Glider PRO

Glider PRO
Original author(s) Casady & Greene
Developer(s) John Calhoun
Initial release 1994
Stable release 1.1.2 / 1995
Operating system Mac OS, Mac OS X
Type Arcade
License Proprietary, later rereleased as freeware

Glider PRO is an Apple Macintosh game first published by Casady & Greene in 1994. It is the final installment of the Glider series to date. When Casady & Greene went bankrupt, the rights to the series reverted to the author, John Calhoun, who opted to give a few versions of the game away for free on his website.

The game

Game basics

A screenshot from the Glider PRO game in an outside area.
Glider PRO gameplay. Note the outside areas, openness, and bright colors.

In the game, you fly a paper plane (the Glider) in, around, over and even under a house trying to collect a number of hidden magic stars. The Glider can only be maneuvered to glide forward, glide backward, or to stand still. Further navigation is done chiefly with the aid of air currents provided by floor or ceiling ventilation ducts, fans, drafts, and wind. It is also possible to slide along slippery surfaces (such as spilled grease), and transport from a part of the level to another using the ventilation system, mailboxes, and sometimes invisible "teleports".

The main challenge is to simply avoid collision with the floor, or obstacles such as furniture. Moving obstacles include bouncing basketballs, popping toast, and dripping water. Candles and other ablaze objects sport both a handy updraft and a lethal flame. Collision with "enemy" paper planes and balloons is also fatal, but these can be shot down with the use of a rubber bands bonus item. The other bonus items are aluminum foil (shielding against in-flight collisions), pieces of paper (extra lives), a variety of clocks (points) and batteries and helium tanks (mutually exclusive, granting the ability for faster or more buoyant flight, respectively).

A puzzle element is added to the gameplay in the form of switches controlling vents, lighting, home applications and even enemies.

Unlike the Glider 4.0 game, in which the game metaphor involved such things as claustrophobia and rainy days indoors, the metaphor in the Glider PRO game involves such things as sunny weather, the start of summer vacation, and outdoor environments in addition to indoor environments.[1]

Houses

Levels are called "houses", although a level may contain any number of individual buildings, as well as outdoors, sewer, or other sections. Houses are entirely self-contained, and any of them is immediately available for play. The game was released with one real house called Slumberland, and one demonstration house. A later CD release of the game featured 14 further houses. Beyond this, a sizable number of houses are available for download on fan sites.

Reception

Inside Mac Games praised the game for its entertaining and non-violent gameplay, in addition to having a two-player mode that did not require modems or a network.[2]

Versions of the game

Differences between OS X/Carbon and System 7-OS 9/Classic versions

Glider PRO was initially released for System 7 and was continuously updated through a Mac OS 9 version, the final release on the "Classic" Mac OSes. It was later ported to Mac OS X as a native Carbon application, and while this version has reworked graphics and a more muted color scheme it lacks a variety of preferences and the built-in house editor present in the Mac OS 9 version. PowerPC Mac OS X users can still run the Mac OS 9 version of Glider in the Classic environment, giving them access to the multitude of additional preferences and the house editor.

Glider PRO ("Classic") CD

This was an update that included Glider PRO, new houses, and a few utilities. The houses included were Art Museum, In the Mirror, Davis Station, Castle o' the Air, Teddy World, Land of Illusion, Imaginehouse PRO II, The Asylum PRO, Nemo's Market, Titanic, SpacePods, Rainbow's End, Leviathan, Grand Prix, Metropolis, and obviously Slumberland, Empty House and Demo House. In addition, the utilities Moving Van, a utility for moving graphics and sound between houses and libraries and any combination of the two, and Foundation Mover, a utility for sliding an entire house over in terms of the map position if you room ran out and CD-ROM special instructions and some graphics libraries were included.

