro. Then he renamed it to Odyssey.

TWZ: How did you get involved with Odyssey?

LW: Art found out about me through a computer club we went to in Dennis. It was a pirate ring actually, located in the basemant of a sewing machine repair shop. lol.

TWZ: What was the first game you did for Odyssey?

LW: We started with Byteman. I did all my programming in assembler 68000. I did the entire game myself, same with Jailbreak and Deathbots.

TWZ: Did you work on the graphics on any of the NES games or just Amiga? Did you guys have any special graphics program used?

LW: The NES graphics were my graphics from the Amiga converted. Art and George converted them. I think we used Deluxe Paint. Then they were broken into 8 by 8 blocks for the NES characters and had to be made into maps using a tile editor. George did this part though. We used an AVE utility, a map maker to make levels out of characters, a burner, an assembler, stuff like that.

TWZ: Do you know why Odyssey didn't make the games themselves? Wouldn't they have gotten more money?

LW: Art wasnt very good with business.

TWZ: Were you involved with Cue Stick at all? It was a heavily rumored NES game that went unreleased.

LW: George did that. It was delayed so much, had problems, bugs. Some formula, the gravity or something was messing up, the balls wudnt follow the rules. It's complex especially if there's lots of balls together. These balls were sprites and had collisiontransfer of energy and vectors. Each ball had a direction and velocity. Trying to do floating point on an 8 bit processor is maddening. George was addicted to games and would play RPGs late into the night delaying that grueling task of making the balls work.

TWZ: Solitaire on NES is cool. I realize the 'winning' music is ripped from the intro to Dudes w/ Attitude, another AVE game. Or was it the other way around?

LW: We had permission to do that, not sure which way but AVE owned it so it was okay. Some of those solitaire graphics have survived all the way to the current version off Funsol. In the middle of the cards are now the tiny suits in Funsol.

Odyssey had severe financial troubles during the 90s recession. No one was payed for 3 years. There was one last burst of activity, he got a big contract with Color Dreams and even got an office and Sega tooand we made this shooting laser cd game.

TWZ: When did Odyssey go out?

LW: 1995. Art hired this synical manager, an old friend of mine, to manage the office. He did it all wrong and I left and Odyssey went under for good. A year later Softgame company was born.

TWZ: In all those years, what games did Softgame put out?

LW: They did Funsol, Funcard, Funpok, Inside world, and a graphics viewer that is dicontinued. When I left Odyssey and started my company I went shareware. Best choice I ever made. I learned form Art's mistakes.