Uploaded August 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A game about living in which you travel a journey from birth to death, through opportunities, situations, conversations, and experiences expressed as designs, colors, and sounds. It is a series of games of different moods - each of which affects the next. This multi-scenario action game is meant to be an analogy of a person's life experiences, from the cradle to the grave, with the ultimate objective of leading the longest, fullest life possible. This was reviewed in the March 1984 issue of Electronic Games, and the programmer John O'Neill was interviewed in the July 1984 issue.
A few copies are known to exist; one of them was acquired from Arnie Katz, Bill Kunkel, and Joyce Worley in November 2001. The rumor is 5,000 copies of this cart were destroyed when Roklan folded, making it an extremely rare release. From Ron Borta (Roklan VP of development): "Neither Lifespan or Da' Fuzz were sold to the public. Those carts contain EEPROMs. Lifespan was the creation of an artist we were working with and he could never get to "complete". He (John O'Neill) just kept developing and developing until we decided to cancel the project and he went back to Ireland. Da'Fuzz was created by me. It took a back seat to projects we were getting big bucks to complete for Disney, Atari and others. It never really got completed. There were maybe 6 to 8 cartridges of each floating around. I've got 1 of each. Don't know what happened to the rest."
To quote the manual, "YOUR REWARD, if you are successful in discovering your Character Range before your time runs out, will be that your LIFESPAN will end with a Hypnotically beautiful Light and Sound Show built from the experiences of your past life. The more years ahead of you when you reach success, the longer this show will be.” The "brilliant sound and light show" is nothing more than a poor man's demo. Imagine a bunch of random colors and sounds, with simple graphics and patterns being drawn all over the screen. Unfortunately for me, I ended the game with 32 years left (out of 96), which punished me with an interminable 10 minutes of said bullshit. The instructions say to hold down OPTION, SELECT, and START to jump right to the special ending, but I haven't been able to get this to work. Instead, all you have to do is boot the floppy disk and let it run for a few minutes and the special ending will appear all by itself.
A game about living in which you travel a journey from birth to death, through opportunities, situations, conversations, and experiences expressed as designs, colors, and sounds. It is a series of games of different moods - each of which affects the next. This multi-scenario action game is meant to be an analogy of a person's life experiences, from the cradle to the grave, with the ultimate objective of leading the longest, fullest life possible. This was reviewed in the March 1984 issue of Electronic Games, and the programmer John O'Neill was interviewed in the July 1984 issue.
A few copies are known to exist; one of them was acquired from Arnie Katz, Bill Kunkel, and Joyce Worley in November 2001. The rumor is 5,000 copies of this cart were destroyed when Roklan folded, making it an extremely rare release. From Ron Borta (Roklan VP of development): "Neither Lifespan or Da' Fuzz were sold to the public. Those carts contain EEPROMs. Lifespan was the creation of an artist we were working with and he could never get to "complete". He (John O'Neill) just kept developing and developing until we decided to cancel the project and he went back to Ireland. Da'Fuzz was created by me. It took a back seat to projects we were getting big bucks to complete for Disney, Atari and others. It never really got completed. There were maybe 6 to 8 cartridges of each floating around. I've got 1 of each. Don't know what happened to the rest."
To quote the manual, "YOUR REWARD, if you are successful in discovering your Character Range before your time runs out, will be that your LIFESPAN will end with a Hypnotically beautiful Light and Sound Show built from the experiences of your past life. The more years ahead of you when you reach success, the longer this show will be.” The "brilliant sound and light show" is nothing more than a poor man's demo. Imagine a bunch of random colors and sounds, with simple graphics and patterns being drawn all over the screen. Unfortunately for me, I ended the game with 32 years left (out of 96), which punished me with an interminable 10 minutes of said bullshit. The instructions say to hold down OPTION, SELECT, and START to jump right to the special ending, but I haven't been able to get this to work. Instead, all you have to do is boot the floppy disk and let it run for a few minutes and the special ending will appear all by itself.
