Lost in Space with Matthew D. Groves

December 6, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

A few months ago we detailed some search methods for discovering unknown Game-Maker games in the wild Web; as examples we detailed two games: Roland Ludlam’s rather wonderful Hurdles, and Matthew Groves’ modestly charming Space Cadet. Since our interview with the one author went so well, we now turn our sights on the second, Web developer and aspiring Android coder Matthew D. Groves.

Hello! Are you the Matthew Groves who designed the Game-Maker game Space Cadet?

Wow, that’s something I haven’t thought about in a loooong time. Yeah, it’s me. I’ve lost all my copies, so if you have one could you send it this way?

Sure! You can download it here.

Oh my god, this is so cool. I haven’t seen any of that stuff in years! You are very generous with your review of Space Cadet. Even at 13 I had a sense for the limitations of Game-Maker, and looking back now, it was just not a good game. But thank you anyway.

Well, hey. It may not be the most ambitious or technically astounding thing around, but it does show a good sense of humor and judgment, which is more than you can say of many games. I don’t suppose that your other games still survive, then? Did you ever get around to the sequels?

I did, in fact, actually make Space Cadet 2 and Space Cadet 3, but no one ever paid the registration fee (not surprisingly). I also made both of those Mystery games, Mystery Mansion being shareware and Mystery Caves being the registered only. I also made a game called Jet Driver, which was, ironically enough, a very very primitive form of a Grand Theft Auto style racing game where you can run over pedestrians and what not, and I released that as shareware too.

Oh, and uh the Mystery games were very similar to Space Cadet. Overhead shooters, but the theme was that you were some sort of supernatural action hero in a haunted mansion with monsters and ghosts and what not. I believe at the end of Mystery Mansion, you found a secret entrance to a series of caves, which was the next game.

So I take it Mystery Caves was similar to Mansion, but with different backgrounds?

Mystery Caves was the same sort of game with different monsters and backgrounds (rocks instead of bricks mainly, because it’s a cave).

I also remembered that my dad and friends would often sell stuff at Hamfest and computer show flea markets, and I brought along a dozen copies of my shareware games to sell for $1 each (this was very common at those types of events). I think I actually did sell a few copies, so I did make a few dollars after all.

Did you sell Caves and the Space Cadet sequels at your garage sales too, or just the first episodes?

The sequels were sold mail-order only, and I never sold a single copy.

One other tidbit: CD-ROM shareware discs were common back in those days, just discs full of shareware games for like $10 or so, and Space Cadet and Mystery Mansion were both featured on one of those discs (I want to say “Game Head” volume 4 or something like that). I wasn’t paid for it, but I remember being very proud of it at the time.

Do you recall exactly when you designed Space Cadet? Presumably it was between 1991-1996, but could you narrow it down?

I actually still have my original Game-Maker box, so I dug it out to see what I could find. I have a couple letters of correspondence from Recreational Software. One of them is dated June 15, 1993, the other is February 15, 1994, which would put me at ages 13-14 when I did these. There’s also a receipt still in the box (why did I keep all this stuff?) dated 4/29/93.

What sort of correspondence did you have with RSD? Someone else recently suggested that the box contained a slip or letter soliciting responses from users. Do you recall how you encountered Game-Maker in the first place?

I believe I sent them a letter suggesting some new features, at least that’s what the response letter seems to indicate. I remember I had attempted more ambitious adventure games with dialog, inventory, voice acting, etc and what not, but Game-Maker was just not having it, so all I could think to do was send them a letter.

Did you have any contact at the time with other Game-Maker users, or encounter other Game-Maker games?

I remember finding a bunch of other Game-Maker games at some point, maybe when I first got an Internet connection, maybe on a BBS somewhere (maybe I convinced my parents to let me call the RSD BBS?), I forget, but I never had any contact with those authors. I remember I was hoping to learn some tricks on how to overcome Game-Maker’s limitations, but never really found anything.

Do you remember anything about the games that you stumbled over?

No I don’t really remember anything about them, other than I think they used some of the assets that came with Game-Maker (which I think everybody probably did). I burned through a lot of shareware in those days, so nothing is really springing to mind.

I notice that you’re still in software design in some form. Have you at all pursued game design since your Game-Maker years?

I am a programmer now, though I mostly lost interest in writing games as I matured and learned what professional game development was really like (and I also had no interest in moving to New York or LA or wherever). I mostly work on web applications and web sites, though I have been toying with mobile phone development, and I have an idea for an Android game that I’ve been toying with.

How far have you come with the Android design? Is it anything you want to talk about publicly?

I’ve only just recently gotten an Android phone, and I’ve been playing with some development tools (MonoDroid and PhoneGap), but as far as the game goes, it’s really just an idea at this point, and nothing more. Nothing earth-shattering, just a rehash of some other games that I enjoy. I would probably get a normal “app” done first, and then consider doing a game. I actually have an old friend from a previous job who is a great artist and designer, so it’s possible we could work together on something but it’s far far too early to say anything more than that.

so what led you back into game design (provisionally as it may be)?

