Shareware Heroes is now on Kickstarter for one final big push to raise the rest of the money and get the work going in earnest. Seems to be off to a strong start already! Hopefully the funding will finally come through and Richard is finally able to really dig in - since hearing about this project, I've been listening to his podcasts Ludiphilia and The Life And Times of Videogames, and he does good work.
Just noticed that the rpg2knet.com Facebook page shared this episode and added a note or two:
Ed note: the heavily hyped game with pixel art nudity he could not recall the name of was Destiny's Call Complete. Also he thought Don Miguel was Spanish and not Russian but I'll forgive him this one time...
Just stumbled on to https://breakintochat.com/, which is a wiki & blog dedicated to preserving the history of BBS door games, via a link to an interview with Gary Martin, the creator of TradeWars 2002. Then I saw they had a whole list of interviews with door game creators, including one with Austin Seraphin, creator of BarneySplat! who has been on my list of people to interview for the podcast since the first draft. Gonna enjoy digging into these!
@Shadsy has written an in-depth essay called The Mario Fangame Myth about MFGG for the Lost Histories Jam that is very worth reading.
I meant to reply to this much earlier! Sorry!
I actually had a very similar experience with Furcadia when it came out - as I recall, it came up in an IRC channel I frequented, and so I gave it a shot with a few online friends. I remember being impressed at seeing a graphical world you could inhabit with other people and build your own part of, and vaguely confused that someone somewhere could possibly be running a server that hosted everybody, for free.
I went back once or twice on my own but kind of bounced off it pretty quickly - none of my friends continued using it, and I was more interested in it as a space for doing things with people I already knew than meeting it on its own terms and meeting people there. It just seemed so big and daunting!
Very interesting to read more about it, for sure. Thanks for posting it!
So this book project was brought to my attention the other day, and I figured I'd give it a mention over here: Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet
I'm not in love with the industry-centric framing of the pitch video, but I'm extremely excited to see others take shareware history seriously. The author promises to conduct lots of first-hand interviews with various people involved in shareware, which, you won't be surprised to hear, I think is absurdly valuable work. I can't be the only one out there interviewing folks about this stuff, I'm far too slow!
I'd say every tool has its "grain", and Allegro's bread and butter was really "draw bitmaps on top of other bitmaps", with certain effects like scaling and rotation being very easy to add. But other things, which may have been straightforward if you had written the blitting code and were able to make tweaks to it, were much more difficult.
I remember putting together a demo game to show off my "skills" in the early TPU days, where I tried to build the most audiovisually impressive thing I could. The thing that gave me the most trouble: I wanted to reproduce the end-of-level screen-melting effect from Doom, and getting that to run fast was hard.
That game also had:
I definitely remember having to do a lot of fiddling to mash everything from these random sources into a sensible 256-colour palette. I had specialized commandline tools for palette generation & re-importing.
In general, I had a bunch of disparate free-or-pirated tools for creating visuals, and I used them about as naively as you could possibly imagine, and I suspect that had a lot to do with how my games ended up looking. It probably was not far off from the process that people making OHRRPGCE games were going through. Even my 3D stuff was made in tools that were designed to be accessible. I had a copy of 3DS Max, but I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything - I just knew it was "professional".
Glad you enjoyed it!
Regarding making timelines clearer, that's a fine point - I tend to be pretty muddy about what things happened when until I start digging into the wayback machine. I could certainly do some homework ahead of time and anchor questions with that information in the future.
I'd say the timeline looks roughly like:
Episode 6 show notes are here!
At one point in the interview, I assert that the General MIDI standard was based on the instrument choice of the Roland Sound Canvas. It turns out this is half-true; I had misremembered a story from The Fat Man on Game Audio, which incidentally is probably my favourite book ever written on the subject of the video game industry. If you can track down the book, I definitely recommend doing so, but here's the timeline as he lays it out:
There are also a lot of DOS games that come out around this time that credit The Fat Man for their General MIDI FM patches for Adlib cards - this is because he bundled it with the popular MIDAS Sound System library, that allowed DOS games to support the vast numbers of incompatible sound cards that were being
released at that point.
