Rik- yeah, it was John Denker. I wish I had asked him more questions when I first emailed him, but he did say that he designed the game and designed, built and programmed the prototype hardware. The code in the patent wrapper was compiled on his account at Caltech and has vestiges of Auto Race in it, so I assumed he also wrote that. He mentioned copyright in his reply to me; I'm not sure if he was really worried about that, or just didn't want to dig up the old files!