Update........
I have worked with Kevin Furry (nickname is Fuzzy) several times over the last few years. He owns an LED display & software development company, Kiboworks:
http://www.kiboworks.com/gallery/gallery.html
Just last year, I was talking to him about myself being an old school video game & arcade collector. That was when I found out that he did stuff for Atari, EPYX & others....I was totally freaking out!
He's done really well for himself and has a partner in his company that also worked with him back in the video game development days. I haven't seen him in a few months - but plan to tackle him next time I see him and get more info
-GackAttack
Here's an interview I recently did with Fernando Alvarez, who did the Atari 8-bit port of Genesis:
http://www.2600connection.com/interviews/fernando_alvarez/interview_fernando_alvarez.html
Unfortunately, he didn't have anything to add about the coin-op version beyond confirming they had one to use for some of the home ports.
By some crazy coincidence, Kevin Furry walked by my desk just a few minutes ago!
I asked if he had been contacted recently about your Genesis game research which he said yes....did he respond back to you?
He mentioned something about forwarding another contact to you who would possibly have more info....also mentioned he remembered it having game play similar to Tempest.
I only got to bend his ear for about 3 minutes before he had to go to some meeting (big wheel kinda guy, lol)
The last time I talked to him he mentioned being one of the developers for Zaxxon arcade machines for
ATARI and if you check the inside of the back door of a cab you might see his autograph which he did on a lot of those cabs when he was testing/approving them. I didn't think about it at the time, but Zaxxon is a Sega game. I asked him about that today - he claimed Zaxxon was actually made by Atari, then licensed to Sega....I didn't know that!
He mentioned briefly how he (and others) used to make really good money in the beginning on console games, they would typically get 10% royalty on each game. One of them sold like 500,000 copies! Then later companies started to just offer salaries at around $30k-$40k per year for a full time position doing the same thing. At the time, I'm sure that was probably decent pay....but nowhere near the possibility of what a successful game would make!
I also asked if he still has cartridges/files from when he developed back in the day. He said yes, that he still has most/all of that stuff in his own collection
.....Next time I see him, I'm just gonna ask straight up if I can see/take pics of his stuff!!
-GackAttack