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This page is about the arcade game by Rodger Olsen. If you are looking for the City Builder game, go to Zeus: Master of Olympus. There is also a German turn-based strategy game of the same name, and an Amiga Puzznic clone Zeus: The Game.
Rodger Olsen originally studied clinical psychology and worked in this field more than a decade. He built his forst computer from a 8008 and a teletype machine and soon bought a commercial model. He began writing games for his children and decided to sell them to get the money he spent on the computer back. For this purpose he founded Aardvark Software. He wrote a couple of text adventures in BASIC: Deathship, Derelict, Mars, Escape from Mars, Pyramid, Quest. The links lead to a Tandy CoCo site, but the games would run on all the platforms of the day.
While there is at least some documentation for the text adventures, there is none at all for the arcade games (shoot-'em-ups) that formed the other half of Aardvark Software's product palette. Zeus is the only one that has survived at least in name and with a few screenshots. Most likely it was originally programmed by Rodger Olsen on an IBM PC and then ported to TRS-80 and Commodore 64, but only the existence of the C64 version is known for sure.
Later, Rodger Olsen worked as an IT specialist for Hollywood record labels, then he founded ADM Software, which specializes in software for court ordered psychological treatment programs. Now he writes science fiction and runs an online bookstore. He lives partly in Lake Elsinore, California, and Russia, where his wife is from.
Mark Sinclair, whose function was probably to port Rodger Olsen's code to the Commodore 64, wrote a D&D style BBS door game, Arrowbridge. The lead programmer of the 2000 game Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs is named Mark Sinclair. I have no idea whether they are the same person.
Links
- Rodger Olsen's Bio on Great Authors Online.
- Aardvark Software on Adventureland.
- C64 Game Guide (scroll down a bit for Zeus).
