I have fond memories of playing Jazz Jackrabbit...and Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Secret Agent Man, Jill of the Jungle, and so on. Epic Games and Apogee were the logos I remember seeing most often.
Such a simple but awesome game. The level editor was hours of fun. And the best part, it worked on all my friends computers, no matter how cheap or old they were!
We were allowed to play Castle of Dr Brain in class, but there was no save feature, so some of us got pretty good at speedrunning the first puzzles to spend the rest of class on the next one.
Looking up images of DOS platformers like Secret Agent and Crystal Caves reminds me of a game that was loaded on some elementary school computers in 1998. I don't recall if they were Mac or DOS, but they certainly weren't the cutting edge G3. I think the game had a character in a trench coat and they were maybe a sleuth of some kind. The color palette was dark but there were yellow-ish lights coming from above in a conical shape.
I know memories are usually warped and wrong, but hopefully this is enough of a description to jog someone's memory. I have been able to rediscover all of the games I played as kid. Most I never revisited, but it feels satisfying to learn what they were. Big ones that bugged me for ages are Tyrian and Descent.
The detective character you're describing sounds a lot like the character from the Super Solvers: Gizmos & Gadgets series. I've linked a video but not sure if it's the exact game you're thinking of
It's definitely it. I think the overhead light I'm remembering is from Mission T.H.I.N.K., but I do remember the Gizmos & Gadgets levels. Thanks for finally quashing this curiosity. I can die in peace now.
The mention of Secret Agent above reminded me heavily of it, but I remember the character being about twice as tall on the screen.
I think it is likely an Apogee game or by someone inspired by their art. I haven't found a solid hit of what's in my memory after looking through their catalog and a quick glance through a wider list. It may just be busted memories and it is Secret Agent. It's unsatisfactory though because every other vague memory has turned out to be more accurate than not.
Apogee had some great games for their time. Some of the full versions and many of the free/share ware versions are available at the various DOS game archive sites.
Ah yes, we almost finished Death Rally with a Sentinel (best car in the shareware version).
Sometimes I hang out with my little brothers on Discord, with one of us playing DR (or a similar game), the rest watches the stream. We have some snacks and pretend we travelled back in time to the era when we shared the same PC and had a (very elaborate) hot-seat queueing/watching and commenting system.
"streaming" as watching your buddy play in the same room beats Twitch for me every time!
Recently I had fun with The Curse of Monkey Island and Microsoft Bob experienced in the same way. Although the latter is more like bringing your friends home for a Tommy Wiseau movie night.
Recently, thanks to linux gaming support, I was able to run Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (using proton). Nothing beats fun nostalgia. So happy it lives forever on open source now.
As a kid, my family got a new PC and it came with the full version of Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Both the campaign and the local multiplayer were a lot of fun, but quite often the multiplayer crashed. I also read about the game having a level editor called the Jazz Creation Station, but my copy absolutely didn't come with it. I looked though the game files and all that. I loved level editors so I was really disappointed.
We had a closer look at the disc and it was a mysterious "OEM Version" (I know what that means now, but none of us did back then). But it said version 1.0 so surely it was meant to have everything? We contacted Gateway, like "is there any way we can upgrade to the actual final version of the game?" And the answer was no.
They were bundling an unfinished version of the game!
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> OEM Versions
> These beta versions were originally distributed alongside Intel's manufactured hardware, as a result of a partnership between Epic and Intel. While most people who acquired these versions assumed they were the same as the retail release, they were actually builds from halfway through the game's development.
> Two OEM versions exist: 1.00g, which is the most common, and 1.00h. These versions have quite a lot of differences compared to the final release, such as different file formats, many levels use different tilesets or are in different orders, many sound effects weren't coded yet into the game, different screens for loading and menus and different and/or glitchy physics for weapons and objects.[0]
Funny, I'm in New Zealand and I'm guessing you probably aren't, which means Gateway must have done the same game bundle around the world. Did yours also come with an exceptionally crappy two-button gamepad by any chance?
