TWZ: Was Top Fuel Challenge your first experience in the gaming field? Was there any hidden "easter eggs" in that game? I know that alot of the older games were filled with secrets, now they don't have as many surprises.

RB: Shirley Muldowney's Top Fuel Challenge was the complete C64 name, I also did another racing game called Richard Petty's Talladega which I did for C64 and ported it to the Atari 800/1200 computers, it actually got better reviews, I just saw the actual paper version of it the other day in my closet, I'll see if I can get those doc's scanned as they have many other game reviews in them. RB: I'll have to think about easter eggs, mostly the one's I had in my games had to do with cheats to skip to other levels, etc.

TWZ: Did you work on any games after Top Fuel Challenge before working at Color Dreams?

RB: Let's see, I got my first non-exclusive agreement with Atari's APX (Atari Program Exchange) in 1981 for 'The Bonifas' a game that almost within the same week was picked up by COSMI and renamed 'Aztec Challenge'. I was in high school at the time. Atari wanted some minor changes to it, whereas COSMI wanted a simultaneous 2 player option which made it a very fun 2 player game. The Atari changes were never completed and subsequently they never actually sold one copy of it. COSMI had 'Aztec Challenge' as their first hit and it did pretty well. I ended up working for COSMI under contract for many years (9+). Almost immediately after signing on at COSMI for 'Aztec Challenge' they asked me if I could do some games for some box art that had already been finished and they didn't want to waste it. I ended up doing 'Meltdown' which was a Frogger Style rip-off that featured nuclear reactors and you had to run around and de-activate them. Next I did a game called 'Caverns of Khafka' for some box art that looked like something from an Indiana Jones movie complete with the big boulder rolling after the guy. Caverns of Khafka got some good reviews. So the rest of the COSMI lineup goes something like: 'E-Factor', 'Delta Man', 'Chomp!', 'Super Huey' for the Atari, (Paul Norman did the original C64 version), 'Nav Com 6' for the Atari, 'Richard Petty's Talladega' both the C64 and Atari Versions, 'Shirley Muldowney's Top Fuel Challenge' for the C64. Later we released another version of 'Aztec Challenge' that featured 'Instant Replay' for the Atari. 'Professor I.Q.' an educational game (yuck) for Atari and C64, I did some 'PC Atlas' program in DOS when COSMI stopped making games, and that's about the time I left COSMI. I think there may be others, but at the time I was producing a game roughly every 4-6 months or so I also fixed bugs for some other COSMI titles including, 'Crypts of Plumbous' and 'Spider Invasion' I helped Vance Kozik write the game, 'Slinky' (his first game) while he was my roomie in San Bernardino, (I subsequently got him a job at Color Dreams later) and he subsequently wrote the Atari version of 'Forbidden Forest' of which Paul Norman wrote the original C64 version.

TWZ: Why/when did you start working at Color Dreams?

RB: I went to Color Dreams when COSMI decided not to publish games anymore, and while at Color Dreams I wrote the 'King Neptune's Adventure' using Dan Lawton's state machine for the NES. It had some really wild easter egg in it that was part of a sweepstakes where one cartridge actually could win the player some prize (I forgot what it was maybe money?). I also helped debug a game called 'Pesterminator the Western Exterminator' andthen started a new project when Color Dreams went all Wisdom Tree and started making bible games, that's when I left.

I worked at MindCraft for a few years and released 'Strike Squad' and 'Tegel's Mercenaries' with an artist that I met at Color Dreams named Dan Burke. Dan Burke and I left to THQ after MindCraft and did 'Bass Master's Classic' for the Sega Genesis and I also got some royalties and credit for the SNES version of which Bob Polaro programmed (Bob ended up being my roomate in Calabasas for a time and also has a claim to fame of being the guy who did the 2600 version of 'Defender' the popular coin-op and many Atari APX games)

TWZ: Did you work on any games (in general) which never made release? If so, could you please tell me a little bit about them?

RB: Dan Burke and myself started Nocturnal Entertainment when THQ laid off the entire internal development department and became roomates in Simi Valley for a year while we worked on a game called 'WAR' I wrote the 3D Game engine for it, networking code, etc. We tried a few times to find a publisher for it, however we didn't want to go budget software and in the end it was put on the shelf when I started working on Interactive TV software. The main reason I did this was due to the fact that if I worked for a game company again they'd consider it a conflict of interest, so the ITV stuff wasn't. In the long run, I got so involved with my ITV projects that I never got back to the WAR game and Dan Burke ended up working in Irvine for another game company. We still have the Nocturnal website up, however nothing has really changed since then ...

TWZ: What is the favorite game you worked on? How about in general?

RB: I think the games that did the best were always the ones that I had complete creative control over, and they were always the most fun to work on, these included: 'Aztec Challenge', 'Caverns of Khafka', 'Richard Petty's Talladega', 'Chomp!' and of course WAR (even though it was never finished, I learned so much writing it and had fun in the process). In the end I'll go back to some sort of Entertainment Software be it games or itv or ???

TWZ: Are you really Sir Robert Bonifacio, or was the "sir" part added in King Neptune's Adventures just for a little bit of fun?

RB: The 'Sir' part on the KNA was just in fun ...