By A.P.P.L.E. Staff
A never before seen Take 1 movie comes to us by way of its creator, Eric Iwasaki. Star Voyagers is a high action Take 1 movie which spans an entire 10 Apple II disk package!
According to Star Voyagers Creator, “When I stumbled upon Bill Martens’ Take 1 Movie Site, the timing couldn’t have been more amusing. I had just celebrated 30 years working as a game developer in the interactive entertainment industry…a career that my Take 1 creations helped launch.
The story of Star Voyagers began when I discovered Take 1 through friends when I was in middle school. This tool provided me with a unique creative outlet…one that helped me learn a lot about computer graphics, animation, and storytelling. While working with Take 1, I learned that I was far more interested in pixel-pushing than programming visuals, in writing stories more than code. I filled a portfolio with clips, screens, and one-line plot summaries to share with colleges (I was accepted into the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television as an incoming Freshman) and my first employer (I started working one week after graduating high school).
Years later, I broke the ice during a phone interview with Naughty Dog’s co-founder Jason Rubin by mentioning my use of Take 1. I had not realized he and his partner Andy Gavin created their first game Ski Crazed for Baudville using the Take 1 Programmer’s Toolkit. I spent the next 13 years working as an artist at Naughty Dog on three very successful video game franchises. The irony in all of this is the fact that I never actually owned an Apple II. I would be quite remiss if I did not thank my friends’ parents for letting me borrow so much time on their computers during my high school years.
While heavily influenced by Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Robotech, Star Voyagers 3000 was my most original and ambitious personal project during my high school years. Unlike many of my early Take 1 movies, I created the entirety of its art and animation. Sharing this trailer was a no-brainer as it can serve as a tease while I get the entire 10 disk episode ready for distribution.”
It was thanks to the advent of software emulation, my foresight to pressure a relative to pull his Apple IIgs out of storage and make disk images while my original floppy disks still held data, and the Take 1 Movie Site, I now have an online outlet for sharing my Take 1 efforts. Aside from admissions officers and my first employer, only my close circle of friends and relatives have seen them. As most of my early works were originally not intended to be viewed by the public, I probably won’t share everything I created…and many will require minor edits to get working (or to simply redact classmates’ names from the credits, associations that were made as an inside joke amongst friends).
You can download the Star Voyagers Trailer at:
https://take1.applearchives.com/disks/Star_Voyagers_3000-00-Trailer.dsk
