The making of Dark Castle (2018)
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
I also got to play Beyond Dark Castle[1] at one point- also a great game.
(Tangential: I was in a user group that may have tended to share pirated software for pretty much every version of computer that Apple made. If I could go back today and give each of those developers and businesses what they were owed, even with inflation, I would want to. I don’t remember anyone being aware this was illegal, and it might not have been back then. It felt sneaky though, like taking a cookie when you weren’t supposed to. I didn’t understand copyright, not that ignorance is an excuse. These kids were not intending to be criminals by any means. I know one became a cop. Duplication helped spread those games that parents probably would not have bought and they helped the kids learn and care about slightly more technical aspects of the technology they were using, such as what a sector was on a floppy, and the physical noise and behavior of the drive when things were written or read from the disk in a certain way, and how that would sometimes relate to whether the duplicated game could be played.)
There was a later color remake version of the original[2] for the Mac. It’s strange that old B/W Mac OS is being used in the video; my Color Classic’s desktop was in color. I’m also unfamiliar with the ports of Dark Castle, but it looks like a color version of Beyond Dark Castle was made for the Amiga[3].
I eventually got Return to Dark Castle[4] for macOS many years later, which was a good bit of fun also.
[1]- https://youtu.be/ISP9su7okHo
[2]- https://youtu.be/ZVSm6pexOWA
[3]- https://youtu.be/1ZfEbqhb_Mc
[4]- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/return-to-dark-castle/id410703...
Wow, didn’t realize the main programmer ended up writing Flash: “Jonathan Gay (who we should note went on to create the Flash multimedia software) owns a family-operated cattle ranch”
I wrote games for the Apple ][ in basic and created some with The Arcade Machine, but my Apple Machine Language book was largely unread, due to my impatience.
Someone at the time that did have the patience was Jordan M., who wrote Karateka[1], which I thought was pronounced “kah-RAH-tic-a” but is “CARE-ah-TAKE-ah”[2], and please don’t ask me to change. The making of that game was one of the greatest things in the recent history of humanity, at least in my limited experience.
[1]- https://www.amazon.com/Making-Karateka-Jordan-Mechner-ebook/...
I used a Basic compiler, but for the life of me now I cannot remember the name of it. There are several different AppleSoft Basic compilers (such as TASC and Beagle Compiler) but this one used its own variant of Basic, not AppleSoft Basic.
Dang, now I'm going to spend all day trying to remember the name of it. That and reminisce about the space exploration game I was developing that was going to take over the world, but mostly just ended up getting my middle school teachers to yell at me for working on it instead of the class work.
With C, (at least the way I remembered back then), you had to deal with QuickDraw, double buffering, etc. which was more complicated than I could deal with versus just being able throw up a game to play with.
When it was clear most people were moving to THINK C, I did as well.
Languages aside, the Macintosh Toolbox, specifically "Quickdraw", had a nice routine called CopyBits() that did the blitting. That (and how to create a bitmap offscreen) was what really mattered.
On one hand, I was in awe of people that wrote straight assembler to blit to the screen for even faster performance, but at the same time it was apparent how fragile that was as the machine and OS evolved and broke them.
Obviously no kid is a criminal because of pirated games. When I was a kid, you bought C64, Amiga* -- and later, DOS -- games at shops, and every game was pirated. This was the norm in third world countries. I didn't even know there was anything out of the ordinary. I don't think I owned a single legit C64 game. As for my first legal PC games, which a relative from abroad bought for me: I didn't really make the connection; to me they were "boxed games" because they came with a fancy box and a manual.
I don't feel the need to "repay" anyone about this, or feel any guilt. Of course, a real C64 boxed game is probably a collector's item today, and I'd like to own an original of the games I loved as a kid.
* though nobody I knew owned an Amiga. I marveled at the color graphics on display at the pirated games shop, and wondered who owned one!
Incredible that sometimes the "I'll get rich first so I can X fulltime!" plans actually do work out.
Indeed. I remember playing the DOS version on an 8086 (an Amstrad PC-1512 DD) when I was a kid (thanks to this article. I had totally forgotten about it, but this brought the memories back!). I remember being intrigued by the ambience and setting, but finding the game quite unplayable. Probably not only because it was the DOS version and the controls were terrible, but also because the computer was not up to scratch, it lagged a lot. I very rarely could pass the first level I encountered (and I wasn't a bad player, I completed various games in the DOS era, but it was just hard with so much lag and bad controls). I still played quite a bit more than the experience on that version/setup deserved, which goes to show that I found something special in it.
Time to find an emulator and play it as it was meant to be played once and for all, I guess!
This is marvellous to remember those times!!!!
Oh my god, that article opened a pandora box in my memories.
[1] not the same thing as Netrek.
Crystal Quest was awesome. My mom loved that game too.
I don’t recall a pyramid game.
I was going to link screenshots, and then I realized, holy jesus, I can just link the actual running game to you on the web archive: https://archive.org/details/ScarabOfRaMacintosh
Oh, the dithering!!
King's Quest III was amazing; when I went off to college I upgraded to a Quadra 840AV which allowed me to play the first three games (as well as the Space Quest & Monkey Island series) in color.
It was like the Wizard of Oz shifting into color for the first time… just amazing.
The VGA point-and-click remakes did a great disservice to these fantastic games.
I learned a lot of English with Space Quest!
The article is great writing. Looks like he has a podcast The Life & Times of Video Games [1], I will have to check it out.