Well, I just got my first Android phone, and I get hyped up whenever I get new gadgets. Though I’ve been very disappointed with the dev tools, Windows Phone 7 is so much easier to dev for (but I like Android as a platform better).

What’s frustrating you about the tools?

Well, I’m not a Java developer, but the Android SDK is Java-based. I have no desire to really learn Java, so I’m using other tools like PhoneGap and MonoDroid, but those tools are still in early versions, so they aren’t quite there yet. Sometimes there’s an error, but it doesn’t really identify what the error is, the debugging doesn’t work, or some feature really isn’t fully supported, etc. It’s a similar story for iPhone and Objective-C: developing is a painful process, not to mention I don’t own a Mac or an iPhone. Windows Phone 7 has the best dev story by far, in my opinion, but who knows if anyone will actually buy a Windows Phone, right?

And I suppose it’s more efficient to write directly for the phone’s specifications, rather than layer something like Flash on top of it. What attracts you about Droid in particular, compared to the other mobile platforms?

Well, a lot of reasons. I’m not an “Apple” guy, I really don’t “get” it, I guess, but I imagine that’s related to my thriftyness (or cheapness as my wife would say). I just don’t understand paying that much for a phone or PC, even if it never crashes or has some fancy industrial design. Windows Phone 7 is attractive, but ultimately it will be a similar thing: overpriced phone and/or contract with expensive data plan, plus it’s playing a lot of catch-up with the other OS’s in the market.

I’ve been using a Windows Mobile phone for years now, but its just too slow and outdated. Virgin Mobile just came out with these super cheap $25/month plans with no contract, and a mid-range spec Android phone to match. I’ll save close to $80 a month with Virgin (which covers the non-subsidized phone price in 4 months), and I’ll have all the features I need. So I guess it just comes down to me being a cheapskate.

I hear you about the apple thing. I always feel claustrophobic in their environments. So aside from Game-Maker and this new project, have you done any other game design?

Game-Maker actually wasn’t the first game-making program I used. I also bought QuestMaker, which was a Sierra/LucasArts style game-making program, but I had lots of trouble getting it to work very well, so I never released a game with that. I believe I found both of these programs through magazine advertisements, though maybe QuestMaker had a shareware demo or something. It must have been Compute magazine, which was my favorite magazine. I might even have that magazine sitting around somewhere too. I also wrote a couple games for ZZT, which had a *very* extensive gaming “editor” with it’s own object-oriented programming language. I did a lot of that sort of stuff, which is probably closer to “modding” as it’s called today than it is programming. Though ZZT definitely involved programming.

How would you compare your experience with Game-Maker to those other design tools?

Out of the ones I mentioned, ZZT gave me the richest experience as a designer/developer. The fact that the canvas was limited to ASCII characters and colors actually worked in my favor, since I’m not really much of an artist. The programming language, dialog options, level designer, etc, were very rich. Game-Maker was probably the best one I used with real graphics, and I had a lot of fun just playing around with pixels and sound effects. QuestMaker was pretty weak, and I don’t recall it being much fun.

I can actually see a bunch of ZZT in Space Cadet. Something about the use of space, and the flavor of exploration involved. What effect, if any, do you think your experiences with these tools may have had on your later software work?

Well, gaming was certainly a big part of what attracted me to computers and computer programming in the first place, but other than that I don’t think ZZT or Game-Maker really influenced my work today. If you mean what effect did ZZT have on my Game-Maker games, well I think I tried once or twice to “port” stuff I had done over to Game-Maker, but never really got anywhere. Other than that, the style of game was slightly similar (in that they involved shooting sometimes), but other than that pretty different.

What traditional videogames would you say had the biggest influence on you? You were fond of Space Quest, apparently.

Oh, probably the same stuff everyone played back when I was a kid. Sierra/LucasArts style games were my favorites (including Space Quest, of course) on PC, and I played a lot of NES/SNES games too (Mega Man, Mario, Zelda, etc). I played/modded a lot of X-Wing on PC, cuz I’m a big Star Wars nut too. Doom, Wolfenstein, all that stuff. I played pretty much anything that could run on my old 386 PC.

So cool. A pretty rounded picture, then. Do you have any final thoughts about your experiences with Game-Maker?

My only final thought is that while it’s kinda embarrassing to have these games around again 15+ years later, I had a lot of fun making them and using Game-Maker.

Following the interview, we received in the mail a bundle of floppy disks containing all of Matthew Groves’ surviving Game-Maker material. Amongst that material are two of the games we discussed. Following some adventures with ancient computer hardware, we managed to extract the data for preservation. Come back later this week to see the results.