The Colony

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the computer game. For the city in Denton County, Texas, United States see The Colony, Texas. For other uses of the word "colony" see Colony (disambiguation).

The Colony was a computer game released in 1988 by Mindscape for the Apple Macintosh. It was the first 3D "first-person shooter" game for the Mac (although it can also be considered, and is often described, as an adventure or RPG game). The Colony was written by one person, David Alan Smith. It was released for the PC in 1988 and for the Amiga platform in 1990, also by Mindscape.

The Colony won "Best Adventure Game of the Year" from MacWorld magazine (1988) and was listed in "The Top Ten Mac Gaming Thingies of the Last 1000 Years" (2000), again by MacWorld.

It is interesting to note that at the time of the game's development, the standard method of programming for the Macintosh was to use an Apple Lisa. Development tools for the Macintosh did not exist when the Macintosh was initially released. David Smith completed the first scenes of The Colony with a C compiler ported to the Macintosh by Softworks. Those first scenes were developed on a Macintosh with only 128KB of RAM and a single floppy disk drive. Eventually, development tools were made available on the Macintosh, allowing Mr. Smith to complete his work using the Megamax C and Lightspeed C (developed by Mike Kahl) compilers - on a Macintosh upgraded to 512KB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive.

Some technical notes: Instead of a 360 degree circle, the colony used 256 "pseudo-degrees" which allowed the game engine to rotate the player's perspective using only 1 byte of data. Bit-map graphics were drawn using MacPaint, while 2D images such as doors, letters, and the Apple logo were crafted using the game engine.