Jeri Ellsworth of Tilt Five
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Sometimes, Apple II users have ambitions bigger than their humble retrocomputers. Steve Chiang went to work at Zynga and Warner Bros. Richard Garriott flew into space.
And now, Jeri Ellsworth is setting out to redefine reality with Tilt Five.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-tabletop-gaming
Jeri’s mixed reality rig is impressive in its own right. But it’s all the cooler due to Jeri being an Apple II rockstar, too… Well, maybe more Commodore 64.
But she was a cover story for Juiced.GS, too!
Doug Cuff’s interview with Jeri opens:
She’s a self-confessed hardware nerd, and she has a mission. She wants to rebuild one of the most popular and beloved microcomputers of the 1980s: the Commodore 64.
On the way, she’s going to be a big help to the Apple II. But even if she wasn’t, you would still want to pay homage to Jeri Ellsworth.
When she was 16, Jeri Ellsworth was playing with her Commodore 64, and she wanted it to have more colors. (Just as with the Apple II, people mentally dismissed the C-64 long before production stopped. The last C-64 rolled off the production line in 1992.)
By the time she had explored the idea of improving on the C-64’s hardware, Jeri wanted to create a C-64 on a single chip. She liked the idea of a C-64 palmtop. And she was still being driven by forces that most of us can understand: she wanted to play all her old games, and at the same time, she wanted them to have better graphics.
Jeri is also an alumna of KansasFest, Vintage Computer Festival East, and the JoCoCruise, at all of which our paths have crossed.
Tilt Five’s Kickstarter was the latest opportunity for me to intersect with Jeri, as her project was a perfect fit for my monthly gaming podcast, Polygamer. Our hour-long chat (with a few opening and closing remarks about the Apple II) aired last week.
It was a pleasure to catch up with Jeri. It was also completely unsurprising to discovery she is as much an ambitious yet humble geek as ever. I didn’t feel like I was talking to someone who had outgrown the Apple II; rather, it was two old friends picking up right where we left off.
Jeri asked that I not air the video of us singing karaoke. In truth, no such video exists — but there is video of her beating me badly at arm wrestling. So really, even if I did have any dirt on Jeri, I’d be highly incentivized to keep it to myself!
