After HG101 contributor Audun Sorlie wrote a
memorial for composer Ryu Umemoto, I felt compelled to dig out the notes from my interviews with Dale DeSharone, who passed away February 2008 from leukemia, and share them with the world. For me there's a feeling, like a sense of duty having interviewed someone no longer with us, especially since as far as I know I'm the only one to have interviewed Dale. He was involved in early Atari software,
some acclaimed C64 classics, including Below the Root, an adaptation of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green Sky Trilogy of books. He was connected with the team that developed Red Book Audio, was a pioneer of the CD medium for games, and was instrumental in making sure the Philips CDi had software. His career later included the PlayStation and GameCube, right up to the current generation. Perhaps though, his most known works, are the two side-scrolling Zelda games for CDi,
which I will forever argue are well designed games which are fun to play.
Above all though, Dale was a sincere, decent human being, well loved by all those who knew and worked with him. I am always reminded of the memorial comments from James Bach, who explained how Dale had given him a start with his career, taught him to drive and helped him through a family tragedy.
My own experience of Dale was that he went above and beyond when helping with my articles, providing numerous high res scans and always happy to answer my many questions, and I will always remember that.
