James D. Sachs

Who is James D. Sachs?

James D. Sachs is a retired United States Air Force veteran, game artist and game programmer.

Sachs was the lead artist on the groundbreaking Amiga computer game Defender of the Crown from Cinemaware. He is also the author of the Commodore 64 game Saucer Attack, which was heavily pirated. He called it "the Commodore 64 game everyone had, but no one purchased". He is also the author of the CompuTrainer 3D software, Marine Aquarium simulation screensaver SereneScreen Aquarium, and of the user interfaces and start-up animations of the Amiga CDTV and Amiga CD32.

Some time after finishing development of Defender of the Crown, Sachs began working on a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea game. Unable to secure the rights for a game based on the Disney film, Sachs instead based his game on the original book by Jules Verne. His game used a custom boot-up routine, as many games of the era did. His work, however, was destroyed by a usually innocuous virus which installed itself in the boot sector of floppy disks. The virus remained hidden until about the fifth soft reboot of the computer, when it revealed itself with a harmless message.