by Eugen Pfister, Aurelia Brandenburg, Adrian Demleitner, Arno Görgen, Addrich Mauch, and Kevin Negele. Additional research and editing by Corinne Hirter
At the end of the 1980s, four young people met in the Basel area and started developing a game called GATE for the Apple IIg in their free time. They came together partly through ice skating, a computer store and an early fascination with computers. The result was an unlikely reinterpretation of Gauntlet for the Apple IIgs, unlikely because the computer was already fourteen years old at the time of programming. The game itself even found a publisher, first in France and then in the USA, but it failed to achieve great success.
This is the first part of our two-part case study on the game GATE. You can find the second part here.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- How we found the game and why we played it
- Production Analysis
- Not a conclusion but a preliminary summary
Introduction
The first traces of the game on the internet date back to 1995. However, the game was not rediscovered but mentioned in a game by one of the developers: In a time when there were no large language models, Reddit or social media, someone asked in a Usenet forum (now Google Groups) where to find games for the Apple II. Even 18 years after the Apple IIs introduction into the market in 1977 the question found quick answers. One user called “Gudat, Henrik Michael” responded only one day later and pointed to two games in the portfolio of the American publisher “Seven Hills”: GATE (Bright Software 1991 / Apple IIgs) and Space Fox (Bright Software 1992 / Apple IIgs). He explained that GATE is:
“an action-adventure with smooth scrolling (up/down/left/right), top view, 15 channel background stereo musix [sic!], [with] lots of brain teasers, requires IQ of a plant or more (more to solve riddles), IIGS native, control panel, simply fun. Two 3.5″ [floppy] disks, not protected. Joystick or keyboard. Fast disk loader. A+/InCider editor’s choice. Took us four years to complete… did someone shout ‘beginners’?
:-D)”1
At this point, we don’t learn much more, neither how the developers came to an American publisher, nor on which data carriers the game was distributed and how. Gudat is one of the developers of GATE, the first game developed by a studio called Bright Software located in Switzerland which was released in 1991 for the Apple IIgs. This made it one of the last games to be developed for this platform, which brought the game a certain amount of attention. For example, inCider A+ magazine wrote about the game in December 1991:
“What’s special is that GATE exists at all. The large North American game companies, such as Sierra On-Line and Electronic Arts, no longer write new games for the Apple Ilgs. The future of computer games seems to be a machine called Nintendo.”2
From today’s perspective, GATE could be described as a 2d dungeon crawler with a top-down perspective. The Screen is divided into a graphical user interface that is divided into five segments (see Fig. 1) with a score bar on the top left, the actual playable map in the middle of the left and a health bar on the bottom of the left. On the top right we see a screen that shows the character or readable scrolls and on the bottom of the right an inventory. The game is very clearly modelled on Atari’s Arcade-hit Gauntlet (Atari 1985 / Arcade et al.), and could therefore also be described — like Gauntlet — as a hack and slash dungeon crawler.


In GATE, we play a young warrior—the avatar suggests somewhat of a Roman legionnaire in the Apple IIgs version—who has to escape from a dungeon and constantly fend off enemies respawning from multiple “monster generators”. As we make our way through the dark corridors, we collect treasures and healing potions and search for secret doors.


However, in 1991, similar to many European “studios” of the time, Bright Software was nothing more than a group of four young people living around Basel: Henrik Gudat, Jörg Kienzle, and the siblings Yann and Valérie Le Tensorer. In the history of digital games, we often read first and foremost about improbable success stories, about young developers (mostly men) who later found themselves on the covers of magazines, such as Richard Garriott and Peter Molyneux. Like the vast majority of games of its time, Gate was not a huge success, that would have allowed the little studio for a deeper professionalisation and consolidation or to gain a widespread (inter-)national visibility. The studio existed as a name for a couple of years, but Henrik Gudat no longer made games with his friends. Jörg Kienzle and Yann Le Tensorer later developed the side-scrolling shooter Spacefox in 1992 also for the Apple IIgs which was still published under the “Bright Software” label. We also find the name of the studio credited in the karate game Sensei, developed by “Miami Software” and published by the French company “Toolbox” for the Apple IIgs. In addition, Jörg Kienzle developed a GATE remake for the Macintosh in 1994 with the help of Valérie Kienzle (née Le Tensorer) who created the graphics.

