Our next stop on the vintage gaming tour is ScummVM, the portable virtual machine with the unappetizing name. The AGI interpreters do great for Sierra, and Sierra was certainly at the top of the games market (at a time when they didn’t even know it themselves!), but many other adventure gaming companies deserve their due as well.

Here’s a factor you’ll see over and over in computing: the smaller the company, the friendlier it is to hobbyists and open source users. Check out IBM and Sun Microsystems, once considered bullies of the computing world; now that Microsoft rules their universe they have changed their strategy in the 21st century so they now embrace open source software - they’re almost mushy over it. That’s just an example. The point is, Sierra, still a major player on the market, might prosecute you if they caught you pirating their games. But smaller game proprietors are so flattered, they’ll even give them to you for free! Or lacking that, very cheaply all on one CD.

Thus enters ScummVM, whose name comes from “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” (what LucasArts originally used the engine for) and the “VM” is “Virtual Machine”. So it’s not an emulator, though the difference will be unnoticeable to the user. ScummVM has varied support for games by LucasArts (including the Monkey Island and Indiana Jones series), Humongous Entertainment, Revolution Software, Virgin Interactive, and a sundry group of other titles. The ScummVM team has also recently begun integrating Sarien’s AGI interpreter into their project, so perhaps a unified adventure games engine is in our future.

Halfway between Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” lies Revolution Software’s “Beneath a Steel Sky”, shown here in ScummVM. It won the Golden Joystick Award for best adventure game in 1995.

ScummVM is the ultimate in cross-platform porting, running on everything from Windows, Mac, and Unix to Amiga, Solaris, and even several game consoles. As for the games, there are games freely available for download from the ScummVM site, others that can still be had for dirt cheap in compilations and collections, and others you just have to hunt down and download. The full list of supported games is here.

So, what’s next?

We’ll cover some other genres related to adventure games in part five, but here it’s time to switch gears and talk about one of the software companies most friendly to the vintage gamer: ID Software. Famous for Doom and Quake, which defined the first-person shooter genre, ID’s titles require little to no effort to port. In addition, ID has maintained a generous tradition of releasing the source code to their game engines as open source, and even maintains an archive of demo versions of their older titles.

They’re reasonable about it, of course. They wait until they’ve milked the last dollar from a title, then when they’re done with it (and their next title is picking up the sales) they release it under the GPL. In addition, they have been generous in supplying custom editors for each of their engines - for instance, DeePsea is an excellent shareware WAD editor. You don’t have to search hard to find custom Doom WAD files out there, and some of them qualify as outstanding works of art on their own. ID Software has even licensed some of the custom work of the fan community and released it on a bonus CD. It is so rare to see a commercial software company having such a warm relationship with its fans.

ID Software also piloted the concept of shareware games, beginning with their Apogee label. So you can still find Cds in stores with what some disparagingly call “shovelware”, those disks with “1000 Windows games!!!” on the label selling for ten bucks. It’s worth hunting the bargain racks on the off chance of finding a lost treasure. Apogee titles such as Commander Keen, Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure, and Duke Nukem still have much of their appeal for fans.

Usually, even with an open source engine, you still have to own the CD to play the original game. That is because the artists who did the graphics and sounds still hold copyrights apart from ID. However, there is so much fan-created artwork and levels out there that you’ll hardly miss the original titles, and you can still pick up the original games stacked on one disk of shareware collections. This Wikipedia article alone covers several free Doom projects.

The FreeDoom project. The look and sound is different, the gameplay is identical.

Most, if not all, ID and Apogee games are either cross-platform in the open source version, or easily emulated. For that matter, for games like Commander Keen classic, you could probably clone it in Flash without too much hassle.

That pretty much sums it up for vintage action/adventure PC games. But we still have two installments to go. So, what do you say in the next installment we tell you how to play vintage coin-op arcade and Nintendo console games on your desktop? Until then, think about how much you regret giving away your only copy of Earthbound, how you’ve never gotten over not having enough quarters to finish Strider, and how you haven’t seen a Mr. Do machine in ten years.

Related Posts:

• Vintage Gaming - part two: Sierra Games and DOSbox
• Vintage Gaming - part one: The Least You Need to Know
• KDE on Road Kill, Old games and Macintosh - Sad but true story.
• A Revisit to Classic DOS Games
• Best Moments in Gaming

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