The Game-Maker Archive — Part 13: The World Wide Haystack

July 27, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Over time Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker may have become obscure, but in its time it was both progressive and widespread. From a small family business in New Hampshire, the software traveled to Russia, to South America, to Singapore, to Australia. It sometimes seemed that every other game was from a new country. This was before the Web, when consumer software spread through magazine advertisements and shareware spread through bulletin boards, so people had to spend some real effort to seek out the software and trade its games.

Then attention shifted to the Web, and those BBS archives started to gather dust. It’s kind of like moving to a new computer; you transfer the most relevant files, then leave everything else sitting around on your old hard drive. Maybe, months or years down the line, you will remember an old file or application and dig it up again. Mostly, you forget. Somehow, despite its pervasiveness in the BBS scene, Game-Maker never quite made that transition.

And yet because of that pervasiveness, you can find echoes of Game-Maker everywhere if you know how and where to look. The Web contains huge unfiltered archives of content gathered from bulletin boards, dumped either directly from those boards or from late-’90s software bundle CDs. Abandonware and DOS software archives, in languages from Russian to Esperanto, are dotted with Game-Maker games. You just need the right search keys.

Obviously it helps to know a game or publisher name. Failing that, you can recognize the Game-Maker file structure at a glance. Every game consists of an unusually large collection of raw data files — some combination of .PAL, .BBL, .CBL, .MBL, .CHR, .MON, .MAP, .SND, .GAM, .VOC, .CMF, .GIF, and .TXT files, with a handful of others. Furthermore, nearly every Game-Maker game contains a few common files: SNDBLAST.DRV, CONFIG.DAT, CONFIG.BAT, CONFIG.HLP, GMHELP.TXT. A few other files pop up frequently enough: GMTITLE.GIF, GMTITLE.CMF, GMSONG1.CMF.

Not every game you find will be a winner, but if you keep poking around you will find a few weird gems. Like, for instance…

Roland Ludlam’s Hurdles

Offhand I can think of half a dozen attempts to contort Game-Maker’s engine into permitting a traditional space shooter. Despite the odd moment of brilliance, none of those attempts has been successful. In his simplicity, and in his slightly shifted goals, “13 Year Old Wiz Kid” Roland Ludlam almost makes it work.

Ludlam describes Hurdles as “A game of timing, and skill.” Although it takes the basic form of a shooter, there is no actual shooting — rather like a side-scrolling F-Zero or OutRun, I suppose. rather, the game consists almost entirely of dodging back and forth to avoid obstacles and collect bonuses. The dodging itself is a bit unconventional; to move up and down, you use the left and right arrows.

Also notable is that the intended goal is not so much to finish the game as it is to collect as many points as possible — a bit of a novelty for Game-Maker. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that I have seen another game focus on score. Game-Maker has a built-in high score table, and score is one of the major default counters, yet the engine tends to lend itself more to action-adventure games than to arcade action, making the score table a bit extraneous.

The game is one of a handful that I have seen to include an in-game menu system; hit start, and the game dumps you into a stage select screen. Available are stages 0-3, with 0 being a sort of training level, and — for the utter novelty of it — a music test. Ludlam put some not-insignificant effort into the latter, with custom visuals — some of them digitized from photographs — to accompany each .CMF file. Why he bothered, considering that none of the music is original, I don’t know. I am pleased with the effort, though!

For the main challenge, Ludlam provides dozens of lives. The goal, again, is to be challenging but not necessarily to limit the player’s progress. And the game is tough, and fast-paced. Every level seems to be built with hard right-leaning gravity that the engine just barely keeps up with and that gives the player just enough reflex time to dodge around obstructions. Each level is distinct, and some of the visuals are rather gorgeous. You’ll even find the odd bit of faux parallex scrolling.

Despite all this effort, Ludlam seemed to have little interest in presentation. He didn’t bother with a story or a title screen. It’s all about the content here — and the content is some of the most original, for its part, you’ll find in a Game-Maker game.

And I just found this two days ago. How? By searching for Game-Maker’s SNDBLAST.DRV and CONFIG.DAT files.

Matthew Groves’ Space Cadet

This is perhaps more par for the space shooter course. For the visuals Matthew Groves employed his best MS Paint skills; for the music he raided Sierra’s Space Quest. The game design involves roaming around an inscrutable maze in a sort of a cross between a lunar lander and a Space Invader. The space bar fires lasers at monsters yanked from, I believe, Penguin Pete.

And yet, the game has charm. And it plays well. The laser in particular, has a satisfying crunchiness to it. Part of that comes from the sound effects, part from the visual, and part just from the timing of the animation. Movement is precise. Groves seems to have paid actual attention to the difficulty balance. There’s little sense of nonsense about this game, and yet a huge sense of playfulness. Stereo visualizer bars serve as spikes. What seem to be old 1950s B-movie posters animate in the background.

How did I find this one? GMTITLE.GIF and GMSONG1.CMF.

To save you the search I’ll upload the two games here. You see how it works, though. Even something as obscure as Game-Maker has become leaves its traces; you just need to know how to look. And you never really know what’s out there until you do.

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