Postmortem: "Rescue on Fractalus!" - 40 Years Later

When the Lucasfilm Games Group (later Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts) launched, we were tasked with creating two "throwaway games" to test new processes in game development. This also lowered the extreme pressure of trying to create the "Star Wars of video games" on our first attempts. My game internally known as Rebel Rescue, Rescue Mission, and Behind Jaggi Lines eventually launched in 1984-1985 as Rescue on Fractalus!

What was widely considered an impossible task, rendering a realtime fractal landscape on an 8-bit home computer at high enough frame rates to make a compelling experience, was something we achieved through the brilliance of fractal wizard Loren Carpenter of the Lucasfilm Computer Division (our parent division at the time) with optimizations by Charlie Kellner (Apple employee #7).

On the 40th anniversary of the game's release, I'll go into some of the game's history, invaluable suggestions by George Lucas (including maybe the first video game jump scare), how the game was pirated before it was released, and why the game is still remembered by so many people.