Unsung Heroes: Steve Bjork

The hardcore are more likely than most to recognize the "big names" of the early video and computer gaming era -- people like Rob Fulop, David Crane, Carol Shaw, Dan Gorlin, Eugene Jarvis, Jeff Minter, Scott Adams, Nasir Gabelli, Roberta Williams, Steve Meretzky... the list goes on. These designer-programmer-producers made a splash in the pioneering days, when a lone designer or a small team could think up, program, and even market a game largely on his/her own. Today, they are respected for their innovative ideas, their unique styles, or their ability to squeeze performance and gameplay out of the primitive hardware of the time.

One gentleman that never got much broader recognition is Mr. Steve Bjork, who did a lot of programming for the TRS-80 Color Computer at Datasoft back in the day. I met him once at a RAINBOWFest show in Chicago, and remember him as a portly, affable gentleman who was willing to share his technical insights in person, though he couldn't often be bothered to write them up for publication. He was fairly prolific, too -- I played several of his games myself on the CoCo -- and he later moved on to console programming in the 8- and 16-bit era.

I wouldn't call him an innovative designer -- his output consisted mostly of adaptations and conversions from other platforms -- but he was a talented programmer who worked in a variety of genres. My earliest encounters with his work were the unlicensed Popcorn (a straight take on Atari's Avalanche, which also inspired Activision's Kaboom!) and Clowns & Balloons (Exidy's Circus.) Later I played his conversion of Datasoft's illustrated adventure Sands of Egypt and his official conversion of Sega's Zaxxon, which was very smooth and impressive, blowing Elite Software's unlicensed (and terribly named) Zaksund out of the water. Bjork also handled Color Computer conversions of Activision's Pitfall II, EA's One on One, Midway's Rampage, and many other popular titles, although even then he continued to dabble in "original" games like Ghana Bwana (inspired by Congo Bongo.)

To appreciate Bjork's work, you have to understand that the Color Computer had one thing going for it -- Motorola's spiffy 6809E processor -- and many counts against it, especially when it came to gaming. The joystick had luxurious analog sensitivity but was not self-centering, and the "chiclet" keyboard wasn't very responsive. There was no sprite or music hardware provided to simplify graphics and audio programming, meaning precious CPU cycles had to be consumed to do everything a game required. The graphics capabilities were limited, with a "hidden" 4-color black background mode that Radio Shack never officially supported, as it was unpredictable whether the palette would boot up as black-red-blue-white or black-blue-red-white. Even the speedy microprocessor was a bit of a disadvantage from a publishing perspective, as it made conversion from contemporary 6502-based platforms like the Apple II, Commodore 64 and Atari 400/800 tricky.

So what I appreciated about Mr. Bjork's work is that he made a serious effort to work around the CoCo's hardware limitations, while many other game programmers just accepted the rough edges. He cared about things like aligning his frame updates with the vertical blanking interrupt and spending precious memory on page-flipping, avoiding the rampant flickering common to CoCo games. He found ways to make sound effects work without visibly interrupting the animation, another jarring flaw in too many titles. He made it possible for some fairly sophisticated designs to cross the border into my backwater gaming territory growing up, and I doubt too many other programmers could have managed it, or would have bothered to try.

Steve Bjork never got a lot of press back in the day, and I have no idea what made him so loyal to the platform, but without his dedicated efforts Color Computer users would have missed out on a number of worthwhile games. And he stuck with the CoCo even past the point where it could have been (I imagine) even remotely commercially viable to code for it.

Thanks for the good times, Steve.