Adam Baratz wrote: > > > (Remember The Bilestoad?) > > No... please explain...
The Bilestoad was an awesome Apple II game that was way ahead of it's time in terms of graphics, coding, and concept. You control a "cyber knight" as he battles with another knight. The weapon is a battle axe, and as you fight you can lose an arm, there is copious amounts of blood, etc. Top-down graphics had extensive detail, rotating bitmaps... an excellent game... ..and one that was barely copy-protected. The protection was cracked fairly early on and pirate copies ran rampant throughout the warez kiddies of the time. As a result, only 5000 legitimate copies of the game were sold, so it turned out to not be profitable for the developer and publisher, and the developer never made any more games. Here's what he had to say about it: "Pretty frequently I see the recurring threads on software piracy on various newsgroups. People really believe that there is no impact from their copying software. Well, there *is* an impact. I couldn't support myself by writing computer games, so 'The Bilestoad' was the last game I did." -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer Here's some more Marc Goodman quotes from Halcyon Days, if you're curious: "I did all of the art myself, excluding the box art and manual art. I had a whole lot of grid-ruled blotter paper and scads of graph paper, and I'd draw pixels on them, and then rule them up into rows of three pixels and four pixels and then I'd convert them into hex by hand. Yeesh." -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer "I think it sucks that creativity, for the most part, consists of designing even bigger and scarier boss monsters and inventing ever more disgusting fatalities." -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer "I'm turning into one of those old geezers who is always ranting on incessantly about how much better everything was when he was a kid. People have these awesome toys now! Real computers! Amazing graphics, speed, memory, everything. And what are they doing with them? Mostly sideways-scrolling run-and-jump platform games, shooters, and the latest 'Karate Champ' clone." -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer "The only debugger I ever used was the monitor built into the Integer BASIC ROMs. I think back on it now and I wonder 'How the hell did I manage to do that?' I must have been a lot smarter then than I am now." -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer "There were so many creative things happening back then with computer games. Almost every new game that came out was a new way of slicing up the universe. There weren't a set of formulas around, thank goodness, so we had to ask ourselves, 'What's the best way to present this idea?'" -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer "Working with graphics on the Apple II was a total bitch because of the funky way the display was set up. Alternating pixels corresponded to individual colors for the bottom seven pixels, and the top pixel was a half-shift that changed the color mapping. Then, if you had two pixels set next to each other, you got sort of white. So, shifting the bits in an image so that they lined up with a particular X-coordinate on the screen was a total pain in the ass." -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer "You look at what you can really do on a 1MHz Apple II in 6502 assembly with only 48K RAM, and you hack away until you're out of memory. Then you put it in a disk mailer or a couple of wads of cardboard and cast your bread upon the waters." -- Marc Goodman, The Bilestoad (Apple II) programmer -- Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious PC games project? Drop by http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.demodvd.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/swcollect@oldskool.org/
