![]() ![]() These games were very, very good for Access in general, but something of a mixed blessing for Chris Jones, who was now working full-time for the company, keeping track of all the money they were bringing in. #Tex murphy under a killing moon cast seriesHe and his brother Roger Carver made a golf game called Leader Board in 1986, which begot World Class Leader Board the following year, which in turn begot the long-running Links series in 1990. Raid Over Moscow and Beach-Head II, more games in the same style, did almost as well in 19.Īfter that, however, Bruce Carver stumbled upon the subject matter that would sustain Access for almost two decades. Thanks to Carver’s programming chops and Jones’s instinct for cinematic drama, Beach-Head became the breakout hit that put Access on the map upon its release in October of 1983. Like virtually everything else Jones would ever do on a computer, this first game was inspired by his love of movies - in this case, by rah-rah World War II movies starring John Wayne and similarly lantern-jawed leading men. Thus he sketched out the scenario for a multi-part action game called Beach-Head, which Carver then proceeded to implement in code. Jones initially joined the venture, whose offices would move back and forth between Salt Lake City and Bountiful as it grew, as its part-time sales representative and accountant, but he quickly grew fascinated with the creative potential of the new medium his friend was exploring. #Tex murphy under a killing moon cast softwareHe discovered a latent genius in himself as soon as he began to program it, and founded Access Software to publish his work. Jones had a friend named Bruce Carver, who in 1982 bought one of the first Commodore 64s ever sold in Utah. Meanwhile Jones wound up an accountant at an engineering firm in Salt Lake City. He parlayed that gig into an impressive career he won an Emmy Award in 1988 for his work on Muppet Babies. After university, Vandegrift switched from acting for a camera to drawing for one, landing a job with Hanna-Barbera illustrating Saturday-morning cartoons. Inspired by these experiments, Vandegrift went off to university to study acting, while Jones, being of a more practical bent, went out for finance. Judging from the few fragments of their movies that have survived, they were hopelessly square - it’s hard to believe that they’re contemporaneous with the likes of Woodstock and Easy Rider - but also clever and endearingly cheeky. Chris Jones, Doug Vandegrift, and a collection of assorted siblings, cousins, and friends spoofed the things they were watching at the local cinema and on television: Batman, Tarzan, Mission: Impossible. She was doubtless doing the same in the late 1960s, when a handful of Bountiful kids started to shoot their own movies on the new Kodak film format of Super 8. (“We hope that gang activity can be stopped before it takes a foothold.”) The same issue looks forward to “patriotic Americana” in the city park with “Utah Voices and the 23rd Army Band.” Somewhere in Bountiful, one senses, a middle-aged matron is still shaking her head disapprovingly over Elvis Presley and those gyrating hips of his - “and yet he seems such a nice, well-spoken young man otherwise…” ![]() An issue from 1993 notes with alarm that a gang (!) has been formed, whilst going on to add a little reluctantly that it doesn’t appear to have committed any actual crimes yet. The city’s newsletters have a weirdly anachronistic tone, regardless of their cover date. Like so many Mormon communities, Bountiful seems frozen in time, or rather out of time, a vision of a bucolic 1950s small-town America that barely ever existed in reality. Legend has it that its patriarch, a herdsman named Perrigrine Sessions, exclaimed, “Here at last is paradise on earth!” on the day in 1847 when he first looked down upon the lush valley where the city stands today. We couldn’t believe one CD could be filled up so quickly.īountiful, Utah, is the second city of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. ![]()
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