Odyssey Software (located in Massachusetts) had entered into the Nintendo market sometime in 1990. Many people suspect that Odyssey was just another unlicensed Nintendo company, trying to make a quick buck. The story couldn't be farther from the truth; Odyssey was treading water the whole time they were cranking out NES games. I should probably tell the story from the beginning.

Art Cestaro began his computer career sometime during the Eighties. Cestaro would program game demos from his bedroom; this "company" was known as Northstar Software. By 1990, Art was ready to run a real software house so he renamed his company Odyssey Software.

One of the first guys to work at Odyssey Software was Lane Waters. Lane had met Art in a computer club located in Dennis. It's funny to mention that several of the former Odyssey Software employees all came from this computer club--George, Art, Scott, Lane, and Ranjeet. These guys would hang out in this club, located in the bottom of a sewing machine repair shop, and they would play computer games.

Art Cestaro had enjoyed working with the Amiga, so it was inevitable that the first several releases would be Amiga titles. Byteman was the first game Odyssey Software had produced, it was one of Art's Amiga concepts. Lane Waters had helped with the programming while Art Cestaro did graphics. Soren Young and Scott Lahteine had helped out with the music.

This wasn't the only time that Scott had worked with Art on an Amiga title. Scott and Art had put many hours into an Amiga game titled Dino Wars, which was eventually released by DigiTek. Ranjeet Singhal had worked quite a bit on the Dino Wars title. Ranjeet had created the original graphics for Dino Wars and he also contributed to the design. Scott and Ranjeet both worked at Odyssey Software for a little while. Scott left a few months after Odyssey had started, due to being unaccustomed to the style of collaboration at Odyssey. Scott's last project for Odyssey, a graphics engine, was never used for Scott took it with him when he left Odyssey.

Overall Odyssey had only produced four Amiga games. Lane Waters seemed to be the major programmer, writing the code for Byteman, Deathbots, Jailbreak, and Space War. Art Cestaro and Soren Young were the two main guys responsible for graphics.

By mid 1990, Art Cestaro had gotten a contract with Color Dreams to produce Moon Ranger for the Nintendo. Cestaro really didn't have an interest in programming Nintendo games; he needed the money to pay the bills and the opportunity landed itself on his doorstep.

George C. Rucker III had gotten himself involved in one of the Odyssey Software projects, and he stuck it out at Odyssey for four of five more years. Mike Smith and Steve Tilton had joined Odyssey around this time too.

When Odyssey Software had finished up the Moon Ranger project, Art got a contract with American Video Entertainment. American Video had been looking for small game companies that would be desperate enough to take to unlicensed Nintendo game programming. Odyssey needed the money, so they ported Deathbots over to the Nintendo system. George had worked on the game code and graphics while Mike Smith had composed the new music. American Video published the game, and Odyssey ended up having a long-lasting relationship with them.

By 1992, Odyssey Software was back to producing Nintendo games. Art Cestaro was fairly good at getting contracts to produce software, though his contracts were more often quantity (instead of quality). It also seemed that more often then not, the small contracts would take longer then the money would last. Art would get involved in another project and the cycle kept repeating itself.

George Rucker had programmed both Solitaire and Blackjack, which American Video had published. Three other Nintendo titles were worked on as well: Backgammon, Cue Stick (Pool), and Poker.

Cue Stick and Poker had both been completed. Odyssey Software passed the completed titles onto American Video Entertainment, which had folded upon itself before the games were pushed onto the market. It is quite a shame that Cue Stick wasn't published; lots of hard work was put into the pool title.

Sometime during the programming stage of Cue Stick, George Rucker had run into some problems involving the balls. George dedicated a large amount of time each day trying to fix the ball issue, and he did finally come up with a solution. Sadly the solution did not fix a problem for the unrealistic-super high-speed balls where the balls could theoretically pass through or nearly through each other. If the ball went fast enough, it would not register as a collision. During this stressful period, late at night George would then play his RPGs as an escape mechanism. As the project began to take longer than expected, this was viewed negatively by some of his co-workers.

After Cue Stick was passed on to American Video Entertainment, Robert Byrnes (famous billiards champion) signed a contract with AVE for Cue Stick. Robert had requested several of the last minute changes. At this point American Video Entertainment had been losing money since most gamers were moving onto bigger and better gaming consoles (Super NES, Genesis). A month or so before Cue Stick was to ship, American Video folded and the contract had ended.

At one point, (sometime in 92 or 93) Art Cestaro had contacted an agent up in Canada. This agent had landed Odyssey the Mad Dog McCree contract. Another group that Art had contracted with designed up a special version of Mad Dog, this version was not just a shooter. The game featured a built in poker game, a map, and some RPG elements. The problem with this idea was if you add too many game elements to one game, nobody is sure what the game is supposed to be. Some people might like the RPG elements while others might find them annoying.

The agent that got the Mad Dog McCree contract for Odyssey was also well engaged with Blizzard. The agent established a relationship with Blizzard's publisher. As most of you may already know, Blizzard was the company behind the Warcraft games. Odyssey was actually involved in the initial concept discussions pertaining to "FOG of War." Odyssey didn't coin the phrase, though they did discuss the idea and passed it along to Blizzard. Blizzard used the idea and it now appears in most of the RTS games of today.

George recalls that the Mad Dog images from the Laser Disk were being scanned and cleaned up by hand. During one of the Consumer Electronic Shows (CES) at Las Vegas, Odyssey was praised for the quality of their digitized video animations (how clean they were). Compared to the video processing of the time, by-hand cleanups produced excellent results. The manpower needed to produce these animations by hand was quite large. Another factor that Odyssey realized was that higher speed CD-ROMs and improved MPED compressors were around the corner. The other companies rejected Odyssey's approach once they realized the cost and time behind it.

Odyssey almost landed a contract from another company. The company was interested in having Odyssey do some video processing for them. They spent a week with Art though a contract was never signed and they did the video processing themselves. They might have used some of the techniques that were mentioned to them.

Towards the beginning of the Mad Dog McCree project, Art Cestaro had downloaded a multimedia movie that used Jerry Normandin's Multifli engine. Art got Jerry's telephone number from the credits and Jerry began working part-time at Odyssey in 1992. By 93, Jerry became a fulltime worker. One of Jerry's projects was to integrate the features from his engine into the Cool Odyssey Engine that George had previously written.

Sometime during the Mad Dog McCree project, funds had dried up. Since the game had been "hybrid," it didn't turn out too good. American Laser Disks thought that the video conversion was good, though they didn't like the actual game that was being worked. American Laser Disks decided to do the conversion of Mad Dog McCree themselves; you can still buy American Laser Disks version today. It was re-released at the low price of $10.