Rob Fulop (Demon Attack, Night Driver, Cosmic Ark) at CGE

[digitalpress]

I'm going to announce the industry legends we've confirmed attendance for at this year's Classic Gaming Expo at the Classic Gaming Expo site, but in this forum I'm going to detail them so you can take note of which games and items that you might want to bring along for signatures!

Rob Fulop

Rob Fulop has been a pioneer in the commercialization of interactive digital media from its earliest days in Silicon Valley. He joined the original Atari in 1978 where he developed home versions of Night Driver and Missile Command, which sold over 2.5 million copies. Mr. Fulop left Atari in 1981 to co-found Imagic, a high growth video game start-up. As the lead game designer of Imagic, he crafted two of the company's three best selling products, Demon Attack, which was voted Billboard's Video Game of the Year in 1982, and Cosmic Ark, which sold over one million copies. Mr. Fulop was named Billboard's Video Game Designer of the Year in 1983.

As an independent producer of interactive entertainment from 1983-1985, Mr. Fulop's Rabbit Jack's Casino for AOL quickly became the online industries first "hit", and was ported to four platforms. For Hasbro, America's largest toy company, from 1986-1988, Mr. Fulop engineered the design and production of two feature length interactive movies. Both of these titles, Sewer Shark and Night Trap were later released through Digital Pictures and were the companies two best selling CD-ROM titles.

Mr. Fulop's interest in combining sponsorship with interactive media led to the development of many widely distributed floppy disk, and CD-ROM multimedia promotional titles for clients such as Buick, PARS, American Express, and Apple computers.

As the founder and Creative Director of PF. Magic, a "multimedia gulch" startup in 1990, Mr. Fulop produced and directed Third Degree and Max Magic for Phillips Interactive Media. Max Magic went on to win the Melia Award for "Best New Entertainment Title" of 1995. At PF. Magic, supervising a growing design staff, Mr. Fulop invented the computer pet, and served as co-designer of DOGZ, the company's breakthrough title which, together with the sequels CATZ, ODDBALLZ, DOGZ II, and CATZ II have sold over two million copies world-wide, and have won countless awards, including the Oppenheimer Platinum Award of 1997.

After PF. Magic was acquired by The Learning Company in 1998, Mr. Fulop shifted his focus on the Internet as a platform for wide scale distribution of future interactive entertainment experiences he is currently developing. He has spoken at virtually all of the industry's leading conferences, and he has been profiled in a range of publications including Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Forbes, and Wired Magazine.

[rolenta]

It's good to see Rob attending again. He was one of the earliest supporters of CGE. He appeared at The World of Atari in 1998 and the first (and maybe second) CGE.

[Pantechnicon]

Excellent. Rob is one of my heroes. It never occurred to me until I met the guy at CGE `99 how much impact he had on my formative years (translation: As a teenager I played a hella lotta 2600 Missile Command and Demon Attack). Looking forward to seeing him again.

[ubikuberalles]

Yay! It's been a while since he's been at CGE and I'm glad he'll be back this year. I remember his talks at previous CGEs and enjoyed them thoroughly. I look forward to seeing him again.