The Game-Maker Archive — Part 12: Cut-and-Paste Opportunism

July 25, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

For its time, Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker offered users the world over to put practice to their game design ambitions, within certain strict limitations. Mostly this ambition took on an informal shape. Users connected with each other through bulletin boards and shared ideas and resources. They explored how to subvert the engine’s limitations, and how to adapt their own wild ideas to practical realities. A few users, like Mark A. Janelle, took the business implications of shareware very seriously, while still contributing to the overall Game-Maker culture. Other users kind of took the engine and ran.

Instead of seeing Game-Maker an opportunity to explore game design and to make social connections without any of the usual hurdles, they saw it as an opportunity to turn around a quick profit with a minimum of investment. Although I admire a certain ambition, I’m not sure if Game-Maker was really the best tool for the job.

The Antares Bros.

Time After Time and Reptalia are two of the oddest Game-Maker games I have encountered. Both are the result of the entrepreneurial pairing of Paul Callahan and James Russell. With an easy game development kit at hand, they chose to advertise their services as custom game designers. Send in a portrait of yourself, and they would scan it in, anti alias it, and slap it on a stock body to roam around a dungeon (in the case of Time After Time) or desert (in Reptilia).

Along with Sheldon Chase and Marty Valenti, these two games are amongst the few examples of digitization I have seen in a Game-Maker game. They are also the least effective, as there is no animation and little attempt to blend the photographs into the surrounding imagery. Also, frankly, the games aren’t all that hot. Still, there’s a certain weird brilliance to the business strategy.

Especially in middle class America, there is a huge market for marginally customized products — stamps, address labels, Christmas cards, pre-formatted business cards; all inexpensive, all a bit tawdry. All of them allow a solipsistic demographic that achieves little and earns both too much and too little to have real freedom to buy meaning for itself. By that reasoning, what better gift for that young gamer in your life than to buy him a slot in a real videogame?

I have no clue if Callahan and Russel found their own success in this venture. I kind of hope so.

Sherwood Forest Shareware

Another industrious pairing, Rob Sherwood and Dan Whalen pumped out game after game. Their concern lay more in high concept scenarios than in exploring Game-Maker’s abilities. The result is that each game stays well within the limits of Game-Maker’s back-of-the-box feature set, and so comes off like a cross between Pipemare and Sample, except without the polish. To the last, the games are top-down action adventures, controlled with the arrow keys and the space bar. They even use most of the same filenames.

Although the individual games may be unremarkable, when you scrape up a big enough pile of them you begin to take each new concept strictly within the limits of the Sherwood Forest template. Shootout at Dodge has a wild west setting, and a kind of neat side-scrolling overworld or map screen. Big Bob’s Drive-In has a 1950s diner setting, which rationalizes attacks as food orders and monsters as customers. Robo Wars wraps its generic top-down action in a sci-fi techno setting. Rocket Fighter tries to sell itself as a space shooter, though you and I know better.

Perhaps Sherwood Forest’s best-known game is an adult title called The Adventures of Melvin Freebush, that may or may not have been created with Game-Maker. Although I have yet to track down a reference copy, I have noticed a certain fond following in some circles.

Erotic Game-Maker games are hardly unusual, particularly in the wake of Sheldon Chase’s Woman Warrior games. Yet it is interesting to see wink-wink eroticism as just another plug-and-play theme next to wild west shootouts and space operas. I suppose that in the end Game-Maker is just an empty engine that fills in its blanks with standard data files. Yet it takes a certain chutzpah to not only lay that structure bare but then in one’s callousness to extrapolate it into our wider understanding of theme and narrative.

All is one, most is crap, and the sooner you submit the further you can go. I’m not sure what to make of this philosophy. All I can think of now is how Sherwood could easily have included porn in any of its genres. Had they that foresight, I wonder where they would be today.

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