Duane Blehm

3 Mar 2025

It surprises me that people much younger than I am (I’m sixty years old) are into retro computing—where a ‘retro computer’ might include the original Macintosh Plus — the very machine I cut my teeth on writing shareware games in the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s. I mean I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised — some thirty-five years have passed since. But wait until you’re my age. You may find yourself caught off guard when people call a machine vintage that you simply remember as a computer.

So I write this to address the newcomers that might look back on that as a “Golden Era” but not be as familiar with some of the more esoteric things that a super-fan at that time might have been expected to know.

To underscore my point, I might mention that when I started working at Apple in 1995 I would from time to time meet someone for the first time and they might say, “Hey, are you the guy that wrote the game, Glider?” And yet, toward the sunset of my career, a couple decades later, my manager might try to introduce me to someone with, “This is the guy that wrote Glider.” To avoid the embarrassment of blank stares, I started interrupting him and reminding him that no one now has probably heard of that game.

If my audience are vintage Mac enthusiasts you might already know that Duane Blehm was an early Macintosh shareware author. He was writing shareware games before I was and served as both a model and inspiration to me. I’ll tell you what little I know about him here because I was suprised to find recently, when I was on a retro-computing live-stream, that there were some retro fans that didn’t know what I knew about Duane. Maybe it is worth sharing.

Early Mac Shareware

If the name Duane Blehm does not register for 68K Mac fans though then I feel like the shareware game Stunt Copter will at least get a few nods of recognition.

Duane Blehm wrote Stunt Copter in 1986 — years before I even owned a Macintosh. Although it was his first game for the Macintosh, it had immediately a lot right about it. The mouse was the new interface device for the personal computer, unique to the Macintosh at the time, and all four of the games that Duane would release were heavily invested in the mouse — practically showcases for this new peripheral.

Like the yoke of a joystick (made visible in the lower-left corner of the game), you moved the mouse to change the pitch and collective of the eponymous “stunt copter”. The button on the mouse released the stunt man (a little stick figure dangling from the chopper landing gear). If you released the man at the right position at the right time he would fall through the air but land safely in a passing hay wagon. (I don’t need to tell you what would happen otherwise.)

But what I want to point out is how much of a signature Mac game it was already. Besides making the mouse the means of playing the game, it also had simple, 1-bit (of course) graphics that convey a cuteness that was a natural extension of the Macintosh interface. I feel like the moment that Susan Kare gave us the happy Macintosh face that we see everytime the computer starts up, she had established how we would perceive the whole experience with the machine. Duane had apparently got the memo.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, Stunt Copter was not a violent game. Er, I mean if you discount the “bounce” when the stuntperson misses the wagon. (Hopefully you know what I mean though — no one was getting points for killing anyone in the game.)

I mentioned Susan Kare — that’s a great segue into Duane’s perhaps second most famous shareware game, Cairo Shootout.

You’re firing a gun in this game, but looking at the screenshot above it is obvious you are in a shooting gallery — plinking moving targets as they go by. The mouse control is still there, the cuteness still there … also not a violent game.

For those who don’t know, the Susan Kare connection is by way of the font, Cairo. The Apple Macintosh had a number of bitmap fonts that shipped very early with the machine. The fonts were given the names of famous cities of the world. The very serif font was called New York (evoking the banner of the New York Times, I suppose), the smaller san-serif font used often in the user interface was Geneva, the fatter one used in the menu bar was Chicago. (Maybe someone has a guess or insight as to where these names came from.) Monaco was, ha ha, the name of the mono-spaced font.

The font Cairo was what would be called a symbol font — a font where the glyphs are of various images and symbols (you know, Egyptian heiroglyphics). And Cairo Shootout takes it’s name no doubt from the use of the artwork from Susan’s Cairo font.

In fact when I did the shareware game Glypha some years later, I too would lift a few of the Egyptian themed glyphs from Susan’s font and incorporate them into the background art. A few years back I did a rewrite for Steam .

Zero Gravity and PUZZ’L were Duane’s final games. I feel like Zero Gravity was more of an experiment in mouse control, not unlike the control physics of the classic Mac game, Crystal Quest. PUZZ’L was a cute little jigsaw puzzle game where I expect Duane was leaning heavily on the Region type — unique at the time to the Macintosh’s graphics system, Quickdraw. These days a little searching will turn up these vintage shareware classics.

And again, there’s a kind of playfullness and a refinement to these games that goes hand in glove with the early Macintosh ethos of that time.

Hometown Software

As I touched on earlier, I didn’t get my first Macintosh until a year or two after Duane had released his 1986 and 1987 shareware games. I was living in Lawrence, Kansas — in college at the time and had used part of a student loan to take advantage of the half-price offer that Apple was giving to students. Even then the $1100 price tag was dear to me.