Outside of the dedicated Apple II fan community, GATE, in all its iterations, is only known by very few people today and only a few entries in the Mobygames database, in Wikipedia, the Apple IIgs pages and Mac pages, as well as two reviews in Apple magazines hint onto its existence. Nevertheless, the game is also included in two video compilations showcasing the best Apple IIgs games.This is probably due to the fact that it was released towards the end of the platform’s life cycle and made full use of the computer’s capabilities.
How we found the game and why we played it
Yannick Rochat was the first person in our team to mention the game on our Discord server. He had found it on Wikipedia, where the article mentioned the sentence “designed by Swiss programmers”. This prompted us to start researching the game. The Wikipedia page was apparently created in 20143 by a contributor called “Mindmaster789”. Two years later in 2016, the game was added to Mobygames4 by the US-American contributor “hoeskmas”, who appears to have had particular interest in Apple II games. To our knowledge, there are no physical copies of the game on the market at the moment, although we know that Jörg Kienzle – who we interviewed twice for this case study – still has a physical copy.

Unfortunately, he was unable to retrieve it for us in time for the publication of this text. We learned from the Wikipedia page, which was later confirmed by our interviews, that in 1991 the game first had the French publisher Toolbox, followed by the American publisher Seven Hills. (From a private webpage of an Apple II Aficionado who tried to reconstruct popular software sold for the machine, we learned that the game was apparently sold in the US for 30$ in 19915. In the apple magazine inCider A+ we found the game advertised for $406. We also found a demo from before 1989 of the Apple IIgs version that can be played online via the Internet Archive7. We were then able to get a disk image of the Apple II version from the “What is the Apple IIGS?” abandonware webpage, and later the Macintosh version on Jörg Kienzle’s old webpage8. We succeeded in running the latter on one of our 1998 iMacs. However, the iMac that had been given to us as a gift, had lost the majority of its reliability due to its storage in a damp attic, and kept crashing. Thanks to Adrian Demleitner and Addrich Mauch, we then managed to get the Mac version running, using the Infinite Mac and SheepShaver emulators.
Lacking an original copy of the game, as well as an original Apple IIgs, we had to rely on emulators from the start, which are still helpful in our work today. However, they do have their caveats. For example, we can safely assume that our gaming experience is quite different to the original one. Not only are the responses via joystick or keyboard different because of technological differences in the hardware, but playing the games using high-resolution flat screens today creates a different gaming experience to the initial CRT monitors that were used at the time.
As we succeeded in gathering enough informations about the development of the game and also sufficient play experience with the game, we decided that the game is a promising subject of investigation for four reasons:
- The production history can be read as typical for its time, as we will demonstrate. It was made by a young Swiss team of hobbyists who partially met through a computer shop and decided to program a game in their free time.
- The biographies of these young developers also make for an interesting reading against the backdrop of the digitalisation of Swiss society. “Programming computer games created a corps of young programmers who were very sensitive to human-computer interactions”9: Two of the four developers, Jörg Kienzle and Henrik Gudat, went into research and stayed there. A third, Yann Le Tensorer, the only one remaining in game development, was able to make a career at Ubisoft as programmer of Rayman (Ubisoft 1995 / MS-DOS) in France. Nowadays, he is still active in the game business. Unfortunately we know the least about Valérie Le Tensorer’s later biography. We will come back to this in the second part.
- The choice of platform is also of interest. The Apple II series was already over ten years old at the beginning of the 1990s. The Apple IIgs, released in 1985, was a hybrid machine that could use the software and hardware of the Apple II series on the one hand, and on the other (although not in time for the market launch) featured a graphical user interface similar to that of the Macintosh. However, the future definitely lay with the Macintosh and almost no more games were released for the Apple II series. At the same time, the Apple II was well known for its games in its heyday.
- In terms of content, the game offers a perspective on how specific games like GAUNTLET were frequently cloned at the time, but at the same time and with growing knowledge and creative self-confidence allowed for eclectic deviations from the original.
