Welcome to another Quick Bits article. I’m giving some of Hayden Software Company’s games a go and will be doing a few very small blog posts, nothing more than a short text, a few pictures, and a gameplay video.

In late 1980, brothers Garry and Daniel Kitchen started Imaginative Systems Software, Inc., out of New Milford, New Jersey, with the ambition to write their own games for the home video console and computer market. The venture amounted to six titles for the Apple II computer, all published by Hayden Software, a subsidiary spun off of the Hayden Book Company in 1981.
One of the six games was Shuttle Intercept, created by John Van Ryzin who earlier had worked with Garry at Wicked Design Associates.

Shuttle Intercept, created by John Van Ryzin and published for the Apple II in 1982 by Hayden Software

Shuttle Intercept was a simple Defender-type arcade game. Pilot your space shuttle and retrieve friendly satellites bearing vital data with your sky hook but watch out for enemy saucers and satellites which can be shot down with your laser cannon. Avoid missiles and meteors

Both Kitchen brothers and Van Ryzin ended up joining Activision, all later creating much more well-known titles than the Hayden-published ones. In 1986 Garry, Daniel, Van Ryzin, and Alex DeMeo went on to found Absolute Entertainment, Inc. Van Ryzin stayed with the operation, primarily working as a freelance, for a few years before he sold his ownership in the company and left to do his own thing.
Absolute Entertainment was built into one of the leading video game developers in North America with more than 120 software titles for entertainment companies like Nintendo, Sega, Sony, 3DO, Paramount Pictures, MCA,  20th Century Fox, and Acclaim.