This was before the world-wide web, before America On-Line. Macintosh BBS’s were non-existant to my knowledge in sleepy Kansas. Instead I came across a small, enterprising company called “Budget Bytes” that was based in Topeka, Kansas I believe. (I have since been told that it was the idea of a man named Mike Ortiz. Very cool. Hi, Mike, if you read this.) You would pick out floppy disks from a catalog — each disk had some number of apps copied onto them. “Games #1” might have 4 or 5 shareware games: a solitaire game, a couple of action games, etc. They were inexpensive enough that I could save up some money from working at the dorm cafeteria and order a few at a time. It was likely in this way that I first came across Duane’s shareware games.

Something that caught my eye about Duane’s games were the “About” boxes. That was when I discovered that Duane lived in Ulysses, Kansas. Now I also lived in Kansas but I was on the other, slightly more populous end of the state and I never knew or met him. (Keep that in mind as I talk about him here. The photos of him, for example, I found looking through the archives of ancestry.com, newspapers.com.)

You have to understand that shareware was a new thing to me. Software titles were, I thought, distributed by Publishers. I also had this chip on my shoulder that Kansas, especially when it came to computers, was nowhere. But here was a guy out in the sticks (and I say that as a fellow Kansan — Ulysses is the sticks) and he’s self-publishing games that I would be proud to have written.

Almost immediately after having got my Macintosh I started trying to learn how to write apps for it — specifically I wanted to learn how to write games. Again, pre-web, this rather arcane knowledge was a challenging thing to discover. As it turned out though, another dialog in Duane’s games indicated he was also selling documented Pascal source code for all his apps. I didn’t have to think twice, it was the quickest check for $10 I wrote and mailed off to a stranger in a small town in western Kansas.

And this is the sad part of the story where I have to tell you that I did not get back a floppy disk with source code on it. Instead his mother had returned the check and included a small note to tell me that Duane had died. Neither she nor her husband knew what to do with $10 or my request.

Oz

To this day I don’t know how he died. Somehow I had the impression it was a motorcycle accident. Maybe I got that idea from something in the letter that his mom sent or maybe someone just heard it and told me. Maybe I’m completely wrong.

Since I nonetheless went on to write my own shareware games for the Macintosh (and also self-published them) it’s obvious that I eventually learned by other means what Duane could have handily shown me: how to do flicker-free animation on the Mac using off-screen bitmaps, etc.

Nonetheless, when I did go to distribute my first game, rather than downplay my Kansas residency I celebrated it. Whether I am right or not, I saw the little scarecrow icon of Duane Blehm’s “HomeTown Software” as representative of the Wizard of Oz books (I’m pretty sure that is what people immediately think about when they hear Kansas). I pivoted to the character of Dorothy though when trying to think of a “company name”. In my head, maybe: Dorothy Software. But that became Dorothy-Soft (it sounded more like the name of a small company up in Redmond Washington). But being college-age and “edgy” the word order was reversed for Soft Dorothy — finally, Soft Dorothy Software.

I can see that many of the games that I wrote in the years that followed also echoed the somewhat whimsical games that Duane wrote. But as I described it may have been from the early Macintosh that both of us were taking our cues. Regardless, it’s easy to see in hindsight how closely I was following Duane’s lead from the get-go. Thank you, Duane.

Coda

Years after his mother returned my check, I received another letter about Duane’s source code. Someone more knowledgeable about computers had apparently stepped in to help Duane’s family and was in a position to duplicate floppies containing the sources. His mother had kept the letters she had received after his death and so my own address must have come up. The letter explained what I have just conveyed and the offer for source code was extended to me again. Again I mailed off a check but this time a kind of in memoriam for Duane.

The floppy disk did arrive and all but the sources to PUZZ’L were included. Yeah, wow, that would have been gold when I was new to game writing. The code was well documented, plenty of examples showing how offscreen bitmaps work…

Some years later I was contacted online by someone interested in preserving Duane’s sources. I don’t think they knew if I had the sources or not but just made a leap of faith or something. In short order I sent the sources off. Perhaps I sent them as a .zip attachment in an email or something. I don’t recall. Nonetheless, they’re out there for whole world now. A quick online search for “duane blehm source code” listed four sites as the top results.

There’s something rather odd to me about someone’s work outliving them. Of course almost every painting you might see in a gallery, and many books and films of course are preserved while the artists themselves (actors, what-have-you) may be gone. Maybe it’s the residential address in the About box — the implied correspondence that makes it kind of sad to me. As a parent myself, Duane’s death must have been a horrible thing for his parents to bear. Were the letters that kept arriving sweet or were they a constant and sad reminder?

In doing research for this post, I wandered by Find-A-Grave (a website) and found that, sadly, both of Duane’s parents have also now passed away.