Just trying to gain an overview of the Windows 3 games written in 1990 by Microsoft employees. I’m ignoring those I know only within the Windows Entertainment Pack. Months are according to the time stamp of the versions I have.
Moved to new blog.
Like Bogus Software before, Duff Software was a handle used by Microsoft programmers for inofficial, usually recreational software. The name first turns up in June 1990. In the help files for Kolumz and YATC, the label is explained as follows:
DUFF software is another group of weird programmers just having fun.
It is not associated in any way with Bogus software.
The name was reportedly chosen to honor a famous brand of beer, but there are rumors it also stands for Developers United to Fight Fish.
The head of the group was obviously Robert Donner (RobD), who is typically credited as “The Guy who did all the work.” While the Bogus Software programmers sometimes went anonymously, Duff Software programs tend to have detailed credits, the handles in the about screen, the full names, with some funny quote, in the help file.
Nowadays, Lars Schenk and Frank Horn produce a software that creats and prints barcodes ActiveBarcode. Before 2004, they ran a company called ShareDirect which published shareware. In 2002, there was a school shooting in Erfurt with 17 dead. As a reaction, the German parliament decided, two years later, on tougher laws to prevent access of minors to violent video games (don’t you love politicians’ logic?). Every computer game sold in Germany henceforth had to have an official age rating, a costly process, too costly for a small shareware company. ShareDirect closed down, the domains are for sale, currently they redirect to Classic-Cadillac.com, one of Lars Schenk’s hobbies.
ShareDirect published many games by Digital Nightmares, but also several programs Lars Schenk and Frank Horn wrote themselves. Among these are four Windows Tetris games with 256-color graphics that are interesting because some of them are variants rarely covered by shareware authors.
ColorStar 2000 is the least unique, it is just Columns, which is not exactly rare, still it is only one of two 256-color Columns for Windows 3.1 that I know (The other is Columns Max, by the author and in the style of Bricklayer).
Magic Words is Wordtris, avery rarely implemented variant on any platform. With the same update I uploaded a demo for a game called Wordtriss, but that demo allows only 45 seconds of gameplay, so it hardly counts.
Pogo’s Dreams is Puyo Puyo, not something you encounter very often either, though there are some Columns clones (like Gemstorm) with a certain Puyo Puyo feel. This is the real thing—without the competitive aspects of course.
But the most interesting and uncommon is WinBlocker. It is based on Quarth, a 1989 Konami arcade machine only ever ported to Japanese platforms. It combined Tetris with shoot ‘em ups: You shoot single squares into the dropping U- and L-shaped pieces, they vanish as soon as a square or rectangle is full. Apart from this unique gameplay Quarth is interesting for having a certain steampunk feel before the word was even invented. The export version, Block Hole, was devoid of the steampunk elements. Quarth never got particularly well known outside Japan.
These games do not need any DLLs. They have two nag screens when you start them and one when you exit. According to the help files there are also some ads during gameplay, but I never encountered them. I uploaded them in the course of a larger update with twelve new Windows 3.1 Tetris games. There are now 40 in total, and I’ve uploaded nearly everything I know about and have on my hard drive.
People interested in retrogaming and retro-remakes may know Ignacio Pérez Gil, who remade a number of classic Spanish and ZX games. Apart from that, he created a few Visual Basic 3.0 games, which I recently uploaded. Since he started programming in 1997, these are some of the latest games for 16-bit Windows.
90% of the people who start programming games,
he writes, make a Master Mind. And I’m not the exception…
Qúbix is a 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, developed up to version 3 in 2000. Though the author says that it has three difficulty levels: easy, very easy and ridiculously easy,
I found it quite tough to beat. Maybe I just don’t play very well. I liked the way it occasionally comments in the title bar.
Parchís is the Spanish variant of the cross and circle game family. This is possibly the only implementation for 16-bit Windows, developed up to version 2.1, 2001.
Deflektor PC was his last Visual Basic game, the only one that runs in 256 colors, and the only one with an optional English interface. He started to work on it in 1998, originally just as a practice, like the other games. In 2004 he abandoned it and started from scratch in C/Allegro, with completely new graphics. The graphics of the VB version are actually very good, since they retain the look and feel of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, yet improve it in subtle ways, which is exactly what remakes should be about.
