“Another visitor. Stay a while… stay forever!”
- Impossible Mission, 1984 (Electronic Speech Systems)
Key Personnel
The founders, programmers, producers, composers, and engineers who made Epyx one of the most influential game companies of the 8-bit era.
Jon Freeman co-founded Automated Simulations with Jim Connelley in 1978 in Sunnyvale, California. Freeman's background was in game design - he had co-written Dunjonquest with Connelley - and he was instrumental in steering the company's early RPG output. Freeman also co-designed the tabletop RPG Escape from New York and contributed to the theoretical writing on game design that would influence the field for decades.
Jim Connelley co-founded Automated Simulations alongside Jon Freeman and served as the company's technical lead in its early years. Connelley's engineering skills underpinned the early Dunjonquest titles and helped establish Automated Simulations as a technically capable publisher before the Epyx rebrand.
Dennis Caswell programmed Impossible Mission for Epyx on the Commodore 64 in 1984. The game was a technical tour de force: fluid sprite animation - over 140 frames for the main character - and the revolutionary integration of Electronic Speech Systems (ESS) technology for digitised human voice. The line "Another visitor. Stay a while… stay forever!" became one of the most quoted phrases in gaming history. Zzap!64 awarded Impossible Mission 98%, one of the publication's highest-ever scores. Caswell returned to develop Impossible Mission II in 1988.
Randy Glover created Jumpman for Epyx in 1983 on the Atari 8-bit, with ports to the Commodore 64 and Apple II. The game featured 30 single-screen levels of increasing complexity - defusing bombs across ladders, ropes, and platforms - and is considered an early classic of the platform genre. Glover followed it with Jumpman Junior in the same year, a more accessible companion piece with twelve stages.
Kathy Bachus-Kosaka served as producer on multiple Epyx Games series titles, including Summer Games II (1985) and World Games (1986). Her production credits helped ensure that each instalment of the series raised the bar on the last - maintaining the quality and polish that made the Games series commercially dominant in the mid-1980s home computer market.
Chris Grigg composed the music for California Games on the Commodore 64 in 1987. His score is exceptional: each of the six sporting events has its own theme, including a memorable arrangement of "Louie Louie" for the surfing event that became one of the most recognisable pieces of SID music ever written. Grigg worked on multiple Epyx titles during the peak years, and his California Games score remains one of the finest achievements in C64 music. The full score is preserved in the HVSC and playable via DeepSID.
The digitised speech in Impossible Mission - "Another visitor. Stay a while… stay forever!" - was produced using technology from Electronic Speech Systems (ESS). ESS provided the speech synthesis chip and voice data. At the time of Impossible Mission's release in 1984, this was among the earliest examples of convincing digitised human speech in a home computer game. The effect was shocking and memorable in equal measure, and no player who heard it in 1984 ever forgot it.
RJ Mical was one of the two lead engineers who designed the hardware that became the Atari Lynx. Before joining Epyx, Mical had worked on the Amiga computer at Commodore/Amiga Inc., where he developed the OS kernel and helped design the revolutionary graphics architecture. At Epyx, Mical and Dave Needle designed a colour backlit handheld - the "Epyx Handy" - that was technically superior to the Game Boy in virtually every respect. The hardware was sold to Atari in 1989 when Epyx could not fund production.
Dave Needle co-designed the Epyx Handy alongside RJ Mical. Like Mical, Needle had worked on the Amiga before joining Epyx, co-designing the Amiga's custom chips with Jay Miner. The Handy's custom blitter chip - capable of hardware sprite scaling - was a remarkable achievement for a portable device in 1986. Needle and Mical's work at Epyx produced a genuine piece of computing history, even if financial circumstances prevented Epyx from seeing it to market themselves.