Knowing this story is what made me wonder, wait, where did Allegro get its General MIDI instrument patches from? And I got sufficiently curious about this that I dug into the source code, and found the following comment:
/* These instrument definitions are taken from the MID-KIT library by
* John Pollard. Many thanks to him for letting me use his patches: I
* wouldn't have enjoyed the task of coming up with a set of my own.
*/
Further digging reveals that MID-KIT was a shareware library that provided sound and music routines for DOS for the Watcom C compiler. Registration was $50 for a "link the binary with your software" license, and you could get the source code for $600. The author, John Pollard, credits Jean-Paul Mikkers, original creator of the Mikmod library, for assistance and some code. (One thing I had forgotten was that mikmod was also once shareware, though the $25 registration fee was only required for those using it commercially.)
Shawn doesn't remember any details about this; he assumes he must've went looking for existing software that had already solved this problem, and then simply asked the author for help.
Why is this important or even interesting to anyone? Part of what I'm interested in uncovering as part of this podcast is the invisible support networks and ecosystems that made games possible. It's too easy to imagine Shawn toiling away in isolation to produce the first draft of Allegro, and then support and code contributions just spontaneously flowing in his direction. But when you dig into questions like this, you quickly discover a bunch of people sharing knowledge, asking questions, and helping each other out.
Thanks for sticking with me during this extremely dorky and overly technical aside about MIDI. Now: If you had any personal experience using Allegro, or playing games that came out of the loose Allegro community, this would be a good thread in which to talk about it!
So I went to Babycastles and spoke with Mattie Brice about Glorious Trainwrecks and its history! It was a really good time, and I suspect the following hour-and-a-half-long video may be interesting to people who enjoy listening to the podcast.
Youtube Video
Gosh, yeah, the Minecraft project is SO huge. Like, it's not just terabytes of random zip files, he took the time to build tools to analyze and make it digestable. So if you want to explore a representative sampling of random Minecraft maps from the archive, there's The Reef maps. If you want a bunch of data to build Mastodon bots with, there's The Minecraft Geologic Survey. It must have been an enormous amount of effort to put all that stuff together. And pretty much once a year he takes another huge sample.
He also has the Ephemeral Software Collection which, among other things, scrapes jam games from Github. Important work!
Episode 5 show notes are here!
In the interview, Leonard was a little uncertain about the exact chronology of the contest that led to the robotfindskitten game; after we spoke, he was kind enough to pass on an email from Pete Peterson II, definitively nailing down the story:
Jake Berendes had a "contest" with his friends -- I think while in
high school -- called "robotfindskitten". In his words (as I recall
them), both submissions involved a kitten suffering at the hands of a
robot. There is a picture I saved from his website, but I can't
remember the source of it (e.g., I don't know if he drew it, or if a
friend drew it for him). I've attached the image I have.
I loved the idea of the super broad and intriguingly named "contest"
"robotfindskitten", so I thought I would use Nerth Pork as a venue to
have the robotfindskitten contest. As you know, you're the only person
who submitted something. I was expecting poems, or pictures, or
stories, so I was absolutely delighted when the submission was a video
game.
I didn't realize Leonard had written a fan song for a Klik & Play game until after the interview was recorded, or I would have pestered him about that. So I pestered him via email instead! He sent me his copy of the game that he had archived from his BBS, along with the description that he'd written at the time:
CHOP.ZIP Size: 414,647 | A very dumb Windoze game called Choppy the
Date: 01/11/96 DL's: 0 | Pork Chop.Extended description:
You're a pork chop (surprise) and you shoot various weapons at non
sequiter baddies like hamburgers and mops. The final boss guy is a big
head who throws his eyeballs at you. It's bizarre, but that's good. It's
one of the best attempts at an action game for Windoze that I've ever
seen. I even went so far as to write a song called "Choppy The Pork
Chop" which is officially endorsed by the game's creator even. Here it
goes:
Presumably I had the lyrics in the extended description but they didn't get picked up when I dumped the file. I had never heard of Klik & Play, didn't know it was a tool, and remember being pretty impressed that someone had put in all this effort to program a pointless game.
Jeremy: I'm sure the story of how the creator gave your song an official endorsement amounts to "I emailed him and he responded positively" but I am absolutely delighted by that detail.
