Over at the stately Edge Online, they've reprinted a magazine article on the making of Dropzone, the Archer Maclean-created '80s shooter that's inspired by Defender and blasts things even crazier.

He reveals how the early hype for the title started: "In an inspired piece of guerrilla marketing, he attended a PCW show at Earls Court and surreptitiously slipped his work into a conveniently-placed drive on the Atari stand. "People started picking up the joystick and soon hundreds were crowding round. The aisles were packed. It was an incredible buzz.""

Also, a neat anecdote at the end: "I was at the California Extreme show this summer and Eugene Jarvis was there on a Q&A panel. He was describing what he had to do with the code back in the late '70s to make Defender work. He was explaining how he had to invent solutions to link his four code file blocks without a linker/compiler/Macro assembler, and devised self-loading jump vector tables to make files talk to each other. I sat bolt upright. That was precisely what I had to do. As I listened, I realised he'd come to the same solution as I had for so many things. I got talking to him afterwards and he'd played Dropzone on a MAME cab. He thought it was pretty 'neat'."