A few days ago I had contacted Dave O'Riva, a nice guy who worked on numerous puzzle games for the NES such as Krazy Kreatures and Klax. Here Dave tries to answer some of my questions. Thanks.

TWZ: How did you get involved with programming NES games?

DO'R: I was asked to interview at Tengen by a guy I had worked with before on a PC racing game (never released). Oddly, they liked me enough to hire me in...

TWZ: When working at Tengen, how did you get assigned to working on Klax? I heard that the Blob Ball game was some kind of insiders joke or something is there some kind of story behind this?

DO'R: After Toobin' wrapped up, we were given our choice of a number of available coin-op ports, and Klax looked like the most interesting one to me.

Blob ball was just a lark. I wanted to have some humorous stuff on the cartridge, and the idea for this Pong-like "game" just sprang up. Most of it was coded in one evening, and then refined in "spare time" over the next week. The most common observation on it at the time was "I can't believe they let you ship with that."

TWZ: What year did Franz and you leave Tengen to form Bitmasters? 1991? Why did you decide to leave?

DO'R: Hmmm... I thought it was '90, but could be wrong. We were both concerned about the direction management was taking (unreasonably so, in retrospect - I was young and stupid :), and were both itching to do our own thing. Bitmasters was actually legally formed about 8 months after we left.

TWZ: I heard that you did some of the work on Krazy Kreatures, one of the best NES puzzle games made. The game was published by American Video Entertainment. Did the game do pretty well?

DO'R: Yeah, I wrote the sound driver and some special effects code, and did most of the artwork. It didn't do too badly - I remember getting a couple of checks back from it. Unlicensed games always seemed to have disappointing sales - go figure.

TWZ: At the end of Krazy Kreatures, there is a mention of a planned sequel. How far along did that game get? Were any levels planned out or anything?

DO'R: No. We thought about it a little bit, but negotiations to get paid for it didn't get very far, and we ended up taking a different contract. I was working on SNES tools at that point, and we were both more interested in the newer machines anyway.

TWZ: I'm guessing that you now work at Midway. Although I haven't been kept up with the recent games (I prefer the classics) what games are you working on now?

DO'R: Yes, I'm working for Midway now, primarily writing render engines. The current effort is an action/adventure called "Dr. Muto". Check out the May '02 issue of PSE2 (it's on the cover).

TWZ: Did any of your past works go unreleased?

DO'R: ROFL. Oh, yeah - I think the count is up to 4 or 5 now, not counting speculative prototypes. Most of the "unreleased" products were canceled in-flight for various reasons. Two were actually ready for shrinkwrap, and for entirely different reasons were never put into distribution. Unfortunately, the rights to all of them are still locked up by the folks that paid me to work on 'em, so I can't say much more.