Big Five Software

For the present-day Big Five software companies, see Big Tech.

Big Five 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 TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit computers. Most of its TRS-80 games were clones of arcade 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]

Big Five Software

Industry	Video games
Founded	1980
Headquarters	Van Nuys, California , 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)

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]

Games

See also: Category:Big Five Software games

TRS-80

• Attack Force (1980)
• Cosmic Fighter (1980)
• Galaxy Invasion (1980)
• Meteor Mission II (1980)
• Galaxy Invasion Plus (1980)
• Super Nova (1980)
• Robot Attack (1981)
• Stellar Escort (1981)
• Defense Command (1982)
• Weerd (1982)

Atari 8-bit

• Miner 2049er (1982)
• Bounty Bob Strikes Back! (1985)

Unreleased

• Meteor Mission (1980)^[5]
• Scraper Caper (Atari 8-bit, circa 1983). It was mentioned in some magazine ads for Miner 2049er.^[9]

Notes

1. The first version of the emulator, published in 2001, contains the "20010720" timestamp on its "Help/About..." window.^[7]