Leonard: I did email the author and he responded positively, that's the story, but the secret part of the story is that this was probably the first Internet email I ever sent. Certainly the first one I sent that got a response.
Choppy the Pork Chop, hooray!
It's really worth a try! I really like how it switches back and forth between the physical reality that the protagonist lives in, and the suprisingly detailed MS-DOS simulation. It's pretty astounding what it manages to do with the AGS engine.
You can play Cosmoserve on the Internet Archive in your browser, of course!
(I wonder if I still have the atrocious AGS game I made as a preteen somewhere...)
Haha, I just tried Googling it and the only other English-language thing I dug up is me talking about it with @kirkjerk 12 years ago on the Gamer's Quarter forums. I guess I was the only one who gave it a try?
(In that thread I also mention Ball2 and Igzo the Dolphin, which my recent post about on the gamemaking.social forums was what reminded me about HenyaG. Weird how memory is linked that way.)
Many people are probably familiar with Kenta Cho, or ABA Games - a Japanese freeware developer who is most famous for making interesting shmups with graphics built from abstract shapes in the early 2000s. Games like Torus Trooper, rRootage, and Tumiki Fighters, which became Blast Works on the Wii.
What I've never seen anyone discuss is his game-making tool for the Palm Pilot, HenyaG.
I want to say I discovered it around 2004. I loved my Palm III; I used to systematically browse through Palm freeware sites and download literally everything that looked interesting. I would have been starting to be active in the Insert Credit / Gamer's Quarter forum community, which would have clued me into Kenta Cho's work. I suspect that the venn diagram of "Japanese indie shmup enthusiasts" and "Palm enthusiasts who constantly seek out novel weird free stuff" had a small overlap, but there I was, inside it. And Kenta Cho had a fairly significant selection of Palm freeware on his website.
HenyaG is a tool for making single-image LCD-type games. You draw on a single canvas, and then define rules for when sections of it turn on and off. There are a small amount of events (button presses, timers, random probability, and testing if objects are visible or not), and a small number of possible actions (turn object visible or invisible, score a point, lose a life), but that's enough for an interesting possibility space. There's a decent tutorial, which made much less sense when run through Google Translate in 2004 than it does today.
From what I remember, it had one fatal downfall: when you drew an object, you could draw it anywhere on the canvas; but when you turned that object off, it would erase everything in its entire bounding box. So if you had objects with any amount of overlap, the screen would quickly become a garbled mess. The tutorial seems to suggest that this was a problem only "to save memory while editing" and wouldn't be a problem "during the actual game"; perhaps I never figured out how to run my game properly.
Anyway, I've always thought it was a really interesting idea for a constrained game making tool, and that it was a shame that nobody ever really noticed it. Looking at it now, I think it's also built to run on the desktop using this weird cross-platform Java-like VM that ran on the Palm called Waba. If anyone gets that going, definitely let me know.
This interview with Judith Pintar, author of the Compuserve-inspired AGT text adventure Cosmoserve, is 150% worth your time and I'm kind of jealous it's not a podcast episode.
Welcome @trouv!
With a list of influences like that, I definitely must recommend that you check out Glorious Trainwrecks, the community I started ten years ago that is home to a huge variety of experimental, personal, non-profit game creation. Stephen Lavelle and Anna Anthropy used to post games there regularly; I don't think Jason Roher ever did but there sure are a lot of Passage parodies.
This community is still pretty small and quiet and trying to figure itself out. My focus for the podcast is really on diving into older tools, games, and ways of thinking, but obviously it's important and interesting to talk about what's happening today as well, to connect that history and those ideas with what we can do now, and I think the community that's gathered here so far is at least as interested in figuring that out as digging into the past to see what's been left behind.
But enough rambling; welcome again, and I hope you dig the podcast :)
@rjt, I don't suppose there's anything of that project that still survives today? I'd love to see it.
Apropos of nothing, today I went looking for the source of the Capital World Games logo, and with a little Googling discovered it was in the official Microsoft GW-BASIC User's Guide docs for CIRCLE (example 3).
I honestly don't remember how I ever would have gotten my hands on the official Microsoft GW-BASIC User's Guide - I certainly never owned it, and it seems an unusual thing to have gotten from a library. But that's definitely the code.