Production Analysis
Computer Stores as Network Nodes
When launching the Apple IIgs version, the first thing to appear on the screen is the name of the publisher Toolbox in large letters at the bottom of the menu, followed by the text “written by Bright Software”. The name “Bright Software” suggests the presence of a non-existent professional studio. To our knowledge, and based on interviews, there were no offices, company computers, business cards, and probably not even a company account. At the bottom of a review of the game in the inCider A+ ((Anonymous. “Once Upon a Time”. inCider A+ 12/91, 88, http://s862692851.onlinehome.us/IN_91-12.)) magazine, we find a contact address which was presumably Gudat’s private address. As with many “studios” at the time, such as Ball Raider’s “Golden Gate Crew”10, the name hence served as a stand-in and a façade for a group of friends with a shared interest in computers: Jörg Kienzle, of German descent, Yann Le Tensorer and his sister Valérie, of French descent, and Henrik Gudat, of Swiss descent. All four lived in and around the city of Basel, Switzerland in the early 1990s.

But how did these four people find each other? They did not go to the same school and were not neighbors. It started with a chance encounter: Jörg Kienzle got to know the Le Tensorer siblings through ice skating. Jörg Kienzle and Valérie Le Tensorer first became a successful figure skating duo, and later a married couple. This also led to a friendship between Jörg Kienzle and Valérie’s brother Yann. Gudat and Kienzle, on the other hand, met through a computer store. In the days before the Internet, computer stores were one of the few places where people interested in computers could reliably make new contacts.
Jörg Kienzle was given an Apple II by his father at a young age and had been a regular guest at the “MusiComp” computer shop in Binningen, a Basel suburb, ever since. MusiComp was one of a few stores to sell Apple computers in Switzerland at the time. Computer shops, and computer clubs, functioned as forums and contact exchanges in the 1980s and early 1990s. They not only provided visitors with hardware or games, they were also one of the few places where one could find relevant literature on computers and programming languages. Even if it was for many not an option to purchase them due to the high costs.

This is when shops started to become a meeting place for like-minded people. In this environment, Kienzle and Gudat got to know each other. Kienzle later introduced his newfound contact to the Le Tensorers and over the course of many meetings, a working group formed, consisting of Jörg Kienzle, Henrik Gudat and Yann Le Tensorer:
“I always tried, maybe when I found someone there, to exchange (ideas) or something, but… but then we wanted to do things ourselves, with Henrik. I then met Henrik there in this MusiComp”11
It was also the place where they met members of the “French United Crackers Klan”, coming from nearby Mulhouse and Colmar in France, who would later also play a role in GATE’s development.
This local encounter and networking via computer and game shops is not only specific for Switzerland, but can be observed in many regions around the world.12 Stores were crucial for building local networks of hobbyists and professionals alike.
“I actually got to know all my colleagues more or less in an IT-environment through this store.”13
Through our interviews from Gamescapes+, we also know that the early Swiss gaming communities were initially formed and developed in the toy and computer departments of large department stores in Zurich, Bern, Luzern, and other Swiss cities. These early networks became an informal basis for professional networks later on that not only included the founding of shops, but also contributed to the organization of gaming events, games marketing, games journalism, and other game related fields.14
“[B]ack then, the communities met in different configurations. If they didn’t meet in living rooms to play together, they met in schoolyards, in computer clubs, in game stores for example, in the EPA in Zurich, where you could try out the latest games on computers and consoles and, of course, in gaming arcades, of which there were hundreds in Switzerland at the time.”15
The Apple II as a Gaming Platform
The Apple II was first released in 1977 and thus one of the first microcomputers to be sold and used worldwide. In Laine Nooney’s recently published monograph “The Apple II Age. How the computer became personal”, she introduced the computer this way:
“The Apple II was widely considered one of the few microcomputers that straddled the home and workplace computing markets: robust enough for the office, exciting enough for the games in the home, expandable enough to be a tinker toy in the garage.”16

In his interview, Kienzle told us that he often spent parts of his school holiday in the early 1980s with his German uncle, who worked for Telefunken—a German radio and television producer—and was very interested in electronics, especially ham radio being a typical radio hobbyist (“Hobbyfunker”). Kienzle remembers in an interview that he was mesmerized by his uncle’s Apple computer. Reading his uncle’s books on programming Basic and playing the only available game there: Lunar Landing17. Kienzle’s father, a chemist in the middle (and later upper) management of the pharma and healthcare company Hoffman-LaRoche, saw the potential of the new computers, although not using a computer himself at the time. With the help of his uncle, he organized an Apple II as an extravagant Christmas present for his twelve-year-old son Jörg in 1982. In 1984, the Apple II was sold for 4000 CHF in a microinformatics store in Bern18 Adjusted for inflation, that is over 6500 CHF today. In 1986, a used Apple II would sell for 1800 CHF (i.e. 2830 CHF today). On his old webpage, Kienzle wrote that his uncle custom-made an Apple II Europlus for him in 1982.19 Henrik Gudat also got access to an Apple II through his father, prior in 198013.
