James D. Sachs (born 1949) is a retired United States Air Force veteran, game artist and game programmer.
Sachs was the lead artist on the groundbreaking Amiga computer game Defender of the Crown from Cinemaware (first published in 1986). He is also the author of the Commodore 64 game Saucer Attack, which was heavily pirated. He called it "the Commodore 64 game everyone had, but no one purchased". He is also the author of the marine aquarium simulation screensaver SereneScreen Aquarium, and of the start-up animation of the Amiga CD32.
Some time after finishing development of Defender of the Crown, Sachs began working on a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea game. Unable to secure the rights for a game based on the Disney film, Sachs instead based his game on the original book by Jules Verne. He said this was fortuitous since some things in the novel made more sense than in the Disney portrayal. His game used a custom boot-up routine, as many games of the era did. His work, however, was destroyed by a usually innocuous virus which installed itself in the boot sector of floppy disks. The virus remained hidden until about the fifth soft reboot of the computer, when it revealed itself with a harmless message. However, because of Sach's custom boot routine, the virus destroyed his work on his development disks. After this, Sachs apparently abandoned development of the game.