The World According to Michael Coorlim

‍Michael Carychao: Welcome, Michael Coorlim. Can you tell us about your name?

Michael Coorlim: Okay. Michael may be a name that you are familiar with: "Who is God?"  Coorlim is from my grandfather, from the Greek, columbinus. When his family came over they shortened it to Coorlim.  

What are you drinking, by the way?

Michael Carychao: Egyptian Licorice Mint Tea, which is soothing for my throat.  

When you describe yourself on your website, you describe yourself as, "an author who makes games aspiring to be a game developer who writes books."  

Michael Coorlim: Basically I've been doing both things for most of my life. Earlier with the writing, but since I was 12, I've also been making games. When I was young, I would pick up microcomputers at garage sales. I think my first was either a TSR- 80 or an Atari 400, I'm not sure which, but it came with BASIC. I would get those books from the library, you know, 101 Basic Programs.

Michael Carychao: I had that same book.

Michael Coorlim: For the listeners who may not be aware, they're basically line after line of code that you would type in. You'd come up with little games. I would challenge myself by seeing what kind of modifications I could make, what twists I could do to try to customize them a little bit, because I loved games. I had my first hand-me-down Atari 2600 from my uncle when I was a really young kid. Video games were always fascinating to me.

It was much the same with writing. When I was real young, I would make stick man comics in notebooks, and then give them to my family members as gifts.

But really when it comes down to it, I see myself as a storyteller and both books and games are just different formats through which story can be told—in a very different format, but it's all storytelling when you come down to it.

Michael Carychao: So when you got that first Atari do you remember the cartridges that came with it? What did you get? What games were you playing?

Michael Coorlim: One of my favorites was Combat, a simple two player tank game.

Michael Carychao: Yeah, with all the different variations.

Michael Coorlim: All the different variations. That was one of the interesting things about the 2600 was that the cartridges would often have multiple modes of the same game. There were switches on the console that you could use to switch between them.

I was a big fan of Berserk.

Michael Carychao: What was its tagline? There was something they kept on saying like, "intruder alert?"

Michael Coorlim: "Intruder alert, intruder alert." Well, that was more the arcade.

Michael Carychao: The stand-up arcade game.

Michael Coorlim: The Atari version didn't have the innards to make a noise. But yeah, "The intruder has escaped. The human has escaped." And if you ran away without killing them, they would start calling you a chicken instead. So they would say, "The chicken has escaped." It was one of the first games with a digitized voice chip.

I was also a big fan of Pitfall. Very, very good Activision game from David Crane.

Michael Carychao: Which way would you go, right or left?

Michael Coorlim: You're kind of supposed to go right, but I would go left.  It was very interesting to me because you could go  either way. That was very interesting to me as a