- Anne Westfall
Anne Westfall is an influential
game programmer of the 1980s. She is the wife of fellow game programmer,game designer andentrepreneur Jon Freeman .Career
In 1981, Westfall and her husband, Jon, left
Epyx , thevideo game developer and publisher her husband co-founded just three years earlier. Westfall cites a desire to learnassembly language and to work on the Atari 800 as one reason for their departure from Epyx.Together with game designer
Paul Reiche III , they startedFree Fall Associates to makecomputer game s free of the politics existing at the now larger Epyx.Free Fall was a pivotal company for the fledgling computer game publisher
Electronic Arts (EA) who, in 1984, was little more than a start-up. Free Fall signed EA's first two development contracts for games for the Atari home systems.Free Fall's first game for EA (not their very first game, "
Tax Dodge ", which was a commercial failure) was 1984'schess -like "Archon", which quickly became an enormous hit. EA naturally asked for a sequel, and Free Fall complied with the even more compelling "" delivered later that year. "Archon" and its sequel would eventually be ported to numerous other popular systems of the era. "Archon" is still considered a classic and hallmark game of the early home computer era.After "Archon" in all its ports ran their course, things slowed down for Free Fall. After Reiche left, Anne and Jon made online card games for Prodigy, but then seemed to give up on their company.
For several years, Anne was on the
board of directors of the Computer Game Developers Conference.Personal
Westfall met Jon at the
West Coast Computer Faire in 1980 while demonstrating her surveying program she wrote for theTRS-80 . Her booth was next to Automated Simulations' booth—later Epyx—where Jon was working. After dating for about six months, Freeman convinced Westfall to move closer and come to work at his company.External links
* [http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId=241/ MobyGames' entry on Westfall]
* [http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/FREEFALL.HTM Interview with Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall] from "Halcyon Days"
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