Freeman, along with friend Jim Connelley, started Epyx as Automated Simulations as a vehicle to publish a game they had created together called Starfleet Orion for the Commodore PET home computer.
His wife, Westfall, joined him, though she cites a desire to learn assembly language programming on the Atari 8-bit computers as a motivation.
[2] Soon Freeman made a contact that would prove pivotal for both Free Fall and the fledgling computer game publisher, Electronic Arts (EA).
[1] Freeman and Westfall significantly altered the gameplay, strategies, and premise of the game, adding a new board, spells, creatures, and abilities.
Freeman and Reiche, working with programmer Robert Leyland, developed a murder mystery game concurrently with Archon.
Reiche paired up with programmer Fred Ford and the two developed the Star Control games, published by Accolade.
After the disappointment of their later titles, Free Fall went on to develop some online card games which were featured on Prodigy's GameTV service.