Games by Apollo

In 1980, Pat Roper was president of Texas-based National Career Consultants (NCC), a producer of educational films. He knew nothing about the games industry, but while playing NFL Football on the Intellivision, he realized that there was money to be made. Roper formed a game company called Games by Apollo, citing the name "Apollo" as a recognizable symbol of youth and activity. Instead of hiring away existing game designers from Mattel or Atari, as some developers had done, Roper placed an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News and the San Francisco Chronicle. Sent a copy of the Morning News ad by a friend, a young programmer from Iowa named Ed Salvo contacted Roper to pitch him Skeet Shoot, a game he had developed in about four weeks. Roper flew Salvo to Dallas and offered to make him lead developer for the nascent company. Salvo initially turned him down, thinking it was too risky. After Salvo returned to Iowa, Roper contacted him and offered to buy Skeet Shoot for $5,000. Salvo accepted and agreed to a contract to develop a second game, Spacechase. With Games by Apollo now a going concern, Roper gave Salvo the job of director of development; his first job was to hire 25 programmers to develop games. ==Market presence==

Games by Apollo was, after Activision, among the first third-party developers for the Atari 2600. Spacechase would become Apollo's bestselling title. By the end of 1982, Apollo also moved into designing games for the Atari 5200, ColecoVision, and Intellivision. None of these games made it into production before Apollo closed its doors in late 1983. Under pressure from Benton & Bowles, the company's advertising agency, Apollo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 12, 1982. Apollo owed Benton & Bowles $2.5 million, which represented only half of the year-old firm's total debts. Apollo president Patrick Roper's hoped to reorganize the company and return in smaller form, but that did not come to pass. Programmer Larry Martin stayed until the end, recalling that he had been working around-the-clock for several weeks, trying to finish the game Guardian. Immediately after he released it to manufacturing, the creditors moved in with court orders and shut the company down." ==Games developed==

• Final Approach • Guardian • Infiltrate • Lost Luggage • Pompeii (unreleased) • Racquetball • Shark Attack (aka Lochjaw) • Skeet Shoot • Space Cavern • Spacechase • Squoosh (unreleased) • Wabbit ==References==