The Developers

Cosmic Cosmiads and Cosmic Jailbreak

Derek Hipkin (credited as “DJH” in game code) wrote two of the PET’s definitive arcade titles and had both published by Commodore Business Machines directly. Cosmic Cosmiads (1981) introduced a fuel mechanic that turned a Space Invaders clone into something genuinely strategic. Cosmic Jailbreak (1982) adapted Universal’s 1979 coin-op Cosmic Guerilla into a PETSCII prison-break scenario.

Both games were solo productions. Hipkin coded the entire game, designed the PETSCII graphics, and designed the mechanics.

The Royalty Dispute

After Cosmic Jailbreak shipped, Hipkin sought royalties from Commodore. The company initially denied that the game had been commercially released. Hipkin’s brother found and produced US advertising showing Cosmic Jailbreak as a Commodore best-seller. Confronted with the evidence, Commodore settled out of court. The dispute is documented in Games That Weren’t (which tracked the unreleased C64 version of Cosmic Jailbreak) and in Indie Retro News’s 2021 coverage.

Still Active

In June 2025, Hipkin posted a YouTube Short demonstrating loading Cosmic Cosmiads from tape on a real 1980s Commodore PET — a direct connection between the original development period and the present-day retrocomputing community.

924 Bytes That Changed Everything

Peter R. Jennings (born 1950, British-Canadian) attended the Midwest Regional Computer Conference in Cleveland in May 1976 and bought a MOS Technology KIM-1 single-board computer. Inspired by a Scientific American article on computer chess, he wrote a chess program in 924 bytes of 6502 machine code. He completed it on December 18, 1976.

On April 1, 1977 — April Fool’s Day, deliberately chosen — Jennings founded Micro-Ware to sell Microchess at $10 per cassette. When Chuck Peddle offered him $1,000 for the full rights, Jennings refused. By 1978, Micro-Ware had earned over $1 million from Microchess sales alone, making it the first commercially successful microcomputer game and the first to cross 10,000 copies sold.

Bobby Fischer and the ChessMate

In 1978, Commodore built a dedicated chess computer called the ChessMate using Jennings’s chess engine. Bobby Fischer — then the world’s most famous chess player — met Jennings and considered licensing his name for the device, though the deal was not concluded. The episode illustrates how rapidly “computer chess” had moved from academic curiosity to commercial product in just two years.

VisiCalc and the Killer App

In 1978, Jennings merged Micro-Ware with Personal Software, Dan Fylstra’s Cambridge-based distributor. He deferred his Microchess royalties to fund the development of VisiCalc — designed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet application, the first “killer app,” and the software that convinced businesses to buy Apple IIs by the thousands. Jennings’s willingness to defer his royalties made VisiCalc possible.

He later earned an MA in physics from SUNY Stony Brook and an MBA from McMaster University. The Computer History Museum holds an oral history recording of his Microchess account.

PET Space Invaders (1980)

Satoshi Matsuoka wrote PET Space Invaders in 1980 while still a high-school student in Tokyo. The game was a faithful PETSCII rendition of Taito’s arcade classic, written entirely in BASIC: the player tank fires at descending aliens who fire back; bunkers wear away faster than in the arcade; speed increases as aliens advance; no colour, only the basic speaker beep. By any measure, it was a remarkable achievement for a teenager.

HAL Laboratory and Satoru Iwata

Matsuoka frequented the PC section of Seibu Department Store in Ikebukuro — the first place in Japan to sell Commodore and Apple products. There he met Hitoshi Suzuki and Satoru Iwata, who would later become president of Nintendo. The three formed HAL Laboratory in 1980.

At HAL, Matsuoka was main programmer on Pinball (Famicom, 1984). Satoru Iwata was sub-programmer on the same title. Iwata said of the experience that he was initially assigned to Pinball because HAL’s president thought the game was simple enough that it didn’t need their best programmer.

TSUBAME and Academic Career

Matsuoka went on to become lead developer of Japan’s TSUBAME supercomputer project at the Tokyo Institute of Technology — one of the fastest supercomputers in the world at its peak. A high-school BASIC program on a Commodore PET was the starting point of a career that reached supercomputing leadership.