The Making of Stunt Island

I can't remember why I bought this game (I was in the middle of high school at the time), but I logged hundreds of hours in this game. It's hard to appreciate games from a generation before you because you've developed a certain expectation of how games are supposed to look, features you've come to expect in every game, etc. But there was really nothing like this game at the time. 3D games barely existed (they were mostly flight sims, as this game nominally is), but it had so much more. You have to remember that this was before the web (actually one year after its creation), and most people weren't on the Internet. Some of us nerds were on BBSes, Compuserve, etc. But discovery of new games came from gaming magazines, friends, and just going to the game store and seeing what was on the shelves (which, as I think about it, is probably how I ended up with it. I probably thought it looked cool on the shelf).

I don't really have a point, but this article brought back some memories of that time.

> And I had an extra hercules graphics card that allowed me to debug on a separate monochrome monitor.

For anyone wondering how that worked... Hercules graphics cards had their screen RAM in a different part of the memory map than CGA/EGA/VGA. So a bit of clever coding could get you 'dual screens' even at the DOS level.

There's a few YouTube videos showing ancient IBM XTs running with two simultaneous monitors - one CGA, and the other Monochrome.

I can still recall its intro and sound bites.

That was such a weird era in gaming history; all these cool ideas being explored, but average computing power was not quite enough to do them justice. An odd limbo between the era when most games didn't attempt to be realistic, and before games could actually be realistic.

So you had all these games that thought they were being realistic, and we did what we had always done: nodded along and pretended that they were indeed realistic, and helped them by sticking to their rails. :)

This was so much fun. I mostly just flew planes through canyons and did cool loop-the-loops, but my brother created a whole mini film called Attack of the Killer Christmas Trees... just because he could.

It's worth noting that the slightly less slick and less fun, but possibly more powerful 3D Construction Kit predated Stunt Island:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Construction_Kit

> Disney put me in an apartment nearby from which I could walk to their offices, and I tended to get in in the afternoon and work long into the night. Corporate America is not my natural habitat and I think I was regarded with bemusement by most of the Disney employees. We were receiving no money from Disney during this period, and I couldn’t afford to eat, so I lived on whatever I could find in the office kitchen.

It seems odd that Disney was willing to provide housing, but unwilling to spend even a dime for this man to eat.

The graphics kind of remind me of the car game STUNTS.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/stunts

Still available on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/stunt_island

I regret not getting into it back in the day as I was too busy with Flight Simulator 4 and all its expansions :)

I like the picture with they guy standing on the boat deck.

Does anyone here know how pictures like that where made? With Deluxepaint...?

It doesn't really look like a photo, but close enough. But I doubt it was scanned? On the other hand, doing it by hand seems quite tricky :)

http://fabiensanglard.net/stunt_island/leaving_the_island.pn...

I wish he would run through "Midwinter" and "Midwinter II Flames of Freedom," though there are probably greater and more acute games. I love this guy and his work.

Oh so many memories, I spent so many hours as a kid setting up my own stunt. Would def want a new version running with a modern 3d engine (GTA V is a little like that)

I love this quot under a 16 pixel image, A Mirage 2000 approaching the Golden Gate. Notice the city made of hundreds of polygons and the Gouraud shading.

This is a game I would love to see a modern remake off. It would be great for my kids as a sandbox to play in and make their own movies.