Kienzle says he was thrilled when he had his computer:
“That was one hell of a machine: Motorola 6502 processor (1 MHz), 48k memory, 6 colors (anyway, I only had a monochrome monitor), and a disk drive.”20
According to his website, he bought an Apple IIgs in 1988.20 For Jörg Kienzle, the main reason for his fascination with computers as a teenager were digital games: “I wanted to play games”21. While the Apple II might seem an odd choice for game development in Switzerland at first glance, there were a lot of games—especially action games—programmed for this platform during the late 1970s and the whole 1980s because of its graphics and longevity.22 The first adventures by Roberta and Ken Williams were developed for the Apple II: Mystery House (On-Line Systems 1980 / Apple II) and Wizard and the Princess (On-Line Systems 1980 / Apple II). One of the better known native games of the platform is perhaps the stealth game Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner. In 1989, John Carmack developed the 2D shooter Catacomb on an Apple II. One of the reasons why the Apple II was such a successful platform was that it was constantly being developed and yet remained backwards compatible. The Apple II from 1977 was followed a year later by the Apple II + (or Europlus) and six further models up to 1988. The Apple IIgs was the most interesting for games. “GS” stood for Graphics and Sound. Like the Macintosh released two years earlier, it introduced a graphical user interface, but in color.
In his interview, Kienzle also remembered having played Wizardry I to III, Ultima II and III, Lode Runner, QBird and Olympic Decathlon.21 At the time, Jörg Kienzle was the only pupil at his school having his own computer, which led to a game supply problem:
“For a 14,15-year-old, the games cost 50, 60 francs. So you can’t afford that. In other words, I never bought anything, did I? I always tried, maybe when I found someone there, to swap things or something, but… but then we wanted to make the things ourselves, with Henrik.”21

We know from Gudat and Kienzle that they taught themselves programming mainly by reading specialist literature and trying things out. Kienzle, for example, owned the book “Was ist wo im Apple” by William Luebbert. Other Apple IIgs books were bought in the store “and maybe we borrowed them from each other”21. Gudat told us, that there was a whole separate book for the sound module of the Apple II, that they needed, which was sold for 40 CHF at the time: “I went to the computer store a few times, read through it and then quickly went home and tried it out to see if it worked.”13 The release of the game was not originally a goal. The main aim was to try it out on the computers available at home and to exchange ideas.
Making their own game
Kienzle stated on his website that he had already programmed his own games and applications in his early teens: “I think the number of BASIC programs I wrote are innumerable (text and ‘high-res’ graphical adventure games, a Dungeon & Dragons monster-generator, etc…).”20 Gudat also told us in an interview that he started programming early on “simply not in a commercial context”13 after he had taught himself machine language. According to Gudat, he learned assembler in a three-page course in the magazine Geeko23 [?], “which described everything you need to know to program assembler.”13 Gudat’s interest in game programming was triggered by a school friend with a Commodore Amiga who said he could program a game on his computer faster than Gudat. The bet took on a life of its own: “And then I just got on with it”13.
