Martian Menace

Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s most households did not have a computer. Computers were very expensive by today’s standards. There was, of course, no internet. Software you’d associate with office work today didn’t exist – Word, Excel and Photoshop had yet to be created.

At the time the three most popular personal computers were the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80. The latter two computers were black and white with very limited graphic capabilities, but cost considerably less than the Apple computer available at the time so sold very well as a result.

My First Computer

In 1981 I was fortunate to receive a TRS-80 Model 1 as a Christmas present. This is where my love of computers began; I learnt to type, to program, and also played a lot of video games when not at an arcade. I even have a photo of me in 1981 on my TRS-80.

The TRS-80 had very basic graphics. They look primitive today, but developers at the time did amazing work to produce entertaining games, even mimicking the vastly superior games from the arcades. Here are some still shots of games from that time, running on a TRS-80 (often black and white computers used what was called a “green screen”, which was basically a filter over the monitor that made the text green on black; you’ll see many programmers today still use a similar setup for coding – though with more colours on black).

War of the Worlds

A school class mate introduced me to his brother David who also had a TRS-80, and we quickly became the best of friends. We spent many a weekend together learning to program, playing games and reading magazines about new products for the TRS-80. We collected many games over that time. In mid-1983 we saw an ad for a new TRS-80 game. The ad showed just a single screenshot of what looked like a tripod from War of the Worlds, attacking a city.

In our minds that sounded amazing, as we imagined tripods walking, destroying buildings, and you trying to shoot them down. My friend David had to have this game, so sent in a cheque (people used cheques in the 80s) to the company. We waited, and nothing ever arrived. His family even tried to contact the distributor and got no response, even though they cashed the cheque! Soon after we both sold our TRS-80s and moved on to the Commodore 64 (one of the biggest home computers of the mid-to-late 80s).

The Quest Begins

However, this game was always on our minds. We couldn’t remember the name of the game, but as the internet grew over the years, other TRS-80 users started to collect and document all the software for this system. One day I had the idea of asking the internet, via a usenet newsgroup (comp.sys.tandy), if they recalled this game, and also another game I remembered (and felt had some connection). This was 1999. Attached is the original message I sent:

From: Jamie Curmi jamie…@ericsson.com.au
Subject: Do you remember these games for the TRS-80 Model 1's?
Date: 1999/06/22
(22 Jun 1999 01:01:10 GMT)
Organization: ASAC
Mime-Version: 1.0
NNTP-Posting-Date: 22 Jun 1999 01:01:10 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.tandy

Hi!

This may not be the newsgroup to post this, but I didn't know where else
to post. Don't flame me if I'm wrong.

A long time ago I owned a TRS-80 Model 1 (level 2). I guess my parents
bought it for me back in 1981. I had quite a few games on this machine.

I'm trying to track down the names of 2 games on this system that I
can't find on any emulation collections. I'm wondering if someone out
there knows their names?

The first game was like a multi-screen asteroids clone. You were in the
centre, and you shot at spaceships. If you put your thrusters on, the
screen around you would scroll (I think there was a map in the right top
corner that showed where you were, where the aliens were etc). One part
of the playing field had asteroids on it, while the other areas didn't.

I can't recall the aim of the game. It may have been just to shoot the
alien ships. I don't think they would follow you into the asteroids.

Any ideas? It may have been an Australian game - I'm not sure.

The second game I never owned. A friend and I saw it in a magazine, and
we ordered it, but it never came and the company cashed the cheque and
refused to answer our calls. So all we ever saw was screen shots in a
magazine advertisement. Soon after we sold our machines for C64s.

The game appeared to have alien tripods (something like war of the
worlds) in it, and the score was graphics not text (unusual for most
games at the time). I don't know more than that - I suspect the tripods
moved along on their legs and shot at you, and you were probably a
spaceship.

Does that bring back any memories?

I'd appreciate any help.

Thanks.

Jamie

Unfortunately the responses didn’t help – no one knew of this War of the Worlds game, nor the other game that I mentioned. David and I did start to wonder if we had imagined it all, but we often discussed these games over the years and ideas for how we could prove they existed.

