In 1977, Susan Lee-Merrow invited Jon Freeman to join a Dungeons & Dragons game hosted by Jim Connelley and Jeff Johnson.

[1] The two formed Automated Simulations around Thanksgiving 1978 to market the game, and released it in December as Starfleet Orion.

[a] As the game was written in BASIC, it was easy to port to other home computers of the era, starting with the TRS-80 and then the Apple II, the latter featuring rudimentary graphics.

Around this time, an independent submission to publish a game called Jumpman came through and was a big hit for Epyx.

"[3] By early 1984, InfoWorld estimated that Epyx was the world's 16th-largest microcomputer-software company, with $10 million in 1983 sales.

Data East won at the US District Court level and Judge William Ingram ordered Epyx to recall all copies of World Karate Championship.

Epyx appealed the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who reversed the judgment and ruled in favor of Epyx, stating that copyright protection did not extend to the idea of a tournament karate game, but specific artistic choices not dictated by that idea.

The Court noted that a "17.5 year-old boy" could see clear differences between the elements of each game actually subject to copyright.

Although the console market, dominated by the Nintendo Entertainment System, was highly lucrative, Epyx objected to Nintendo's strict rules and licensing policies and instead initiated a failed attempt to develop their own game console.

Epyx was unable to fulfill its contract with Atari to finish developing Lynx hardware and software, and the latter withheld payments that the former needed.

[9] According to Stephen Landrum, a long-time game programmer at Epyx, the company went bankrupt "because it never really understood why it had been successful in the past, and then decided to branch out in a lot of directions, all of which turned out to be failures.

After emerging from bankruptcy the company resumed game development but only for the Lynx, with Atari acting as publisher.