I was a failed teenage game developer (part 3)

(..continued from part one and part two)

It had always been a distant dream of mine to be a game programmer. At the time, of course, it was possible for young coders to whip up popular games in their own garage and flog them off as shareware. This shut-in, computer-chained lifestyle seemed like the sort of one I wanted to lead.

My bedroom had cut-out magazine pictures of my gaming heroes.. a PC Gamer interview with iD Software back in the Doom days, a Commodore 64 magazine piece on Jeff Minter, a shoddily self-drawn System 3 logo.. I'd gaze up at them almost daily, pinned on my little bulletin board.

I tried somewhat half-heartedly to achieve that dream. After saving months worth of allowance money, I finally managed to gather enough dough to purchase Andre LaMothe's enormous book Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus. It was littered with code snippets showing how to do simple graphical tricks, play sound, and so on. It also weighed in at a rather imposing 600 or so pages, giving it definite blugeoning potential. I think it may actually feature as a murder weapon in Cluedo.

This sheer intimidation factor alone left me unimpressed, and I returned back to the comforts of my QBasic world.

During the last two years of high school, I also kept a running diary about how I was going to create a 3D SWAT-based game. I used pages upon pages to lay out the game design and describe how it would work. Looking back on it, some of it was rather cool, even though Sierra have since made a game franchise that was pretty much exactly what I had in mind. Here's my crazy mind at work in the diary's first entry, describing the sound design:

Sound will be a high priority, I want, no, I need
headphones/mics for the game. This would make for
interesting conversations between the players..

"RED ONE, THE PERPERTRAITOR IS IN THE SOUTH
BLOCK, LEVEL 12E. OVER"
"COPY THAT, RED THREE. I'M THERE. GET BACKUP."
"ROGER RED ONE. WE'RE COMING. OVER..."

and stuff like that. You could have conversations during
the game!! And you could chose which person to talk to as
well. No music - that would spoil the atmosphere. Cool.

Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but as anyone with XBox Live and any modern FPS can attest, the only thing headphone and microphones have brought to gaming is the ability for anonymous twelve-year-olds to call you a "GAY N00B FAG".

Just like the Hindenburg, so too did the plans for "SWAT" begin to slowly crash and burn, with the diary turning into an often-hysterical fest of teenage angst. It wasn't all lost dreams and skipped opportunites, mind you. Oh no. I did make some games. Five of them, in fact. And after looking back on them tonight, well, maybe it was for the best that I didn't end up in the business after all.

It seemed so funny at the time.

My first three were all Grod games (see part 1 of this series). They were terrible text adventures which involved a series of picking random action choices (A, B or C), one of which was going to be the correct answer, with the other two basically leading to 'GAME OVER'. No clues were given as to the correct answer, and most of the time it was just things that a 14-year-old would find cool or funny. As in the following example taken from Grod 3:

YOU DECIDE TO GO TO LAS VEGAS. YOU WALK TO THE AIRPORT
WITHOUT A HASSLE. THEN YOU ARE FLYING. WHILE ON THE PLANE,
THE STEWARDESS WALKS UP TO YOU AND TRIES TO CHAT YOU UP.

WILL YOU GO TO THE LUGAGGE COMPARTMENT WITH HER OR STAY?
(A) GO OR (B) STAY: A

YOU GO TO THE COMPARTMENT AT THE BACK AND START TO
PASH EACHOTHER. YOU START TO GET REALLY EXCITED BUT THEN
SHE TRANSFORMS INTO OPRAH WINFREY AND MAKES A
SPECIAL ON YOU ON HER SHOW. THE TOPIC WAS
`MEN WHO RAPE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS. YOU ARE LAUGHED AT FOR
THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! HA HA! WHAT A LOSER! HA HA HA!

GAME OVER.

Ha ha ha indeed! At the time I was pretty proud of my creations. But one fateful day, my coding rival BISHTRONICS gave me a disk containing a solitary file: GROD4.BAS. Not only was it an unofficial sequel to one of my babies, it featured something the other Grod games didn't.. graphics and sound!

At the time, this was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.
Yes, even more amazing than Robocop.

My mind was blown. Once again, my dismal productions had been bested! The next few weeks were spent tirelessly writing what I hoped would be the ultimate Grod game, Grod 5.

Might I add at this point, that drawing graphics in Q-Basic is one of the most mind-numbing, suicide-inducing things one can ever hope to do. It's full of statements like:

DRAW "BL200 bd100 r50 u60 r300 l250 g50 e50 r250 u20 ....."

that draw each line pixel by pixel. I couldn't even tell you what the above does anymore. But hell, my reputation, BARGOSOFT'S reputation was on the line here, so if it meant nights of sitting there manually creating terribly simple graphics line-by-line, that was the price that needed to be paid.

Suffice to say, Grod 5, like all the other games, pretty much sucked. Although it featured such gameplay additions as secret rooms (during "A,B,C" prompts, you needed to type a phrase that no-one in their right mind would type without looking at the code itself), and non-linear progression (you can go via the left door.... or the right door! Cripes!), it was still the same crusty old Grod underneath.

It's all about the gameplay, not the graphics.. right..? RIGHT?

As 1994 drew to a close, so did my three-year career in QBasic programming, taking with it my desire and patience to write these terrible games. And so, during the warm summer months, I wrote my last hurrah: Snake Stone : Death of a Galaxy.

Spanning around 2500 lines of code split into three separate files, it was the Grod-style of "A,B or C" text adventure gaming pushed to its limits. A long introduction sequence, frequent graphical interludes.. I spent far, far too much time on this baby.

And yeah, it still pretty much sucked.

Snake Stone in action

There was a Snake Stone 2 planned, but I only managed to write the introduction sequence and the first "A, B, C" question. I think once I got to that point, I realized that it was about time I invested my efforts in something other than giving a piece of crap a new coat of paint.. like, playing Duke Nukem 3D for instance. Yeah. That'd do just fine.

One day I shall auction off the code to Snake Stone 2 and make millions.

And on that note, this three-part epic on teenage nerddom draws to a close.

Epilogue

Before BISHTRONICS and BARGOSOFT eventually crumbled into nothingness, a third competitor emerged. Word had spread through the nerd playground that Todd - the IT teacher's son - had written games the likes of which no-one had ever seen someone write before.

We begged to see what these games were, and when he finally showed us, our jaws dropped. He'd written an air hockey game with actual VGA graphics, animation and sound. I imagine we were feeling something akin to what the developers of Awesome Possum must have felt after seeing Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Convined that he couldn't have made it himself, when we next were over at Todd's house for a party, both BISHTRONICS and BARGOSOFT decided to join forces to launch a corporate espionage attempt at finding out our new rival's secrets. Our attempts were stunningly successful. What did we find?

A copy of Andre LaMothe's Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus.

Why hello there, palms! Please meet my face. Repeatedly.

The end.