Orson Scott Card, Compute! Books

Orson Scott Card is a Hugo Award winning, best-selling science fiction author, perhaps best known for his 1985 novel, Ender's Game.

But we're not here to talk about that — because for about nine months, Orson Scott Card was an editor at Compute! Books, where we worked on several books about the Atari 8-bit and other computer platforms. His work appears in Compute!'s Third Book of Atari and Compute!'s Second Book of Atari Graphics.

He also wrote extensively for Compute! magazine, primarily about computer games. His FontByter and ScreenByter graphics utilities for the Atari computers were published in Compute! His short story The Lost Boys features a character that plays games on an Atari computer.

This interview took place on January 5, 2018. A video version of this interview is also available.

Teaser quote: "I really miss programming. I miss those nights, starting after the kids were in bed — 8:30, 9 o'clock — just solving problems ... noticing that there was now light coming through the basement windows, and realizing that I had pulled an all-nighter ... just debugging three minutes of a game."