24009 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 250, Calabasas, CA 91302
circa 1983

I hesitate to include this gig with Sherwin Steffin’s little start-up venture because I never got paid for doing any actual work. But he and his partner, who managed a local computer store in Thousand Oaks, did loan me an Apple Lisa for a few weeks while they were trying to raise venture capital—and that was something.

I remember visiting the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on just such a sales mission. And later I found myself a guest at the Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium Club. Steffin’s dubious business plan listed me as a ground-floor employee who would help write educational courseware for Macintosh, which wasn’t really true because I was much more interested in games and animation.

Things didn’t work out with me since I had other irons in the fire. But BrainPower went on to publish ChipWits. I had designed the splash screen for that popular game (see above). In 2015, Apple released a sample code project called DemoBots, which looks suspiciously just like ChipWits.