In 1994 A 12-Year-Old Programmed a Videogame. It Turned Up on Twitch Monday (kotaku.com) 41
Prorammer Rick Brewster has worked at both Microsoft and Facebook. But this Christmas on Twitter he shared the story of his long-lost videogame creation "that somehow -- like some kind of lost, drunken cat -- finally found its way home on Christmas Eve."
An anonymous reader quotes Kotaku: Rick Brewster is a programmer and the author of Paint.NET, a free replacement for Microsoft Paint that's expanded to have features similar to image creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP. In 1994, at the age of 12, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based roleplaying game inspired by a text adventure from a 1984 instructional book on how to write adventure games. He wrote The Golden Flute IV on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an IBM clone computer...
"I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that's it," Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.
Apparently, that's not what happened. Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.
"Apparently breaking & entering is a 'serious felony' and punishable by execution without a trial in this universe," Brewster remembered on Twitter on Christmas Day.
He believes that back in 1994 his cousin must've uploaded the videogame to a BBS, since it's now ended up in the old game collection "Frostbyte" at the Internet Archive. Which means that you, too, can now play 12-year-old Rick Brewster's long-lost amateur videogame using Archive.org's online DOSbox emulator.
An anonymous reader quotes Kotaku: Rick Brewster is a programmer and the author of Paint.NET, a free replacement for Microsoft Paint that's expanded to have features similar to image creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP. In 1994, at the age of 12, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based roleplaying game inspired by a text adventure from a 1984 instructional book on how to write adventure games. He wrote The Golden Flute IV on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an IBM clone computer...
"I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that's it," Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.
Apparently, that's not what happened. Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.
"Apparently breaking & entering is a 'serious felony' and punishable by execution without a trial in this universe," Brewster remembered on Twitter on Christmas Day.
He believes that back in 1994 his cousin must've uploaded the videogame to a BBS, since it's now ended up in the old game collection "Frostbyte" at the Internet Archive. Which means that you, too, can now play 12-year-old Rick Brewster's long-lost amateur videogame using Archive.org's online DOSbox emulator.
But why... (Score:2)
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I don't know...maybe try the B & E without getting caught? You know, Jersey style (Well he *did* say East Coast)
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must have
must've
sure, why not
beats "must of" doncha think?
Re:But why... (Score:5, Informative)
The game isn't great but it has sound and animations, giant teddy bears that attack you and some goblins. There are probably other dangerous creatures as well but I only played for 5 minutes before getting killed by a giant pink teddy bear (hand drawn using a mouse by the looks of it). Considering he was 12 at the time he wrote it it's a pretty good effort.
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Doesn’t say if the game is any good. I love Paint.NET, but why would I play this game?
Does it matter? It's an interesting story.
FWIW: The exact same thing happened to me. I programmed a game when I was at university and I thought it had been lost forever but a copy of it appeared on an emulator site about five years ago. I still have no idea who could have had a copy or how it got there.
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If anyone has a copy of my GWBASIC 'TANKS' game where you write bytecode to control a tank to fight other players bytecode controlled tanks in an on-screen arena, let me know.
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You would not. Other people would, and did, for a variety of reasons that would not impact you even if I bothered to explain them. Does that help?
A giant teddy bear killed me (Score:4, Funny)
After killing 4 goblins that I encountered while moving about 5 spaces on the map I was killed by a giant teddy bear. I'm not sure if I have the energy to start a new quest
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After killing 4 goblins that I encountered while moving about 5 spaces on the map I was killed by a giant teddy bear. I'm not sure if I have the energy to start a new quest
Killed by a giant teddy? Could've been much worse. [youtube.com]
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Yeah much worse things... Like what happens if you take the Brown Tube car in Alpha Complex [www.bin.sh]
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Past its prime when he was 8, rather
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that extra apostrophe is also past its prime
here's a hint
it's means it is
I have to believe that it is one person out there that is constantly correcting misuse of the apostrophe/contraction.
Thank you.
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Tandy 1000 was still shipping when he was 11. I had a shitty original IBM 5150 with 8088 4.77MHz with floppy drives until 1992; depending on the '1000 he could have had a 286 and a hard drive, etc.
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The part that's hard to believe is, apparently, that stuff that isn't the latest and greatest can still work at all.
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The part that's hard to believe is, apparently, that stuff that isn't the latest and greatest can still work at all.
Indeed; I was programming games on a BBC Master in 1993 (4?). The main difference between a BBC and a PC was that being obsolete, I could actually afford one (50 pounds got me the machine, the good colour monitor, disk drive, printer and a stack of manuals). Basically everything I needed for a fully working computer.
It did what I needed it to, I became much better at programming, learned about
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I had a Tandy 1000 up until 1994, when it was sold to a neighbor after we bought a 66mhz IBM Aptiva. I even wrote DOS games with it. To make the parallels even crazier, I had a DOS game I uploaded to a local BBS find its way on to the internet without my intervention.
I don't see anything wrong with either the timeline or the "found its way on to the internet" part of the story.
Thanks (Score:2)
Lost all my code from way back (Score:3)
Lost all the stuff I wrote as a kid in the early eighties on the Sinclair Spectrum.
A text only Civilisation style strategy game, a golf game, some utilities and the like.
Basic gameplay, very limited graphics, nothing special, but I'd be curious to look at the code I wrote at that age, learning how to program.
Storage was on cassette tape, not known for durability.
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Yeah, as a 12 year old I wrote games, my family played them. That was 1984 not 1994, and we didn't have BBS to upload things to. Shit, by '94 I had online multiplayer games live on the internet.
Prorammer ? (Score:1)
Please entertain me with your definition of a prorammer in your replies below.
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I saw that dude in a brown chicken, brown cow flick where he dick slapped thus to and then banged the shit out of her. I'm an amateur rammer, but he's a pro.
Also there was a buttsex scene and he definitely rammed. It might have been "Diamond Baby".
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*where he dick slapped this ho...
See it on Twitch (Score:4, Informative)
The Twitch video was over six hours of various retro games. This game starts around 5:18:30. https://m.twitch.tv/videos/525... [twitch.tv]
There's a whole web archive of "long lost games" (Score:2)
You can even find downloadable/playable C64 games there that had not been published for 25 years, albeit having been completed as commercial products.
This!!!! (Score:2)
This is why I read Slashdot! This is quite possibly the most "Slashdot" story that I've read in a while.
Good for him (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote dunnet when I was 13. I was lucky that Stallman called me 10 years later and asked me if he could make it part of emacs. So happy to open up the fan mail I get every day. I hope this guy gets the same from this, as I'm sure he already does from his other stuff. Really makes FOSS feel good.
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