Developers Wesley Huntress and Charles Kohlhase were both employees of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and made the game in their spare time. Huntress was a senior research scientist at JPL (who later went on to become NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science was responsible for the nation's planetary exploration program from 1990 to 1998). Kohlhase was the Voyager space probe Mission Designer.
Charles Kohlase was a member of the Sierra Club and an avid backpacker.
Originally developed for Edu-Ware Services, but when Jeff Ford, David Mullich, Pam Pollack and Wesley Huntress left to form Electric Transit, this is one of the games they acquired from Edu-Ware's new owners, Management Sciences America, who closed down Edu-Ware's Los Angeles operations and transferred its educational software product line to MSA's Peachtree Software subsidiary in Atlanta, GA.
The first game sold through Electronic Art's Affiliated Label distribution program. After a year, Electric Transit ended their relationship with Electronic Arts and distributed the game through Spectrum Holobyte.
Originally developed for the Apple II in 1984. It required 48K, DOS 3.3, Applesoft and a disk drive. It was ported to the IBM PC in 1985.