Bitsy is cool! I haven't made anything with it myself, and I don't follow @bitsypcs or anything, but lots of interesting stuff made with it crosses my radar anyway.
I like that its design approach seems to have been "make the simplest, most limited thing possible, then slowly fix what seems most broken." Like I'm playing newer Bitsy games and I'm like "Oh, I can pick stuff up now? People can say different things if I talk to them twice?" There is a LOT more going on under the hood in Bitsy now than when I first saw it, but, like, the experience for someone just getting started is almost entirely the same? It's remained extremely simple & approachable even as it gains more features and power.
Here is my email interview with Shahzad Malik, conducted August 16, 2013.
How did Neural Storm start?
Hopefully I don't bore you with my long-winded background on how Neural Storm started, but it's a fairly fun story so I'll just start from the beginning! ;)
The beginnings of Neural Storm actually started when I was in high school. Myself, Dan Dufeu, and Jon Mavor were high school friends that were completely engrossed by Wolfenstein 3D when it came out in the early 90s. We just loved the whole concept of a first-person 3D shooter since it was a completely new way of experiencing a video game. Since we were all self-taught C programmers with an interest in gaming, we decided to start building our own 3D engine similar to Wolfenstein 3D. This was back in 1993, and we all must have been in Grade 12 or so.
Back then, building a 3D engine wasn't easy, since there was no commercial Internet to scour for sample source code or get coding tips. There also wasn't an easy way to draw a simple texture mapped polygon like we have today with OpenGL or Direct3D, so we had to learn and write all that stuff on our own. We eventually figured out the whole ray-casting approach used by Wolfenstein 3D, and we had a pretty comparable 3D engine working. Then Doom came out, which took things to a whole new level. Doom used something called Binary Space Partition (BSP) Trees to render their 3D worlds so fast, since the ray-casting approach wasn't scalable to the types of 3D environments in Doom. Since we wanted to be competitive to Doom, we scrapped our ray casting engine and then started working on our own BSP engine.
This must have been early 1994, and since we wanted to figure out BSP trees we started connecting with people on dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's) that had more graphics experience than us. We eventually met a local software developer name Jean from Hull who ran a BBS that we often connected to, and he happened to be super knowledgeable about 2D/3D graphics techniques since he ran a consulting software business called Protologik that did some Virtual Reality and Digital Video applications for governments, museums, etc. He also had a rather slimy but hilarious business partner named Rui who handled the business development side of things. It turns out that Rui wanted to get into the educational games market, so he was interested in partnering up with us to build a Doom-like 3D engine. His game was going to be called "ICE 3D", and it would have a futuristic Bladerunner style look to it. The backdrop for the game would be that a new ice age was upon us, and many North American cities were re-building above the ice since the old city was buried underneath. Rui wanted the game to be based in Ottawa or some other Canadian city, and it had to have some educational aspect to it, since he had some half-baked plans to get government funding for it (back then, getting government funding for non educational video games was considered absurd, but today it's quite normal).
From our perspective, the idea sounded great, since Rui seemed to have some biz-dev experience, and we could consult with Jean for technical help along the way. So we started working with Rui and Jean in their office in Hull, which was actually a 60+ year old 3-story house converted into an office. Jean lived on the main floor, the Protologik office was on the second floor, and we worked from the top floor which had a slanted ceiling that we would bang our heads on, and also a cracked window. Rui provided us with some chairs and desks, and also a computer to work on. He also came up with a plan to pay us some hourly rate, but it was a "deferred salary" that would only be paid out once the game was released and made some money (so we were told to track our hours!). We were a bunch of naive high school kids, so we went along with that plan at the beginning, and Rui at least reimbursed us for bus passes to make it over to the office. So we would go to Hull a few times a week such as after school and on weekends and work on the 3D engine. After a few months when we started to get a BSP tree based engine working, we decided to try to get our partnership details in writing, but Rui kept stalling and never came back to us with anything. So eventually we crafted up our own agreement where we decided that since we weren't actually getting paid, we would own all the IP and source code until a game was released and published. Of course, when we showed it to Rui, he blew his top off. It's too bad I can't fully describe that meeting in writing, since Rui's mannerisms are hard to recreate with just words! ;)
Anyways, after that we decided that it would be better to just start our own company and continue building our 3D engine (and eventually Radix) on our own as an independent development company. Greg MacMartin, who was another high school friend, joined us a few months after the Rui days ended and he became our lead designer.
