I finally got around to adding these to an interview I did with Atari's Jim Huether, who was working on making a 5200 home version of the game. The interview can be found on my site at: https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/interviews/jim_huether/interview_jim_huether.html
From Jim Huether:
From Jim Huether:
Xevious (5200): This game was the first where I used a graphic artist, Alan Murphy, during much of the development time - since this game was very rich in graphics, I needed a real graphic artist. It turned out beautiful. Also, Tod Frye and myself went to Tokyo to visit Namco. While there, we were given the source code to the Xevious arcade game and we actually sat with the designers of the game, and by pointing to tables and other code in printout, and by using common programming terms of the time such as "jump table", we were able to understand the basic design and graphics of the game. From there, we worked on our games pretty much separately.


