GameTales: HomeCourt
HomeCourt Box Concept
Luckily, I’m one of the few people to know about this project. HomeCourt was a basketball game designed by two brothers, Don and John Walker. They were stronger on the design side than the coding side, so they had help from classic game programmer, Steve Meuse. I believe the game idea was brought to Origin in 1987 to make a full court basketball game (One on One was a half-court game).
HomeCourt ad concept
The New Hampshire office of Origin Systems closed, and the company was consolidated in Austin, TX at the start of 1989. That effectively put an end to HomeCourt. Says Steve Meuse, “The game design aspect was getting more complex, and by the time I left Origin in 1988, it seemed to me to be only getting moreso. With the company move and all, the Walkers probably could have used more help and guidance than they got, but that’s just the way things turned out.”
Unintended Acceleration
I was reading CNN today and there was a story about a guy whose Toyota randomly started accelerating and he crashed into two cars at 70mph. This was back in 2006 before all the recent Toyota issues. The man has finally been freed as the court found it wasn’t his fault.
It brought back the memory of how the same thing happened to me back in 1991 when I was working on Commander Keen 4-6. I was driving my brown 1975 Cougar in the winter down a pretty short road that was just in front of id’s apartment. I had the accelerator down to get some speed, and when I took my foot off the car kept accelerating! I started messing with the pedal but it didn’t stop. I realized the smartest thing was to put the car in neutral and hit the brakes before I got to the intersection. It worked and I quickly pulled over and popped the hood while the car engine was whining loudly as it was still accelerating. I pulled the fuel hose out to stop the engine and then pulled back on the accelerator cable to get it back to normal. That was pretty terrifying for about 30 seconds.
The reason the accelerator got jacked is because I changed the cable assembly because the previous one broke. But it wasn’t calibrated correctly and the cable snagged on something that time.
The lesson? DON’T TRY TO FIX YOUR OWN CAR! Lol.
Gamesauce #2!
There’s a new magazine in town for game developers, and its name is Gamesauce. The first issue had an interview with Trip Hawkins. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the second issue by Brenda Brathwaite and answered some of the more interesting questions I’ve been asked thus far.
There are some other great articles inside, such as Ensemble Studios’ development transition from Age of Empires 1 to 2 (Age of Kings), a short interview with my friend Randy Pitchford, and an article with ideas about how to you can spend your time if your game has been canceled.
The people who put this magazine together are a great bunch. They have many, many years of experience in the industry and want the magazine to be only the highest quality. I worked with Jessica Tams and Jake Simpson, and they are both very kind and generous to include me here. Gamesauce is only for professional game developers and those in the game industry.
You can read the entire magazine right now.
WordPress Hacked
My WordPress install got hacked a week or more ago, and I couldn’t work on figuring it out until tonight. Well, it looks like some hacker found out my wp-config.php file had some bad permissions set and he inserted some code in there that basically scanned every php file on my site and injected every php file with code that will redirect users to various malware sites.
It was easier for me to edit every php file rather than re-download all my plugins again (except the W3 Caching plugin – it has about 100 files). I also had to reinstall the theme because it was fully infected, too.
So, everyone, make sure you have proper permissions set on all your files or things like this can happen.
Retro Gamer #75
This month, Retro Gamer in the UK published issue 75 (over 6 years) and did something they’ve never done before: they had a guest editor. And, you guessed it, that was me. It also has my name on the cover, so that kinda gives it away.
The cover of the magazine is Wolfenstein 3D (much like another issue several months before that was all about the making of Wolf 3D). I got to read/edit all the magazine content before they published it, and I made comments about several of the articles. The biggest part of the magazine I’m involved with is a 12-page interview with me. There are also industry notables who wrote some paragraphs about me, and readers wrote in about their favorite games of mine.
All in all, I was very happy with the result. Darran Jones did a tremendous job planning and executing this feature. Retro Gamer is sold in most major bookstores.