Redline Racer felt really smooth with great graphics for the time. I loved how eventually you started unlocking ridiculous gimmick bikes like a hover bike and a dinosaur. I don't think I ever quite unlocked all of them.
Half life (1998) also had an OEM version called "Day one" containing the first half of the game along with some slightly last minute changes missing from it, compared to the released version (different handgun ammo count etc).
Wondering why oem versions were dumbed down pre-releases
I wish Jazz had been more popular. I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 1 and 2, and I believe there were plans to make a third, but they decided it wouldn’t sell enough copies. If anyone here can recommend platformers similar to Jazz that run on a Mac, I’d love to play them. I never got into shooters or 3D games, but always enjoyed platformers like Mario and Contra, and Jazz felt perfect for me.
I would check out Celeste or Shovel Knight. Neither is exactly the run and gun style of Contra or Jazz. However, Celeste is extraordinarily polished with best-in-class controls and movement, and Shovel Knight borrows heavily from classics like Mega Man while ditching the stuff that didn't age as well.
Yeah, it's interesting, but I think it's not a huge loss. Early 3D games have aged very badly, while many from the 2D era are still perfectly playable. So a higher res 2D followup might have actually been better.
It's worth mentioning that there's a dedicated online community over at https://www.jazz2online.com/ and the linked discord, which maintains a community patch called JJ2+ (https://docs.jj2.plus/) which does amazing things with the game, including online coop.
Although I never played Jazz Jackrabbit, I remember in our town there was this guy (I think he was a picture frame-maker) and I think my dad was friends with him.
I remember going downstairs into the work area and I remember he was playing Jazz Jackrabbit on his old computer, and I remember thinking that this game must be epic.
Anyway, random story. It just evokes that memory for some reason.
I loved this game when I was a kid. I created a huge map with the editor and I hosted a multiplayer server with this map and people would join and we would be running around this huge map with some players and have fun. People were impressed by the map and I was super exited about it. It was the first time something I created that was used by random people on the internet. I've long since lost that map of course, but still have good memories ^^
I have great memories of playing Jazz Jackrabbit 2 online multiplayer, if I'm not mistaken at some point the official game servers were killed and to still play online we had to patch it to connect to a server hosted by someone I only remember as being called Nimrod (I didn't remember that I knew this until I started writing my memories). I think he was from the UK.
I met a friend by being in a "clan" in JJ2 who kind of introduced me to caring about music, and I went to my first concert with. We are no longer in touch, but I do have one pen pal friend from that "clan" from another country who I still exchange birthday/christmas cards and gifts with for over 23 years now (and occasional messages throughout the year).
Having said all that, I haven't played the game in years though. I remember the excitement over Jazz Jackrabbit 3D that I believe never saw the day of light, or well I vaguely remember there being a playable demo. Not sure, I could probably quickly search for it online but I'll leave that to you, the reader.
One of my favorite games growing up! In high school, one of my earliest programming projects was a VB6 program that could unlock locked Jazz2 levels. I can't remember whether those levels were locked because you had to achieve something or if you had to buy them. In any case, I somehow figured out how to manipulate those files to make them playable. There wasn't any encryption or anything. It was just a matter of finding the right byte and changing it to something else.
Something I liked about Jazz2 was how performant it was on my lousy Intel Celeron PC I had at the time. Strangely, I remember the menus and stuff being kind of laggy, but the game itself always worked really well.
Jazz Jackrabbit is like if Sonic The Hedgehog was on acid had a gun! I never understood why the game wasn't more popular. Epic Megagames really underappreciated what they had.
I loved this game, the feeling of zooming through levels while blasting turtles and collecting gems? was incredibly fun and no other game gave me this send sense of being on the edge of your seat fun gameplay.
You would think current advances in game engines would make it a lot faster these days.. getting it just right like the old game is probably the most difficult part.
I loved this game growing up, I'm definitely going to give this a try.
As a minor observation, I'm pretty (pleasantly) surprised that the project provides a NixOS package for the application. As somebody who tends to flit between Arch, Fedora, and NixOS, seeing packages for NixOS before Fedora availability is a very surprising signal in terms of Linux distribution popularity.