According to Gudat, the motive was not to sell a game but a “technology demonstration”13. After the decision was made by the three friends to develop their own game, they started with basic game mechanics, which were heavily inspired by the 1985 hack’n’slash top down game Gauntlet, “because I used to sometimes play in the arcades, you know, which were those places you go into, some coffee place or so, and then […] you put one franc in and then you can play some game, no? And I used to play this game called Gauntlet […].“11 Gauntlet was first published as an arcade cabinet by Atari in 1985, playable with four characters, which made it highly attractive in the arcades.24 The arcade was a success, despite being published after the infamous US video game crash and near the end of the golden age of arcades. The game, developed by Ed Logg, was (like GATE) inspired by the pen and paper RPG Dungeons and Dragons. For many months, it was the most successful arcade game, ported to different platforms, entre autre the Apple II. Its success led to many official follow-up’s and clones. One of those clones, Garrison, was also developed with Swiss participation in the form of Orlando Petermann, who we already encountered in the Ball Raider case study25.
The development of GATE largely followed a fundamental division of work tasks:
“GATE was basically done by Henrik, as well as the implementation in Assembly, and Yann [Le Tensorer] and [Jörg Kienzle] basically did all the graphics, the story and the level design, and the music”11. A similar kind of organized early specialization can be found, for example, during the development of the Swiss game Necronom26. One question we were not able to clarify was the role of Valérie Le Tensorer in the development of the game. She is still credited in the demo, but no longer in the finished game. We contacted her, but she did not want to give an interview about this time. What we do know is that she designed the high-resolution graphics for the Macintosh version.

Early development was motivated by platform competition and the technical challenges, with systems like the Amiga offering advanced capabilities. This means that the claim of a game on Amiga level was given, but had to be realized with the means of the technologically older and weaker Apple computers. Most of the implementation, including the game engine, was written in assembly language due to the hardware constraints of the time. The enemy AI was basic: “The logic of the enemy, he just keeps running along the wall. As soon as he can, he turns right.”13 Gudat also told us that the graphical user interface of the Apple II could not be used for games because it only ran at 2.8 MHz. Therefore, the game was programmed for a self-booting floppy disk.
“When you insert a disk and switch on the computer, the firmware, i.e. the computer’s operating software, simply reads the first block. That is 512 bytes. And from then on you have control. If you put something clever on sector 0, on track 0, then you simply have control over the whole computer.”13
To get the game running, it took a lot of other workarounds: “We also needed the interrupts of the sound processor for us”13 and “I think the sound chip was an important clock for certain housekeeping functions in the OS, because otherwise there was no interrupt that happened regularly. We simply wanted to have the hardware for ourselves. That’s how it came about.”13 For the same reasons, music and graphics were handcrafted, with the team developing its own solutions like custom oscillators for stereo effects.27
Furthermore, the Apple IIgs hardware limitations required developing custom solutions for tasks like scrolling and sound synthesis. Henrik was in charge of the instrumental part in this aspect. The development spanned about four years according to Gudat (according to Kienzle it was about three years), and was conducted primarily during evenings, weekends, and summer breaks while the team was still in high school in the late 1980s. The already mentioned French United Crackers Klan (F.U.C.K.), a French demo-group, they had met at the MusiComp Store, shared programming insights with the team and even provided a copy-protection solution for GATE. According to Gudat, Yann Le Tensorer later programmed the title music for their game, Sensei, as a thank you.13
GATE was first developed as an action game. But at least Kienzle, who says he was more game-savvy than Gudat, didn’t think that was enough:
“And then we thought, oh, we should transform it more into a sort of an adventure game with a big story and, and, and that’s why in the end it turned out to, to be that.”11
In the demo-version 5.7 from 1989 you can already see pretty much the later gameplay without being able to play. It is interesting to note that the developers still refer to themselves as the “Assembler Clan” in the tradition of the demos, and that in addition to Gudat (program), Yann Le Tensorer (music) and Jörg Kienzle (graphics), Valérie Le Tensorer also received credits for the graphics.
When finished, they showcased at the Apple Expo in Paris, where it was picked up by a French publisher:
“There was this company called Toolbox, and they were excited, and then they basically bought it from us, so we signed the contract, and they got that game, and then, you know, because we were, I think, I don’t know, 16 or something, then suddenly we got money for it, you know, it was kind of exciting, because we knew, oh, we can make money.”11
After Toolbox’s closure, the rights reverted to the developers and were later sold to Seven Hills Software in the US. Yet, The game seems not to have received any coverage in any special interest press such as gaming and/or computer magazines, which makes sense given its platform and time of publication.