House building

Houses are created using the built-in house editor in the "Classic" version. Standard backgrounds include rooms of many decors, from Asian tapestry to a personal library, as well as meadows, fields and gardens; sewers and basements; rooftops and open skies. There is also a wide selection of furniture, other obstacles, and background items ("clutter"), all of which are demonstrated by "Slumberland". Enemy design is limited to specifying attack range and timing.

Customizing

Glider PRO allows for houses to include custom backgrounds, objects and sounds via embedding of 'PICT', 'STR#' and 'snd' resources in the house's resource fork. A few of the game's existing interface elements can also be altered this way. Most houses, including all that shipped with the game, do include at least custom graphics. An interesting design point is that custom objects are on their own purely background elements, but can be made interactive with the help of the game's many different invisible objects.

Fans have exploited design bugs as well as constructed patches to alter houses and/or the program itself even further; the extreme makeover remains Ward Hartenstein's "house" SeaCaves, which completely renews the game into an undersea adventure of a dolphin to free a magical starfish.

Furthermore, a debugging feature in the Mac OS 9 version of Glider PRO allows all of the graphics and sounds in the game (including the ones that cannot be directly replaced by a house's resource fork) to be overridden by alternative graphics. This is done by placing a file named "Mermaid", containing all of the replacement graphics and sounds, in the same directory as the Glider PRO application. This feature was forgotten about by the time Glider PRO was released, but John Calhoun later rediscovered it in April 2004. As of today, at least three houses exist that exploit this feature.

The word "Mermaid" was used as a reference to three lines from the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

The first of these lines also appears in the About box of Glider PRO.

Community and future of Glider series

Probably due to its House-creating ability, Glider PRO has enjoyed an active and involved fan community during most of its life. Two monthly ezines, GliderTech and The Cockpit were published between 1995 and 1997 during Glider PRO's heyday. GliderTech published editorials, house reviews, house building tips and each issue was accompanied by a house or two with some examples of obstacles or techniques that could be used in house creation. Past issues can be found for download on various house repositories, and the actual zine is an OS 9 application.

Following 1998 or so, with brief bumps coinciding with the release of the OS X version and the emancipation of Glider PRO, the community activity dropped. John Calhoun mentioned that he'd like to create a successor to Glider PRO that went back to the roots of Glider (for example, by having fewer objects and all-indoor houses) but that it would have to wait until he's done with his work at Apple. In 2011, Calhoun released a "Glider Classic" game for iOS devices which was more similar to earlier Glider games and less similar to Glider PRO.[3]

The Intel transition and its effect on Glider PRO

Influx of new house creators may over time grind to a halt following Apple's decision to switch the CPU architecture of their Mac computer line-up to Intel microprocessors. Only the "Classic" version of Glider PRO includes a house editor, and since Classic runs the now abandoned Mac OS 9 operating system which only functions on PowerPC processors, Glider PRO enthusiasts buying a new Intel-based Mac will not be able to build houses without resorting to a second, PowerPC-based Mac (or emulation of one).

Glider PRO for Mac OS X will continue to run on Intel-based Macs through the Rosetta compatibility layer, but with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) Rosetta has been removed which makes it impossible to run the game on the newest Macs. The potential for a Universal Binary (that runs natively on Intel and PowerPC alike) is highly dubious at best.

In 2006, Mark Arenz teamed up with Calhoun to construct Glider Web, an Internet-enabled version of Glider Pro built in Flash.

Apple app

On 20 June 2014, a version of Glider for OS X 10.7 or later, on 64-bit processors, was released on the Mac App Store. This version is also available for the iPhone and iPad as "Glider Classic".

References

  1. ↑ McCornack, Jamie et al. (1995). Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus. Hayden Books. p. 713. ISBN 978-1-56830-183-9.
  2. ↑ Myrick, Chris (December 1994). "Review: Glider Pro". Inside Mac Games (free preview edition) 2 (12).
  3. ↑ Patterson, Blake (2011-09-26). "John Calhoun's Mac Classic 'Glider' Coming to iOS". Touch Arcade. Retrieved 2014-10-10.

External links