When I recieved my copy of Raid 2020, I saw that on the box it mentioned a Frank Waung as well as Dan Burke. You may have heard about Frank if you read that recent interview I did with Dan Burke. After a ffew months of searching, I finally got in touch with Frank Waung, and even though he only worked on Raid 2020 as Freelance project, but nonetheless he has some really cool memories to share with us. Ever drink a 2 liter bottle of Mountain Dew to stay awake late at night?

FW: I got interested in Color Dreams because of an ad they ran in the newspapers looking for game programmers. When I showed up at the meeting, they told us, about 25 respondents, that they have figured out a way to get around the key chip, and therefore can make and sell NES games. We were supposed to write a game and story board it for the next meeting. We also had to find a partner who would be doing the art work for the game. After the meeting we all went our separate ways to come up with a game. I went to an arcade near a mall (near Alicia Parkway in Orange County) and met Leo for the first time. He was just playing games. We spoke and I told him I was looking for help to write a game. He was very enthusiastic and it was through Leo that I met Dan Burke, who was (and is) an amazing artist with a wicked hand for air brushes. The three of us hit it off and Leo was responsible for writing while Dan was responsible for Art and I was to do the programming part.

Then the long nights started. I was working as a systems programmer for Unisys at the time, and when I come home at 5 PM, Dan and I would work till 2am in the morning. Leo came a few times at first but soon the writing part was done. The game was originally called Drug Czar but Color Dreams thought the work drug would cause problems with parents, so we changed it to Raid2020. Coding the NES was not very straight forward since everything had to be done in assembly with a cross compiler and internal 6502 registers were all latched. (We used this proprietary kit supplied to us by Color Dreams.) I think when I was finally done after 6 months I wrote some thing close to 20 thousand lines of assembly code. Dan was the art director. Soon we found that we needed music so Dan and I both started to work on that. Dan was by far more musical than I was. To stay awake we used to drink 2-litres worth of Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew every night. We pile up all the empty bottles on the porch and soon we had a collection. Sometimes, just to get some fresh air Dan and I would go out and drive in my Integra at 1am in the morning. I remember once we went to PCH and drove through Laguna Beach at 2 in the morning.

After six months the game the deadline came and we finally received some money from Color Dreams. Dan used the money to buy a new Korg M1 keyboard and down payment on his Civic while I bought another computer. The royalty check afterwards were small since Raid2020 was not that popular, In retrospect, I think we needed more people to design the game and more time to refine it. But the gaming industry is similar to the movie industry in that it is very hard to predict which movie was going to be a hit. I thought it was a great experience no matter how much payoff we got. It was a pleasure working with Dan Burke and also Leo. Most importantly, we tasted what it was like to be an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, actual interaction with Color Dreams was minimal in my case because I had a full time job.