Not a conclusion, but a preliminary summary
With that, we are far away from an actual conclusion, but before continuing with the second part of our case study, it seems useful to briefly reflect upon our insights this far: GATE is an interesting example of a game to study in part since it sparked our interest mostly by chance. It is not a particularly famous game and was developed for a system that wasn’t particularly popular by the time GATE was published. One of the main reasons we even know about it is a niche discussion in an old forum where one of the developers recommended it. Yet, as our analysis of the production has shown, what might seem odd at first makes perfectly sense given that the game was the result of four young people from roughly the same area getting interested in developing a game and simply experimenting with their own ideas and computers, in this case the Apple II. In the next part, we will continue our product analysis before moving on to GATE’s (limited) reception and our conclusion based on our entire case study.
If you want to keep reading our case study, you can find part two here.
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- Kienzle, Jörg. Interview (transcript) led by Adrian Demleitner, 18.10.2024. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Swalwell, Melanie. Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality. MIT Press, 2021, 57. [↩]
- Gudat, Henrik. Interview (transcript) led by Adrian Demleitner, 06.12.2024. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
- e.g. Gamescape+-Interview Thomas Landolt, Michael Andai i.a. [↩]
- Bauer, René and Beat Suter. “Anfänge des Schweizer Game Designs Teil 1: Nerds, Freaks und ihre Communities“. Spiel-Kultur-Wissenschaften, 17.03.2021. http://spielkult.hypotheses.org/2923. [↩]
- Nooney, Lane. The Apple II Age: How the computer became personal. University of Chicago Press, 2023, 13. [↩]
- Most probably the game Tranquility Base, a Lunar Lander clone programmed by Bill Budge for the Apple II in 1981. See Hague, James. “Bill Budge” (Interview). Halcyon Days, 1997. https://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/BUDGE.HTM. [↩]
- Anonymous. Der Bund 135, no 14, 18.01.1984, 14. [↩]
- Although the Apple II, unlike its predecessor, was not available as a kit, the computer was probably cloned more often by hobbyists due to its design. [↩]
- Kienzle, Jörg. “Jörg’s Hobbies”, Jörg Kienzle’s Home (Personal Website), https://web.archive.org/web/20211017161749mp_/https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~joerg/Home/Hobbies.html. [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Kienzle, Jörg. Interview (transcript) led by Adrian Demleitner, 14.03.2025. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Bamberg, Julia and Michael Reimann. “Nostalgie trifft Moderne: Retro-Gaming auf Mac & Apple 2e mit Expertengast Gunnar Lott”. apfeltalk, 03.03.2023. https://www.apfeltalk.de/magazin/editors-podcast/nostalgie-trifft-moderne-retro-gaming-auf-mac-apple-2e-mit-expertengast-gunnar-lott/. [↩]
- Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to find out which magazine this is. [↩]
- Lott, Gunnar and Christian Schmidt. “Gauntlet SF 125”. Stay Forever, 30.10.2022. https://www.stayforever.de/2022/10/gauntlet-sf-125/. [↩]
- Brandenburg, Aurelia, Adrian Demleitner, Arno Görgen, Addrich Mauch, and Eugen Pfister. ‘Fallstudie: Ball Raider (Golden Gate Crew/Diamond Software/Robtek, 1987, Amiga)’. Confoederatio Ludens, 17.06.2024. https://doi.org/10.58079/11u3w. [↩]
- Brandenburg, Aurelia, Adrian Demleitner, Arno Görgen, Addrich Mauch, and Eugen Pfister. ‘Case Study: Necronom (Lunatic Software/Linel, 1991, Amiga)’. Confoederatio Ludens, 28.03.2024. https://doi.org/10.58079/w4dm. [↩]
- Gudat, Henrik. Interview (transcript) led by Adrian Demleitner, 06.12.2024 [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
CH Ludens (October 20, 2025). Curiosity and Computer Stores: Case Study on GATE (Bright Software 1991) #1. Confoederatio Ludens. Retrieved November 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14ze3
