Friends, we have reached the end of 2019 and with it comes the last Diary of An Arcade Employee podcast for the year – although having said that I have chosen to tackle Star Castle for this episode. Granted as I mention in the show itself that is NOT the game I had originally set out to record for the show. Star Castle was a popular title released by Cinematronics in 1980 – one that was designed by Tim Skelly – who you might know best for being the designer and programmer on Gottlieb’s 1982 hit Reactor. Although in addition with this particular show I also take a moment to shine the spotlight on another iconic game designer, Larry Rosenthal, who just happened to be the designer for the first wave of Vector graphic games such as Space Wars. With this show I must beg your indulgence on two matters, one is the fact that I am quite sick… so I am not sure how the quality of the episode is going to sound. The second matter is that there is a not so happy memory attached to Star Castle that I share with you – one that I think explains why my Father has never cared for video games.

As always with a Diary podcast I attempt to breakdown the gameplay of Star Castle and provide a few interesting tidbits about the game itself. Which in this case is how many times that it has managed to appear in movies and television since it was released to the wilds of the arcades back in 1980. I also manage to briefly discuss Yars’ Revenge and the efforts of the legendary Howard Scott Warshaw to bring Star Castle from the arcades to the Atari 2600. Furthermore I managed to find an extremely interesting interview with Tim Skelly from back in 1999 – one that you might want to take the time and check out.

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