GameTales: HomeCourt

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Prototype Box

I recently tweeted about the fact that there was actually a sequel, mostly finished, for Origin Systems' game, 2400 A.D. titled 2500 A.D. MobyGames and Wikipedia were updated with the information which prompted someone on my TwitterFeed to ask about an unreleased Origin game titled HomeCourt.

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).

Steve Meuse worked with the brothers, mostly with Don, to get a graphical prototype working. The prototype had players on a projected 2D court running around and passing the ball on an Apple II. I saw this prototype working once when Don Walker was visiting, and it looked pretty nice. It was black and white graphics at the time, and the running and ball-passing worked great. Unfortunately, Steve left Origin in 1988 shortly after I left to co-found my studio, Inside Out Software.

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.

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.