Lexi-Cross

Development

According to programmer Peter Oliphant, the developers initially worked with another unnamed publisher. They received 10.000 Dollars and the publisher went bankrupt - the result was that they could use the money without obligations. After they developed a demo, Oliphant had a meeting with Brian Fargo, the head of Interplay. He was lukewarm at first, but later he almost bombarded Oliphant with phone messages with the wish to publish the game. Why? Fargo took the demo home, played it and his wife went completely crazy over it.

Opponents

The names of the opponents in the game are taken from many different areas:

AGIMA - Amiga spelled backwards

TOBOR - Robot spelled backwards

VEEGER - The cloudship from Star Trek: The Motion Picture

ROBBY - Robby the Robot from Lost in Space

ENIAC - The first computer

BABBAGE - Named after Charles Babbage, considered the father of modern computing

TURING - Helped desgin the first computer, and also helped crack the "Engima" sipher during WWII

OLIVAW - Last name of Isaac Asimov's book character

JOSHUA - Password into the W.O.P.R. Computer in the movie WarGames

C64PO - Homage to Star Wars and the C64

R3D3 - See above

ADANAC - Canada spelled backwards

FALKEN - Name of the Professor in WarGames

DANEEL - Character in Issac Asimov's novels

ELIZA - Considered the first artificial intelligence on computers

MARVIN - Either a reference to Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or to Marvin the Martian from Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #132 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list