There is another "Gray Chang" who is a nuclear engineer in Idaho, and another who is a film-score composer in Germany. I'm not related to either one.

My Game Design Career

In 1981, I bought an Atari 800 computer and began designing and programming games in my spare time as a hobby. I took my first game, Dog Daze, to the Atari Program Exchange (APX). APX was a division of Atari that marketed and sold games by independent programmers and paid royalties to the authors. They accepted my game for publication and it was an immediate success, much to my surprise.

I quit my regular job to work on games full time. I wrote my next game, Claim Jumper, for Synapse Software. It was also very successful, with many thousands of copies sold. I did not know it at the time, but the computer game market was in a boom that was about to go bust. Had I known that my game programming career would be so short, I would have worked harder to complete my remaining games in time!

I wrote an improved version of Dog Daze, called Dog Daze Deluxe; followed by my best game, Bumpomov's Dogs. Neither game was commercially successful due to the end of the computer game boom. Because I no longer had any income or recognition for my game programming work, I returned to my previous occupation as a technical writer. I have not written any games since Bumpomov's Dogs in 1983.

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©2003 Gray Chang