We couldn’t remember the name of the magazine we saw the game in, but having lunch together one day in January this year (2025) we started going through the names of magazines we used to read back around that time. Back in those days we used to read 80 Micro, Micro-80, Your Computer and APC (the latter three were Australian magazines).

A Cosmic Discovery

David spent the next day looking through online copies of those magazines, and incredibly he found the ad!

There it was! Finally! Martian Menace! The ad was in the June 1983 edition of APC, and the July 1983 edition of Your Computer.

It was pretty much how I had described it on usenet over 25 years ago.

So now we had a game name. A google search showed that no one seemed to have any knowledge of this game, beyond these 2 ads. But the ad gave us more information: the company name (Cosmic Software) and a list of games they sold. We were determined to find out if this game ever existed, and if not, what happened to it? Was it nearly complete? Was there a prototype? Did they still have this prototype? Could we play it?

Alert

While looking through the Cosmic Software games list one game stood out: Boskone Alert. I fired up a TRS-80 emulator and tried out the game. Here’s a video of it in action:

This was the first game I had mentioned in that message on usenet all those years ago. So one mystery was solved. And for those who don’t realise, this is a clone of the arcade classic Bosconian (you can see where they got their name from).

This game also gave us the name of the game’s creator: Tom Thiel.

The Search for Tom

Meanwhile David found an article online talking about Cosmic Software, and it also mentioned the owner was a Tom Thiel. So we knew the name of the owner and creator of some of these games.

Unfortunately, Tom Thiel is actually quite a common name. David found a couple of possible Tom Thiels on LinkedIn. I looked on Facebook but there was no obvious match. We sent a few messages to potential Toms and waited.

David also found another article about Tom Thiel, releasing downloads of all the Cosmic Software games. This was another avenue, so I mailed the owner of Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 Revived Site (a fantastic resource by the way):

From: Jamie Curmi
Subject: TRS-80 and Tom Thiel
Date: 18 January 2025 at 12:25:17 pm AEDT
To: contest@…

Hi Ira,

An odd one, but would you happen to have any contact details for Tom Thiel (of Cosmic Software fame)? I know you had an article about him in 2014, so yes this was a while back (https://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/old-news-and-guestbook/site-news-2013/).

I’m trying to contact him to find out details about a possible unreleased game he worked on for the TRS-80. Unfortunately I can’t find him on socials so far (found 2 possible LinkedIn people, but they look like they never use their accounts).

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you. Love your site.

Jamie

We waited, but heard nothing.

Where There’s a Will

Playing with other games from Cosmic Software, another name came up:

It seemed Tom had a partner William Nitschke. Off to LinkedIn, I found a Will Nitschke, who was a couple of years older than us (based on when he went to University) and studied in New South Wales. I sent Will a message.

Playing another game I came across a little more info:

This game has an association with Malabar Trading Pty Ltd. LinkedIn revealed such a company existed, and a name, Karl Nitschke, who worked there. Too much of a coincidence I felt, having the same surname, so I sent a message to Karl as well.

A common thread here is that a lot of people sign up for LinkedIn, and never look at messages or log in again. Every person we had tried to contact had no activity on LinkedIn, and not even a photo of themselves. So we had low expectations of a reply. And as expected no one ever replied via LinkedIn.

However, I don’t give up easily. The Will I found on LinkedIn mentioned his place of work as “CAPITAL Office Business Software”, and that he had been the Managing Director for 40 years. That sounded like this was Will’s business, and it was related to computers. I was pretty sure I had the right guy.

I found their website and two contact email addresses, so I mailed both:

From: Jamie Curmi
Subject: Will Nitschke
Date: 23 January 2025 at 10:32:20 am AEDT
To: sales@…, web_inquiry@…

Hi,

I am really sorry to bother you all, but I am trying to find a Will Nitschke, who worked on some video games in the 80s; in particular Rally Racer for the TRS-80. I’m wondering if the Will who is the managing director at Capital Office Business Software is that same Will, and if so, would he be so kind as to email me back (jamie@curmi.com), assuming he is interested in chatting to an old fan who was interested in asking him about some other games he worked on.

