The Mean Craps Machine is a full fledged version of the gambling game Craps (unlike most other versions on home computers at the time). It was also the subject for almost a years worth of bi-monthly articles in SoftSide magazine (a magazine mostly for BASIC programmers for Apple, Atari and TRS-80 machines) by it's author Lance Micklus covering subjects from how to get ideas for a game, some programming tips, documentation, marketing, etc. This was published roughly every two months starting in the May 1981 issue, and some points from these articles will be gone through below. The game itself came packaged with a 100 page booklet on how to play craps (Lance was quite proud of the extensive betting options that he included, based on how casinos played the game). Because of the complexity of betting, the game has it's own help screen (brought up by hitting the '?' key) as well as an odds screen. The game accepts up to 8 players and allows players to skip turns, place numerous bets, check odds, etc. When the player finally completes all of their bets, they can then roll the dice. Using the low res graphics and asterisks to represent the two dice, the game nonetheless tries to animate it to match how one threw dice in an actual casino; the dice spin upwards, bounce off the wall and come back settling on their final values.
During the course of his bi-monthly column in Softside, Lance gave progress reports on the project and it's history. Some quotes from Lance:
May 1981 He mentions that the idea of the doing the game came to him during his honeymoon with his bride Diane, where they went to Atlantic City and checked out the casinos. This is where he learned how intricate the betting was in Craps, which intrigued him. This was also the first game he tackled by himself for the Coco; his previous Coco game Star Trek III was primarly ported by new employee Diane Bernard, but this one was all Lance. Some of his early figuring out the design of the game was discussed in this article:
"The Color Computer was the perfect choice. [...] Originally, I was also going to make use of the joysticks to select where bets would be place. Later, I changed my mind. Finally the though occurred to me that I could take the finished game and blow it over to the Model I[...]"
October 1981 Lance mentions that he had finished the programming by July with versions for 3 computers, and how long they took: 125 hours for the Coco (he also was learning about programming the Coco at the same time), 50 hours to port it to the Model 1/3. He also mentions another 58 hours for writing documentation, further testing and retesting of all versions. He also mentions that he submitted it to Scott Adams at Adventure International to see if they will sell it.
December 1981 He reiterates that he wrote the Coco version to better learn the machine, and that Diane did most of the conversion to the Model 1/3 (to get her familiar with those machines, since he already knew them well). He also mentions that Diane's background was in mainframe programming. And he mentioned that Adventure International had agreed to distribute the Coco version only; they didn't figure that there would be a large market on the Model 1/3 by this time (and there were some other Craps games out for those two machines already, although not as sophisticated. But Lance could sell them himself.
April 1982 Lance finds out that Adventure International has been working on cutting manufacturing costs (manuals, packaging, cassettes, disks) by adding the ability to make and duplicate computer cassettes that contain more than one computer's version of a game on it at once. Because of this, they accept his Model 1 and 3 versions of The Mean Craps Machine, and sell the Coco/Model 1&3 as a single entity, saving separate print and duplication runs.
Title: The Mean Craps Machine (originally called Color Craps in Winter 1981 Adventure International catalog)
Author: Lance Micklus
Publisher: Lance-Micklus Inc. - distributed by Adventure International
Released: October 1981 (1981 Winter catalog for Adventure International)
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 16K RAM Extended BASIC.