The Game-Maker Archive: One-Hit Wonders

May 22, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker offered aspiring pre-Web designers the world over their first taste of game development. And for its era, it was darned powerful: VGA graphics, Sound Blaster sound, infinitely huge games. There were some strict limitations and quirks, but at the time there wasn’t much else like it — and it sure beat breaking out Lode Runner for the hundredth time, plus the graph paper and pencil to record your levels.

Although the software was cheap and easy to use, and there was a thriving community around it, it seems most users were content to finish at most one or two games, then to move on. As a result you have a handful of big, influential voices — the artists who made a handful of complete, original games — and a peppering of neato one-off games by people you never saw again. And often it’s those oddball games that stick in the mind the most.

David Barras’ The Descent

As we discussed earlier, Game-Maker consisted of two basic elements: the actual executable file that functioned as the actual “game”, which called upon all of the user-specified graphical and sound and design elements to give itself a face; and the Game-Maker package itself, which consisted of a bunch of VGA design utilities tied together with a text mode wrapper. Game-Maker also came with a wealth of demo material, most of it by the lead programmer and his brother; some of it public domain material, gathered from who-knows-where.

Whereas Game-Maker provided powerful, well-designed utilities for drawing, defining, and organizing graphical elements — tiles, sprites, maps — the sound side of things was always kind of shrug. It wasn’t until the last few versions that the software supported Sound Blaster audio, and formats it supported were… curious. Any digital samples had to be in .VOC format, and any music in the very peculiar .CMF. Whereas even now it is possible to find audio applications that support .VOC, there never really were any popular sequencers or conversion utilities for .CMF.

So what you’ll often find is Game-Maker games with original, brilliant visuals and subversive design that borrow most of their sounds and all of their music from the demo libraries, or even from other Game-Maker games. If the original author complained, the derivative author would issue an update and give him a credit. It was a different era.

By comparison, The Descent has original music and often rather amusing sound effects — and nearly all the visual elements, from the character to the background tiles, are ripped out of the demo games that came in the Game-Maker box. It’s really strange. I guess David Barras didn’t consider himself much of an artist.

Of course what matters is not the materials you have; it’s how you use them. And David Barras was very clever here. The game is droll and odd and a bit subversive. You’re a tall guy wandering through a dungeon, collecting treasure and shooting monsters — mostly floating eyeballs — with a very noisy handgun. The level design is often deceptive, and includes a few forced checkpoints so that you don’t have to worry so much about saving. There are odd touches like paintings that may be treasures, or that may turn into gaping mouths that bite you as you walk past. And then there’s the spellbook.

I’m not sure why it’s there, though its presence — as does the presence of many things in this game — feels ironic in a way that I don’t quite understand. It’s the only item in the game that you can pick up. When you do pick it up, you gain the ability to cast a spell. When you cast a spell, your character slowly intones his incantation. With Barras’ slight southern drawl, it comes out like “ALAIYAT SYET ZIT-SIT”. Of course if you reverse the wave file, you’ll find what he meant to say was “LLEPS A SI SIHT”.

Josh Turcotte’s Orb: The Derelict Planet

This is, basically, Metroid. An amateur Metroid, I grant you. And with a protagonist that rather baffles me; it’s basically an eye inside a glass orb. Still, hey. I guess the most distinctive element of Samus is her morph ball ability. And the most expressive Metroid game is the second one, in which you spend half of your time in ball form, rolling around the walls and ceilings.

Josh Turcotte did a good job here; Orb is one of the more complex and fully-featured Game-Maker games I’ve played, and also employs one of the most comprehensive storylines. Even the credits are uncommonly verbose:

This game wouldn’t be possible without my computer and a half ruined Microcassette recorder, a few good tapes, an excellent SoundBlaster system, a few new pens, a lot of graphpaper, and my very fat Norwegian Elkhound named Thor who was for most of the monsters in this game, and for a few of the sounds in the game, my inspiration. The rest of the monsters Merry, Pippin, and Isis… in order two loud parakeets and a pest of a cat, are responsible for. GAMEMAKER is, however, more responsible than any other for this master piece, and deserves due thanks from I as well as from any who enjoy playing this game.

Indeed. Anyway, the visuals are clean and attractive. The level design is actually pretty good, if about as confusing as the original Metroid. From the amount of original effort that went into this game I’d like to see what else Josh Turcotte got up to.

Firefall Softwarez’s Firefall

It’s not that Firefall is all that great, really. It’s more that this is the closest example I have to the kind of game that Game-Maker was designed to produce. In this case the enigmatic “Firefall Softwarez” clearly tried to clone Gauntlet, and wound up with something rather different. What has always impressed me about this game is the rather nifty Deluxe Paint-derived visuals. Granted they’re hit and miss, but some of the monster design and most of the item and background tile design is rather grand.

Firefall feels like a first, experimental effort by a legitimately talented designer employing a very early version of the Game-Maker package and not yet used to the tools at hand. It was also one of the first Game-Maker games I found by another designer, so for that reason it has always stuck in my head — perhaps a little more solidly than it might otherwise. I can’t really justify it, except to show you the title screen:

Isn’t that sort of neat? Kind of? Maybe I’m just an old softie for Deluxe Paint dithering.

Summary

Since you’ll never find any of these games on your own, you can download them all here. It’s tiny; it takes up fewer bytes than this article. Run them in DOSBox or the like. The .ZIP file contains several .RAR files. Don’t ask me; I didn’t really think this through. If you’re reading this site, I’m sure you can figure it out.

Next week we’ll scan over some of the demo software that I keep referencing, most of it designed by brothers Gregory and Oliver Stone, Jr.

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