Thank you, and I apologise once again for the disturbance.

Jamie

Willing and Able

To my surprise, and immense gratitude, Will responded. I had found the right Will!

From: support@…
Subject: – RE: Will Nitschke
Date: 23 January 2025 at 12:31:58 pm AEDT
To: jamie@curmi.com

Hello Jamie,

I am Will Nitschke but I did not write Rally Racer, nor did my friend/associate at the time. I wrote some fairly crappy games. I don’t remember what they were called. My friend/associate wrote a number of much better ones, but I haven’t been in touch with the guy for over 40 years, and it’s been so long I don’t even remember his name, sorry.

The games we were involved in creating went under the business name “Cosmic Software”.

I asked Will if he remembered anything about Martian Menace and Tom Thiel. He actually had forgotten Tom’s name, and suspects Martian Menace never existed. Over a number of emails Will kindly relayed all he remembered:

Hello Jamie,

I remembered his surname ‘Thiel’ after I sent you that email, but still didn’t remember ‘Tom’ until you mentioned it. There would be no great mystery there, as it’s easy to announce things. Follow through is tough. The market in Australia for TRS-80 software was minuscule, we were teenagers who were doing things based on hope rather than a credible business plan. I doubt Tom made more than a $1000 bucks, at the most, out of all his effort.

…

I don’t think Tom wrote more than 3 or 4 games. He would have been selling games from other developers, I think. I don’t think either of us ever owned a Microbee, for example. I vaguely recall another developer who was doing some good work at the time, which me must have met at a user group, and Tom might have offered to sell his game or games on his behalf. I seem to recall it was moon buggy type vehicle (think Lost in Space). You would drive it from left to right. Don’t know if it ever got published, though.

The names Boskone Alert, Outland and Morgoth sound like names I came up with, as I was a fan of EE Doc Smith and Tolkien. The advertising text was probably mine. I always liked writing stories.

I’d suspect Martian Menace was wishful thinking… It never existed as a game, but it was potentially doable. I recall it was one of us, me or Tom, that figured out how to implement linear algebra in assembly language, so we could draw straight lines. That was sort of a big deal because you don’t have decimal points or multiplication or division in machine code. Remember, we were not mathematicians. So now our “ships” could fire laser bolts at the aliens. I can see from the picture you sent, the three legs of the tripod and the laser weapon all relied on the same line drawing technique we wrote, so that makes sense.

That’s about all I can remember, without getting more wrong than right.

…

Correction, neither of us was that smart… I vaguely remember now. We grabbed a game, probably from Big Five, and pulled it apart. We isolated the code that did the linear algebra (drew lines at different angles), and we copied it off their game and added it to our own.

Martian Menace?

It sounds like Martian Menace never existed. Which is a shame. But I hadn’t quite given up on Tom. Weirdly, Ira had not replied. David noted that Ira actually wrote on his site that he had lost some emails around the same time I emailed him. So I emailed Ira back, and yes, he had lost the emails.

Kindly, Ira replied and gave me the email address he had for Tom.

Quickly I sent an email to Tom…and it bounced. Most likely Tom no longer worked for that company. It had been 11 years since he had sent from that email address.

However, the email address revealed the name of the company he had worked at. I found them on the internet, and sent them multiple emails to their support address asking if they could help locating Tom Thiel. Knowing they may be hesitant to send me his details I offered that they could send him my details instead. Sadly I received no reply (once again, this is a common modern trend where companies don’t have the manners to just reply to a query – see my articles about chocolate).

It was a Solar company that Tom had worked at, so I looked on Google for a Tom Thiel with any connection to Solar, in case he had moved to another Solar company. I found one in the US, but he was clearly an American and had not lived in Australia. So that too was a dead end.

End of Line

Unfortunately we never got to contact Tom. But we got a lot of information from Will, who kindly allowed me to quote him in this article. Thank you Will.

In the end, it appears Martian Menace most likely never existed. And Tom still owes David for the cheque he cashed back in 1983.

Tom, if you are out there, we’d love to hear from you.