About Windmill Software

(This article is taken from Andrew Jenner's Digger help file)

Windmill software is based in Canada and run by Jo-Anne Kempe. They no longer publish games, but now specialize in software for property management systems and custom management information systems (MIS) software. If you would like more information about Jo-Anne's company and its international capabilities in housing and building/facility management in custom MIS projects, contact her at Canada 905 639 4515 or visit the Windmill Software website at www.windmill-software.com

Windmill published at least nine games between 1982 and 1984: "Video Trek 88", "Floppy Frenzy", "Moonbugs", "The Exterminator", "Styx", "Digger", "Conquest", "Rollo and the Brush Brothers" and "Attack on Altair". All these are available from the Digger website.

I wrote to Jo-Anne on a number of occasions but she never replied. However, there have been a few messages on the Digger Chat mailing list from an employee of Windmill Software. Edited highlights follow:

I met Jo-Anne at a tradeshow in Toronto called ORCA which is for retirement communities, a market that she currently sells her property management software to. I had Digger on my laptop when I was there so I asked her a few questions about it. Apparently she was at a gaming show in the early 80s when she had initially demoed digger to an audience. It was in its early stages with alot of bugs. Apparently the folk who did Dig- Dug stole the concept and beat Windmill to the gaming market. She said she hadn't seen the game in years and asked if she could play it on my laptop. You should have seen this. She completed the first 3 levels without even looking at the screen. She said that the algorithms are so well known to her since she created them. She could play just by the sound and music. Amazing!!! I will be seeing her again at an upcoming show so I'll let you know about our next meeting. P.S. the main influence for her games... drugs.

She didn't write all of the games. She did some coding but her husband at the time (now ex husband) did most of the real coding. Her nephew did most of the music. I think that the Styx concept was stolen from Qix but I don't know about the rest of the games.

We've got original artwork (by Russ Liota) and game boxes (Kapanese versions) in the office. Styx, Conquest, Rollo, etc... And some advertisements from PC Magazine. Cool stuff. JA is pleased with your Windows revamp of Digger. She's a bit disappointed with the sound but what can you do. She's interested to know where you got the other games esp. Video Trek since she doesn't even have the source for any of the games anymore.

She honestly doesn't play digger that much anymore and until she found your website she didn't even have the game. We're a real small company right now with 7 or 8 people but growing quickly. Jo-Anne is busy, you've got no idea. She works like 18 hour days trying to get this company into the US market so I can't imagine her spending anytime in this chat room. She does love to talk about the gaming era though. Here's my Windmill history of the day: All the games were done in their home, created and packaged, the whole process. Apparently their two dogs (Chip and Byte) were always laying on all the disks before they were packaged so pretty much each copy of their games had dog hair in it! JA and her husband had vanity plates on their cars - Hobbin and Nobbin!

Jo-Anne tells me that there was another game. Not sure if it had worldwide distribution or not, in fact, she can't remember the name of the game. She claims that it was very similar to Q-Bert but way cooler. The name of the game started with a "J" and may have had the word "jump" in it. I'll keep drilling her to see if she can come up with the name. Also, if you're up for it, Jo-Anne is interested to see if you can resurrect some game reviews that Windmill got in PC Magazine back in the 80's. They were really good reviews - published by Ziff-Davis.

The game described sounds like "J-Bird", but although that was out at around the right time (1983), it was published by Orion Software, written by Greg Kuperberg and "protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America". Also, the presentation is very different from the other Windmill games. The mystery deepens:

After talking to Jo-Anne it seems as though J-Bird was a Windmill game. It was written by her nephew, Ray, but that doesn't explain why the rights are owned by Greg Kuperberg.

I'm gonna sent an email to Jo-Anne's nephew Ray to see if he's got any more info on J-Bird. Jo-Anne says that if Greg Kuperberg's name is on J-Bird, that it's stolen cuz she's never heard of him. Windmill also did a whole pile of utilities in the early 80's as well. One was called Videograph 88 which could take any image off a computer screen and send it to printer. It was the best of it's kind and it was hand-compiled based on the 8086 macro-assembler. Apparently it got a really good write up in PC Magazine issue #2.

What an intriguing mystery! It looks like a case of plagiarism, but the question is how much of the game was plagiarised? Did Greg Kuperberg just take the name and concept and make the game from scratch (much like most Tetris clones are called "Tetris" - I'm guilty of this myself)? Did he patch his name into Ray's executable (unlikely, since he would also have had to patch in the Orion Software animation)? Was there some sort of deal between Ray and Greg? Could Greg Kuperberg be an alias?