An early highlight is Beast (1984), developed by Dan Baker, Alan Brown, Mark Hamilton, and Derrick Shadel, an elegantly simple yet surprisingly deep action game in which the player manipulates a dense playing field of green blocks viewed top-down, pushing and pulling wall formations in an effort to crush the enemy ‘‘beasts’’ between them. Beast borrows from Sokoban (1982), the quintessential ‘‘block pushing’’ game, but whereas that game focuses on careful step-by-step puzzle-solving configuration, Beast offers a frantic freeform, real-time spatial control. Despite comparative obscurity, the gameplay has inspired a cult following even today, and suggests well-known contemporaneous commer- cial classics such as Lode Runner, with its use of negative space to lure and snare the player’s computer-controlled hunters. The ‘‘beast eggs’’ that hatch particularly intelligent and powerful adversaries on later stages recall the arcade hit Joust from Williams Electronics. From a technical perspective, Beast is innovative in that its gameplay, though highly visual, is constructed entirely using ASCII text characters. [The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was largely responsible for the standardization of methods for representing and communicating text between computers. ASCII allows for standard letters and numbers, as well as common mathematical symbols and related characters.]
The earlier, wildly popular role-player Rogue had already firmly established this technique of ‘‘text graphics,’’ in which letters, numbers, and symbols (familiar and obscure) coarsely represent the characters and objects of the game world. But Beast takes this mode from a turn-based to an action format, maintaining a level of fluidity that is unexpectedly effective for an early PC with limited graphics hardware. Beast’s title screen includes a typical freeware announcement: ‘‘This is a free copy of BEAST. You may copy it and give it away. If you enjoy the game, please send a contribution ($20) to Dan Baker.’’ David Clark’s Sopwith (1984–1986) is a World War I-themed game that was influential in establishing the side-scrolling aviation subgenre. While the premise is straightforward— your plane must attempt to destroy enemy flyers and ground targets either by shooting or bombing—there is an unusual level of nonlinearity and conceptual sophistication to the gameplay. For instance, unlike most arcade or action-oriented flying games, the player must achieve and maintain sufficient speed to get the plane off the ground and keep it airborne. Players cannot pursue a pure shoot-‘em-up strategy, as the danger of stalling the aircraft can be equal to that posed by the enemy targets. And while most other flying games
in the horizontal scrolling format reveal the landscape at a fixed, steady pace from left to right (or in the unusual case of Namco’s Sky Kid, from right to left), Sopwith allows (and often requires) the player to roam the map at will, doubling back until all targets have been destroyed.
Historically, one of the most interesting aspects of Sopwith is the tenuous position it occupied between hobbyist freeware and commercial business software. When he wrote the game, Clark was a programmer at BMB Compuscience, a Canadian database and networking company. He included a multiplayer mode in order to demonstrate BMB’s just-developed PC networking technology, Imaginet. But while for-profit, BMB was not a game company, and Sopwith was given away for free to promote Imaginet at tradeshows. Twenty years later the game has maintained a devoted following—Clark released a defini- tive ‘‘author’s edition’’ in 2000—while needless to say, the proprietary Imaginet is an obscurity known only from the history of the game. Sopwith is a lesson in the difficulty of technological prediction, and the influence of programmers’ personal interests on the products of their employers.
Probably one of the best loved PC shareware games is the turn-based tank fighter Scorched Earth (1991–1995) by Wendell Hicken. At first glance a simplistic hit-or-be-hit series of cannon volleys, Scorched Earth’s increasingly exotic ammo (homing missiles, vaporizers, ‘‘dirt bombs,’’ and other concoctions), randomly generated landscapes and weather conditions, and social play style create a deep replayability. Particularly well known is its ‘‘hot seat’’ multiplayer mode, in which players alternate turns in front of a single computer. The precision physics ultimately have more in common with video game adaptations of sports such as pool or golf than with most ‘‘war’’ games per se. Like many popular shareware and freeware titles, Scorched Earth succeeds by limiting its ambitions, catering to the particular (and often restrictive) capabilities of the early PC, opting for a stripped down graphical style: a single-screen, side-view mountain range done up in a
Shareware Games: Between Hobbyist and Professional 153
Figure 25.1 Deceptively simple. Abstract, text-based, but frighteningly intelligent ‘‘H’’-shaped adversaries in Beast (1984).
Figure 25.2 Sopwith (1984–1986). This game appears simple, but it is a surprisingly sophisti- cated flying game.
Figure 25.3 Tiny turn-based tanks with a big bang. A war game that doesn’t take itself too seri- ously, Scorched Earth’s bright colors and precise missile aim are reminiscent of billiards or minia- ture golf.
handful of bright, saturated colors. Scorched Earth’s instantly addictive appeal is infamous, and its strong influence is evident in the commercial Worms franchise, a success across several game platforms.