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Anne Westfall is an influentional game programmer of the 1980s. She is the wife of fellow game programmer, game designer and entrepreneur Jon Freeman.
Career
In 1981, Westfall and her husband, Jon, left Epyx, the computer game developer and publisher her husband co-founded just three years earlier. Westfall cites a desire to learn assembly language and to work on the Atari 800 as one reason for their departure from Epyx.
Together with game designer Paul Reiche III, they started Free Fall Associates to make computer games free of the politics existing at the now larger Epyx.
Free Fall was a pivotal company for the fledgling computer game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) who, in 1984, was little more than a start-up. Free Fall signed EA's first two development contracts for games for the Atari home systems.
1984's Archon, here shown as it appears on the Commodore 64, was an instant hit and proved to be lucrative for both EA and Free Fall Associates. They followed it the same year with the sequel, Archon II: Adept, which also proved to be very popular. Free Fall's first game for EA (not their very first game, Tax Dodge, which was a commercial failure) was 1984's chess-like Archon, which quickly became an enormous hit. EA naturally asked for a sequel, and Free Fall complied with the even more compelling Archon II: Adept delivered later that year. Archon and its sequel would eventually be ported to numerous other popular systems of the era. Archon is still considered a classic and hallmark game of the early home computer era.
After Archon in all its ports their course, things slowed down for Free Fall. After Reiche left, Anne and Jon made online card games for Prodigy, but then seemed to give up on their company.
For several years, Anne was on the board of directors of the Computer Game Developers Conference.
Personal Westfall met Jon at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1980 while demonstrating her surveying program she wrote for the TRS-80. Her booth was next to Automated Simulations' booth—later Epyx—where Jon was working. After dating for about six months, Freeman convinced Westfall to move closer and come to work at his company.
External links - MobyGames' entry on Westfall (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId=241/)
- Interview with Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall (http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/FREEFALL.HTM) from Halcyon Days
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