The “Westwood” came from the trendy neighborhood of Los Angeles, around the UCLA campus, where they liked to hang out when they drove down from Las Vegas of a weekend.
In March of 1985, they decided to give up working as independent contractors and form a real company, which they named Westwood Associates. Sperry and Castle eventually came to specialize in the non-trivial feat of moving slick action games such as Dragonfire and Impossible Mission from the Commodore 64 to the far less audiovisually capable Apple II without sacrificing all of their original appeal. It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the industry, but, at a time when the PC marketplace was fragmented into close to a dozen incompatible platforms, it was certainly a vital one. Through Castle’s contacts at the store - the home-computer industry was quite a small place back then - they found work as contract programmers, porters who moved software from one platform to another. They were both Apple II fanatics, both talented programmers, and both go-getters accustomed to going above and beyond what was expected of them. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he looked at some animation and programming I was working on.” Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school.
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