Ricky Road: The open-source gaming community

I've worked on many many software projects over the years. Some that are just me (Rickyroad.com is an example of that) and some that require hundreds of developers to build and maintain the code. I've never worked on a project that I didn't have passion for. I never worked on a project that I didn't take personally. In fact a lot of the people I have worked with in the past would probably say that is my predominate flaw and my predominate strength in the industry. It is tough to watch a project go in a direction you don't like when you put a piece of yourself into it.

Open source projects have a major problem that is becoming alarming. No one seems to agree on anything.

When I was 19 I had been a professional illustrator for over two years. I had started out doing caricatures at the local amusement park and moved on to doing private work. During this time I was approached by two young ladies who had a business proposition for me. They had a small "art" company that was focusing on photography, pottery and illustration. The name of the company was "Wonderfully Made" (I, obviously, didn't have much say in the name). One of the girls was the CEO and the other was the creative influence. And adding me, I was the so-called "talent". So we talked about what they had in mind and how they could use me and their basic business model. They wanted me to design and paint murals for residential and business clients. I was very interested and agreed to work with them. It was a great idea, with one small issue, I was the only one who knew how to draw or how to paint. In fact if you want to drill down closer to the heart of the problem it would be: I was the only one who knew how to draw and paint and I knew it. And so did they.

As many people know Firefox 3 has been released recently. Whether or not you choose to use it is your business. But I can tell you it is fast. Very fast. They set out to make it fast and I can say for certain "Mission Accomplished".

Let me also preface this by saying I adore Firefox and use it as my primary browser.

Wanna relive the glory days?

Good. That's why we remade it.

Pixel for pixel we carefully recreated an ancient DOS video game legend. Hurry and play it before its graphics go out of date. We might start charging 25 cents to play like the arcade. Simply slide a quarter into your floppy disk drive.

We realize there are quite a few recreations of this video game relic. However, how many are 100% pixel perfect recreations? We remember the glory days in high school playing Gorillas during class. We just wanted to play it again. Just the way that it was. Don't add paint to a masterpiece, bro.

You want graphics? We use a total of 8 different blistering bits to produce a mind-blowing 256 colors.

You want audio? Gorilla boasts full 1.1 surround sound. To fully appreciate the surround sound capabilities of Gorilla, occasionally turn your chair around so the computer speaker is behind you. The sound literally penetrates the air with the piercing clarity of a screaming bald eagle.

Not sold yet? How about 100% keyboard and monitor support?

You're friggin welcome.

So we are planning to make this game. It's called gorilla war. It's been a glimmer in my eye for over 8 years now.

It's finally coming along. And I am going to go ahead and start talking about what we are planning to do with it.

Obviously it's a continuation on the Gorillas.bas game. You probably have figured out that it will be a multi-player version of some sort. So basically two people don't have to sit at the same computer and use the same keyboard to play against each other (that was always a great way to get some face time with cute girls back in the day. Let them win too). Truth is multi-player was the intent all along when I started writing flash gorillas in the summer of 07. In fact if you really want to go back, I wanted to create a multi-player version of Gorillas back in 99 and tried to force myself to learn Java applets. I eventually gave up on learning that unfortunately and in-turn gave up on Gorillas multi-player. But, like I said before, I have refreshed my intention to do so.

So here we are: we have a clean 100% pixel perfect flash version of Gorillas.bas. This is a great jumping off point for the multi-player version I had intended.

A Legal Game of Chicken

The flash gorillas game has been online for 2 months and 20,000 people have played the game so far. Bitchin. And theres been no cease and desist in the mailbox yet. There was understandably some trepidation at first to bring the game online due to that very reason. After all, Gorillas has been released before. And our version is 100% identical to that first initial release. And in that first release there was a copyright line on the splash screen. See the below screenshot.

But - And thats a big BUT - there is no record that WE can find for International Business Machines and Gorillas in 1991. In fact there is no record of a copyright for International Business Machines and Gorillas ever. Even IBM and QBasic only turns up a few manuals. Feel free to search the copyright records for yourself.