Where are they now? - Greg Kuperberg and Paratrooper

Another game I used to enjoy playing on my old Multitech PC was a 1982 game called Paratrooper. Only now did I find out that the game is actually a clone of an Apple II game made a year earlier called Sabotage. The game involved you controlling an anti-aircraft turret that had to shoot down any threats to your position. Threats initially come in the form of helicopters dropping paratroopers (hence the name of the game). If you don't manage to shoot the paratroopers, their parachutes (so they could plummet to their death) or the helicopters, there's a very real chance that four paratroopers would eventually land next to your turret, form a human pyramid and blow you up. Just to make things interesting, if you happen to do well, bombers would then appear that would drop bombs on your position (and it's very hard to hit either the bomber or the bombs!).

The game was developed by Greg Kuperberg, a naturalised American who was originally born in Poland in the late 60s. During the early 80s, he developed three games for the IBM PC which would all turn out to be ports from other platforms (the other two games he developed were Pac-Man and J-Bird, a port of Q*Bert). He soon after enrolled into Harvard University and received a bachelor's degree in 1987. Greg is now a well published professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis.


To download the original Paratrooper (at a whopping 6.9kb!) go here.

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