thresholds, more fuel is obtained, extending play. The player's ship can be shot; this simply resets the quality of enemies (and thus their point value) down to the lowest level. Player high scores are recorded at the end of each game. A novelty for an arcade game, players can input their initials next to their scores to mark the scores as theirs. Entering certain sets of initials into the high score table will cause the game to display certain messages. "DBR" will display "HI DAVE", "SKO" "HI SUSAN", and "TZM" "HI TED"—a reference to the authors' names. Development Ted Michon, an alumnus of California Technical Institute, was a technician for the arcade company Digital Games/Micronetics. There, he created an early microprocessor game called Night Racer before leaving the company in 1976 to found his own arcade company called Techni-Cal. He hired David Rolfe, an assembly programmer from the Institute who had no interest in video games, but was willing to solve coding problems. Michon was inspired by the spaceship battles in the film Star Wars, and devised a game that aimed to recreate the sense of freedom of space flight. Michon's girlfriend (and later wife), Susan Ogg, was the game's artist. The assets drawn were heavily borrowed from Star Wars, from the logo and the TIE fighter-like enemy ships to the X-wing-like laser cannons on the player's ship. The developers had hoped that they could secure a Star Wars license, which would have made their product the first official Star Wars video game. Michon chose a monitor that could display up to eight colors. To achieve this end, he designed what was probably a "color cell" system that was similarly employed by Commodore 64. To save memory, compromises were made such as stars possibly changing from white to blue when enemy ships pass in front of them. Next, to create a 3D effect, using a technique called sprite-scaling, Owen would draw different images of the same enemy spacecraft, and Rolfe would switch the sprites with larger versions as they approached the player. The result required an enormous 21 ROM chips to store the graphics and code. The developers entered a deal with Midway Manufacturing to publish the game, but Midway was unimpressed with the team's project, and its president, Hank Ross, suggested that the team replace the enemy starship with a witch on a bicycle in the style of The