Dreamsteep

It’s a safe bet that many of today’s multimedia developers found their first inspiration for the possibilities of combining computers with audio-visual elements in the hit video arcade games of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dave Theurer developed two of those game classics, Missile Command and Tempest, while a programmer at Atari. As one of the superstar game designers of that era, Theurer encountered first-hand the challenge of preparing thousands of images for use in games. That, plus the needs of his computer artist friends, led him to develop DeBabelizer, a software tool that, since its commercial release by Equilibrium Technologies in January 1993, has become indispensable for working with images in multimedia development and other graphical applications. Equilibrium recently released a low-priced version of the program called DeBabelizer Lite. Morph caught up with Dave Theurer in San Francisco to talk about the challenges of programming with graphics and other multimedia elements.