Wow. I remember the mid-90s as a brief blip in time where game music was out of this world and really added to the experience. Jazz Jackrabbit (Alex Brandon), Crusader: No Remorse (Andrew Sega), Earthworm Jim (Tommy Tallarico), and Top Gear (Barry Leitch) were the soundtracks to way more than just their respective games for me for upwards of two decades until Hotline Miami and Horizon Chase came along, and Allen Simpson crossed my radar with FNAF's "DJ Music Man."
Apache is what's serving the error page. It's whatever is behind Apache that is failing
I've had an Apache server running on a decade old laptop on the HN front page, serving a custom PHP+Mariadb blog without caching, works just fine. It's big projects like WordPress that reliably go down from more than a handful of visitors per minute with bursts to a few in one second, if you don't have a caching layer that turns it into the equivalent of a static page generator
Tried this for recent DosGameClub and it's not quite perfect yet, though a huge step up from the original if you cannot stand how zoomed in the vanilla game looks.
Similarly OpenJazz allows playing Jazz1. It has even more quirks than Resurrection, and can similarly allow zooming out with higher resolutions
The dev is using nCine as the engine to leverage its porting capabilities (it even has a Nintendo Switch homebre version). nCine itself can use SDL2, QT5 and GLFW as backends
Looks very cool, fingers crossed multiplayer support gets added at some point (noticed it says 'Multiplayer is temporarily removed in version 1.0.0.' on the website).
Thanks for digging this detail out! I'm a bit disappointed since I was looking forward to playing this with friends again (fond memories), but I can totally understand how the dev might not have the necessary time to implement this.
If you want to play online, I recommend checking JJ2+, jazz2online.com and the discord link there. It's fairly easy to setup. You just need the base game, which is available on GOG and runs perfectly fine one modern Windows computers. Check gog.jj2.plus website for the installation process.
Though there's the fun twist that Epic has their own competing storefront now and it doesn't include either Jazz Jackrabbit game. What does it say about a company like Epic that their own storefront doesn't include most of their back catalog? It certainly feels abandoned if not abadonware.
I’ve always been curious… are there concrete definitions of “abandonware” in the various major jurisdictions? Or is it just a loose concept that remains legally dubious?
I feel like “Adopt an Abandonware” would be a pretty great source of meaningful, educational, and productive projects for devs with extra cycles or looking to refine skills.
There is no legal definition of abandonware and everyone in the community knows and understands this.
It's just a case of "the lesser evil": preserving games when nobody who owns them cares enough about them to sell them or make sure they can still be run.
I think few people would say it's a "lesser evil" but something that is morally fine and should be legal (when no money is changing hands).
If you were, say, selling abandonware that's much more of a murky area, but just downloading a copy or giving people a copy of some data that is no longer sold - whoever has ended up with the copyright shouldn't be able to complain if they are not actually making it available for purchase - they shouldn't be able to claim any loss since by not selling it they are not being deprived of any revenue.
Of course, part of this is only a problem because copyright terms became absurdly long - if we had sane copyright terms like strictly 25 or 30 years from publication a lot of this stuff would be public domain by now anyway.
I don't disagree that it's morally fine -- after all, the abandonware community wouldn't make the downloads available otherwise -- but it's still not legal.
Home of the Underdogs used to get tons of aggressive cease and desist emails from ESA (then named IDSA), the group representing game publishers legally, and who supposedly are on the "side" of games. So aggressive in fact they sometimes got it wrong (like sending a C&D for a game which was public domain). And who was willing to take a stance and chance it?
Back then the abandonware community was one of two things, I think: people who just wanted to download games (Warez or abandonware was the same to them) and proper members of the community, who'd rather see these games either commercially supported or made public domain. Both HOTU and Abandonia replaced download links whenever someone found a legal way to buy the games.
OMG! Jetpack from Adept Software is still available?! https://www.adeptsoftware.com/jetpack/