Steve A. Baker: The game was developed using an Apple-II computer and the Pro-DOS assembler (I pushed John Arkley into writing it because I found a disk-trashing bug in his EDASM assembler that Apple was currently selling at the time). When the code was assembled I would burn 16K worth of EPROMS and plug them into the card and look at the result. Talk about turnaround time...  (July 1998)

Steve's still programming and you can see some of his Java arcade games here.

April 25, 1988: After playing Defender for 8 hours and getting to 9,999,800 I snapped a photo and held my breath, hoping it would crash when it rolled over. Nah, just went to 10,000,000...I quit with 150 extra ships, 152 smart bombs, and a welt on the pad of my left thumb from holding the joystick...