Retro Gamer put out a press release about this issue:
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
30 March 2010Retro Gamer gains industry legend as guest Editor
John Romero and Imagine Publishing team up for special issue of the world’s greatest retro games magazine, Retro Gamer, is proud to announce an exciting new collaboration with John Romero, co-founder of one of today’s most important and popular genres – the first-person shooter.
On Wednesday 31 March, issue 75 of Retro Gamer goes on sale across the UK and the world with a special celebration issue featuring industry legend John Romero as guest Editor. As well as a host of special content picked by Romero, the issue is packed with comments, tributes and insights from those who have worked with him over the years, such as John Carmack and Dave Perry. The special issue also includes an exhaustive 12-page interview with the man himself, outlining his career, his thoughts on the industry today, and his intriguing current project.
Making his name at companies such as Origin Systems and Softdisk, Romero cut his programming teeth on the Apple II before moving into the PC market. Teaming up with fellow Softdisk workers John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall, he co-formed id Software. After finding success in the shareware scene with the Commander Keen games, id created Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, and with them ushered in a new era of gaming that’s still immensely popular today.
“I absolutely love Retro Gamer magazine because it covers all the game history that I love and remember fondly,” said Romero. “Being allowed the chance to do a little writing for the magazine was an amazing opportunity and I hope you all enjoy it the way I did.”
“John Romero is a genuine legend in the videogame industry,” said Darran Jones, Editor of Retro Gamer, “and he has been behind some of the most influential games this industry has ever seen. It’s been a real pleasure collaborating with him on this exciting project.”
Dark Forces on Mac OS X
Three years ago I wrote a post about getting Dark Forces (DOS, 1995, LucasArts) running under Windows Vista. Well, I got it working under Mac OS X (I use Snow Leopard) easily.
Here are my updated directions for Mac OS X:
(1) Copy entire contents of the Dark Forces CD to a directory (ex. ~/Games/Dark). Keep the directory name to 8 letters or less.
(2) Download the latest Mac OS X version of DOSBox and install it.
(3) mount c ~/Games/Dark (or wherever you put the game on your hard drive)
(4) c:
(5) subst p: c:
(6) p:
(7) cd dark
(8) type either imuse or dark to run the sound config utility or the game
To go in/out of full-screen mode, press Option-Return. That’s it – it works great!
UPDATE: I forgot to mention, for Mac users there is an awesome program named Boxer that will wrap your DOS games up in a simple app file and you just double-click to launch. It’s really amazing. Check it out here.
QTest was Ground Zero
Today is the 14th anniversary of QTest, our release to the public of the Quake executable along with three deathmatch maps, to test our network code over the internet.
Quake was our first internet-playable game, and we knew it would be great to let players try out the net code before the game’s release so we had some lead time to fix all the bugs found with it.
At id Software, we never had a QA department. We were our own QA team, us programmers, designers and artists. A pretty small group, but we were pretty thorough. The network code in Quake, however, needed to be tested way more than our small group could handle because of the amount of networking hardware our packets had to travel through.
It paid off – Quake was released with pretty reliable network code. Playing Quake on a LAN was always a much, much better experience, so John Carmack addressed that with the QuakeWorld release in November 1996 by fixing the network code and adding client-side prediction. Now, the issues he fixed are just part of normal network programming.
The day we released QTest, we invited a very small, select group of hardcore DOOM players to our office to test our release right in front of us. They’re known as the QTest 7. They are:
- NaTaS (Mark Fletcher)
- Hardball
- DoomDeity
- PoLiSh (Jaroslaw Krzysztof Marcin Wolski, aka Jerry Wolski. R.I.P.)
- Wendigo (Brian Hess)
- Monolith
- Avatar (Mackey McCandlish)
Here are the original photos of the QTest event at id Software that Wendigo took that Sunday.
The release of QTest paved the way for high-speed internet FPS gaming. I guess you could say that February 24, 1996 was the beginning of the future. Long live QTest!
Twitter
- @ibogost Turn off syncing contacts & addresses in iTunes and leave it to MobileMe.
- Dear Clint Bajakian, I still listen to the Dark Forces and Outlaws soundtracks. A lot.
- Here's the pic.... #apple2 http://yfrog.com/9d12405874p