How did you decide to make Radix as shareware?
Shareware really took off as a viable sales and marketing approach with the success of games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Apogee (who published Wolfenstein 3D) was also doing really well with a bunch of other shareware titles like Commander Keen and the original Duke Nukem. Even Epic Megagames was making a name for themselves with titles like Jill of the Jungle and Epic Pinball. I think part of the success could be attributed to the fact that BBSs were really popular at the time, so it was really easy for anyone to just download a game and then share it with their friends legally on a floppy disk. From a development standpoint, shareware also let us have more control and higher margins when compared to traditional publishing partnerships with companies like EA (who at the time would take something like 90% of profits). In comparison, shareware publishers would typically give 40-50% to developers.
What was your contribution on Radix?
I worked on the 3D rendering algorithms, as well as some of the gameplay code and other general programming tasks. I'm not an artist, but I also created lots of textures for the game as well as a bunch of levels.
Where did you work making the game?
By the time we were heavily into Radix development, Dan, Greg and I were in our first year at Carleton. So we would do our coursework during the weekdays, and we would independently work on Radix tasks in the evenings from our own homes as time permitted. But once Friday rolled around, Dan would drive out to Orleans in the East End of Ottawa (where Jon now lived), pack up Jon's gigantic CRT monitor and PC into the trunk, and then drive to Kanata (where myself, Dan, and Greg lived), and then pack all of our machines into the trunk as well. We would then set up shop in Dan's parent's basement in Kanata, and work away until Sunday night while listening to techno/trance music and eating lots of pizza. We would also occasionally work from Union Logic's office, which was based in the Bell's Corners area of Nepean. Once the summer rolled around, we went full-time on development and ended up getting our own office in Kanata. It was in a really nice building in the Kanata South Business Park, and we managed to get a really good rate for a few months since there was some vacant office space on the main floor that was wastefully being used for storage. Since Jon was always making his way to Kanata from Orleans, we eventually just ended up renting a 3-bedroom townhouse in Kanata. So Jon took one of the bedrooms as a place to stay while in Kanata, while the main floor living room was converted into an open-space office for all of us. This was the place where we finally finished and shipped Radix.
When did you partner up with Union Logic? How did you find them?
Our meeting with Union Logic was just by chance. When we severed our ties with Rui and Protologik, Dan mentioned that story to his cousin. Dan's cousin then said that we should meet one of his friends who was also working on video games, to see if we might be able to work together. It turns out that friend was Mark Lewis who was a co-founder of Union Logic along with Jason Struck. We met with them, and at the time Union Logic was working on Jill of the Jungle 2 with Epic Megagames. Union Logic wanted to get into the shareware publishing business as well, so they liked what we were doing and that was the beginning of our partnership with them.
Did you shop the game around to any other publishers before going with Union Logic?
No we didn't. In hindsight it would've been good if we had taken a more active interest in the publishing side of things and tried to shop the game around, but we were just super passionate about development and really didn't want to concern ourselves with the biz side of things. The publishing terms with Union Logic were better than what we could get with either Apogee or Epic, and they were also local, so we were comfortable with that arrangement at the time.
How involved was Union Logic in the development of the game?
Union Logic developed the low-level sound system in Radix, and they also helped with some of the art. As mentioned earlier, they also provided us with a place to work during the early days of Neural Storm, as well as some financial support in the form of cash advances.
How did the team get along?
The team dynamics were awesome. Everyone was passionate about what we were doing, and we had a common goal of shipping a 3D game, so it was a fun time. On the in-game credits page of Radix there is a section where a random quote appears near the bottom of the page, and most of those quotes are based on inside jokes and incidents that occurred during the development of the game. There is probably an entire story associated with each quote.
How did the switch to Epic as a publisher go down?
