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| Industry | Video games |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1980 |
| Headquarters |
,
US
|
Key people | Bill Hogue Jeff Konyu |
| Products | Miner 2049er Bounty Bob Strikes Back! |
| Website | bigfivesoftware.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 14 September 2019) |
Big Five Software (a.k.a. Big 5 Software) was an American video game developer and publisher in the first half of the 1980s founded by Bill Hogue and Jeff Konyu.[1][2] The company developed games for the Tandy TRS-80 and later Atari 8-bit computers. Most of its TRS-80 games were clonesofarcade video games, such as Galaxy Invasion (Galaxian), Super Nova (Asteroids), Defense Command (Missile Command), and Meteor Mission II (Lunar Rescue).[3] Big Five also sold an Atari joystick interface called TRISSTICK which was popular with TRS-80 owners.[4]
The company's biggest release came after moving away from the black and white TRS-80. The ten stage platform game Miner 2049er, designed and programmed by Bill Hogue for Atari 8-bit computers,[5] was a commercial and critical success. It shipped on a custom 16 kilobyte ROM cartridge (compared to standard 8 KB Atari 8-bit cartridges) and the game was ported to other computers and consoles. Miner 2049er was awarded "Electronic Game of the Year" in the 1984 Arkie Awards,[6] among other accolades for the game and Hogue.
A planned sequel, Scraper Caper, was advertised, but cancelled. A sequel, Bounty Bob Strikes Back! was published in 1985 after which Hogue stopped developing games and Big Five ramped down. In 2001,[a] he released a free, custom emulation of the Atari 8-bit versions of Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back! for Microsoft Windows.[8]
