Zombies - Realm of Impossibility

When I was young, I saw ads for a brief period of time for a game called Zombies.  It looked amazing and turned out to be really fun to play.  Before long, I saw ads for a game that looked identical called Realm of Impossibility which confused me at the time but as far as I was concerned big companies did all the game creation/marketing and they could change their mind or change things as they saw fit.

Fast forward to a local computer meeting in 2023 where I was lucky enough to score a copy of Realm of Impossibility for a great price.  This brought back memories of the confusion I had when I was young and so I started researching.  It turns out the entire game started as Zombies and was created, programmed and I believe tested by one man, Mike Edwards.  He and a neighbor of his created a company called BRAM and created Attack at EP-CYG-4 which they advertised and sold from their homes.  Following this up, Mike designed the game Zombies which started out as a football game and turned into the game we know and love.  He wanted to create a game he could play cooperatively with his son which I believe was a pioneering idea back then, especially in the home computer market.  He did a few interviews and was approached by Electronic Arts about acquiring the rights to the game as well as to rework a few elements of the game such as the music and making it a little less difficult.  They expanded the number of dungeons and renamed the game "Realm of Impossibility" which was the name of one of the levels in the original game.

This was all information I found online through old interviews, etc..  I was then curious to what Mike has been up to since this time so I decided to try to track him down.  Not only was I successful in finding him but he was a great guy to talk to and I was fortunate to actually meet him in person where he was kind enough to answer some questions I had about the game, how he got started, why he didn't make other games back then after Zombies and other things.  He was gracious at signing several copies of Realm of Impossibility that I took with me.  I had been given a few extra copies in advance by John Hardie to sign as well as 2 copies of my own that I had and a copy of Attack at EP-CYG-4 that I had recently acquired!  I believe all total I had 4 or 5 copies for him to sign.  I was very grateful and even brought him one of my custom AW11 keychains.  I explained to him that people like him and David Murray gave me the inspiration to actually create something special and unique (the keychains which are my original design).  During the meeting I asked him if he would mind chatting with John Hardie as we had a local Atari computer group "T.A.C.O. - Texas Atari Computer Owners" that John had started up a few years ago.  He agreed and was kind enough to be interviewed live at one of our Atari meetings!  The interview went great and although I was unable to make it for personal reasons, we are still working on getting the video up online.  The audio turned out very bad in the recording so it is very difficult to listen to and try to understand...  More to come on that later...

I am hopeful that Mike will interview with Retro Gamer magazine in the near future because I would love to see what he has to say in print.  The newest interview I could find of Mike was from 1984 - 40 years ago!!

I am still on the lookout for an original Zombies game for the Atari home computer so if you have one you would be willing to part with, I would love to hear from you.

This is my first blog post on my site...  I hope to add photos and links to the old interviews here so if you only see text on this page, feel free to check back in...

​SM

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