Preppie Three?

Avram · February 20, 2005

Last night I found an interview with Russ Wetmore, the programmer of Preppie 1 and 2 (plus Sea Dragon and Homepak) and discovered he had been working on a third Preppie title plus another unreleased game that consisted of a "three-dimensional room filled with bouncing balls which the player must drop through holes in the floor".

The interview can be found here: http://www.atarihq.com/othersec/library/wetmore.html

Anyone know anything about these two games?

Avram · February 23, 2005

Well, I managed to get in touch with Russ Wetmore a couple of days ago and got this response from him about Preppie 3:

"Some conceptual work was done on Preppie 3, but nothing ever came of it. When I was interviewed for Electronic Games (the only place I ever mentioned P3) I was in New York for an awards ceremony and had just come from a brainstorming session to come up with some talking points for the press. The interview was more to generate buzz than to promote future products, and when the bottom fell out of the games market in the coming months, I gave up game writing to focus on other types of software, notably HomePak.

At the time, I was talking about P3 but was actually working on an original

game called "Lulu". It was a one-screen action game featuring jungle animals as characters. The premise: there were six ponds of water at an oasis and various animals and birds were drinking from the ponds, emptying them. Lulu was an elephant, and would have to run to a well to fill up her trunk and run back to refill the ponds before they completely emptied. (I know, why didn't the animals drink from the seemingly bottomless well?...) Some animals would drink on a regular basis, some birds would swoop in and drink randomly, and other animals (notably monkeys) would toss things at Lulu trying to trip her up. The gameplay was half action- and half strategy-oriented."

Russ mentions he still has "some source code and drawings" so I hope he'll get around to posting them someday.