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In 1983, Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer, the first releases from Lucasfilm Games, were built with a system written in Lisp. It was a 6502 assembler with Lisp syntax and a Lisp-style macro facility, written in Portable Standard Lisp, running in Berkeley Unix on a 4MB VAX 11/750. Unfortunately it was eventually abandoned because the developer had left and it was a bit of a strain on the VAX that was shared by the whole development team.

Yes, I wrote it. Yes, it was my first non-academic programming job. Yes, the users complained about the parentheses, and the slowness. But, they also took advantage of the powerful macro facility.



Fond memories of Ballblazer. An amazing creation for a ~2 MHz 8 bit cpu.


Written by David Levine, http://grokware.com/dl/resume.html who credits the Lisp-based Macro Assembler in his resume!


> An amazing creation for a ~2 MHz 8 bit cpu.

I ran it on an Apple II. It had a 1 MHz 6502. And yet, it felt more responsive than my first IBM PC... Odd times.


> It was a 6502 assembler with Lisp syntax and a Lisp-style macro facility

And I had to use Merlin... Sadly, I couldn't afford a VAX :-(




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