It was both exciting as well as disappointing. Exciting because it was Epic, and they were considered a leader in the shareware space. But disappointing because our original assumption was that Union Logic would be publishing the game, and that was what they were getting their cut for. Based on our agreement with Union Logic, they were allowed to make deals with other publishers, and Neural Storm would get diluted if Union Logic made any sub-publishing deals. We never anticipated that would happen since Union Logic wanted to compete head to head with Epic and Apogee, so we didn't think much of the clause originally. But when Union Logic made a last second deal with Epic, it really sliced into the potential profits that Neural Storm would see from the sales and it really made us question the value that Union Logic was providing for their stake. In hindsight, a good lawyer would have been very useful when we made our deal with Union Logic, but we were a bunch of young kids driven purely by passion and putting too much trust in others to do the right thing. Lesson learned!
What was your impression of the relationship between Union Logic and Epic?
From our perspective, it seemed like Union Logic and Epic had a good relationship. Epic originally asked Union Logic to develop the sequel to their Jill of the Jungle, which was a big deal since Jill of the Jungle was one of the games that Epic was known for. Eventually Epic decided not to pursue the sequel, so the core of Jill of the Jungle 2 ended up turning into a game called Vinyl Goddess from Mars. Six Pound Sledge became the studio name for the group of developers that worked on Vinyl Goddess, and Union Logic was the publisher. (As a side note, the name Six Pound Sledge came from an actual six-pound sledge hammer that Union Logic had in their office... it was used to knock down a bunch of walls in their original office space in Bell's Corners when they were renovating... ;) )
To this day we're not entirely sure as to why Union Logic decided to sub-publish through Epic. We were originally told that Union Logic felt they didn't have the resources to publish Radix effectively, so that was why they went to Epic, but I still wonder what else was going on behind the scenes.
Were you involved at all with any other games Union Logic was publishing, eg. Vinyl Goddess From Mars?
No, that was an internal Union Logic game that we were not involved with. The main Union Logic guys as well as some other local developers worked on it, and the team was collectively called Six Pound Sledge Studios. I do remember when they did a photo shoot for the box cover art at the Union Logic offices, where they hired a famous stripper to pose as the Vinyl Goddess. ;)
What was Cygnus Multimedia and how were they involved?
Cygnus was an American company that helped us with some of the textures and art in Radix. They had worked on some other shareware games at the time and were considered to be a good place to go for contract artwork.
Were you aware of any other people doing shareware in Ottawa?
I think shareware game development was a hot area in the mid 90s, but surprisingly there were not a whole lot of games that came out of Ottawa around that time. From what I remember, there was just Radix, Vinyl Goddess from Mars, and a few other games that Union Logic had worked on a few years earlier. There was also a guy named Mike Voss from Ottawa who had made a side-scrolling game called "Clyde's Adventure". He eventually made another game through Apogee called "Hocus Pocus". Here is a page that talks a bit about it: http://www.3drealms.com/news/2006/02/the_apogee_lega_3.html
Can you tell me a bit about your move to Cavedog? It seems like a bunch of people from Neural Storm went at once. How soon after Radix was done did that happen?
After we shipped Radix, we were all kind of burned out from the whole experience (especially the business side of things). Dan and I decided to continue our degrees at Carleton, while Jon ended up going to E3 and meeting with Chris Taylor who ended up offering him a job to work on Total Annihilation. After Total Annihilation shipped a year later, Jon teamed up with Greg and pitched a game idea called "Amen: The Awakening" to Ron Gilbert at Cavedog, and he approved it. So Dan and I then joined that team for about a year and a half. Unfortunately Cavedog kind of just collapsed around that time, so that game never actually shipped.
Dan and I eventually finished our degrees at Carleton and went into other software development careers, while Jon and Greg continued in the gaming world in Seattle and Vancouver respectively.
Are you still in touch with people from the Radix team?
Yes, I do keep in touch occasionally with Dan, Greg, and Jon. Greg is currently running his own studio called Interdimensional Games in Vancouver working on a 3D action-adventure game, while Jon is running his own studio in Seattle called Uber Entertainment. Uber actually had an awesome Kickstarter campaign for their upcoming "Planetary Annihilation" game.
Steph Keef, Mark Lewis, Jason Struck (Union Logic): I don't have any of their contact info... Steph actually had a huge falling out with Union Logic right before Radix shipped. I've looked for their contact info online, but it's like they've all disappeared from existence. Maybe they went back to Mars with that stripper?
Frank Krul: another hilarious character who had a huge falling out with Union Logic before we shipped. No idea where he is.