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Andyzero posted:Pfft. This game was made during PRODIGY. Hell, back in the day, the only good thing about Prodigy was this game. Despite this, I remember using it every day. At the time, Prodigy had two tiers, Core and Plus. MadMaze was, of course, gated behind Plus. Prodigy pricing was something like $19.99 for unlimited Core and 10 hours of Plus...followed by $3 an hour thereafter. Every decision that has been criticized here flows directly from that. This game no doubt cost a lot of kids' parents (and quite a few adults too) hundreds to thousands of dollars. I was about ten at the time as well and am extremely confident I played a similar knockoff game on AOL's closed off network, so it definitely spawned copycats/was very profitable. Within that constraint of $$$$/hour - no doubt imposed from management, because the developers themselves did go on to bigger and better things - the game is more interesting as a historical relic than I think the thread gives it credit for. It's not the greatest story ever told, but at least the POPs are descriptive, individually interesting and there's a decent amount of experimentation going on. A lot of the constraints like no inventory could potentially be explained by hardware requirements - Prodigy would have had next to none, so the bottom end of the userbase would have been 286's with 1 MB of RAM and 2400-9600 baud modems. Given this thing could potentially have belonged to a customer, going for the lowest common denominator made sense. Nobody would ever voluntarily play this game today, but even as a dead end, it shows where gaming could possibly have gone if the Internet had not exploded in the way it did. A lot of what it did do successfully was taken up by Sierra when they launched Yserbius/Twinion a couple of years later.
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Jul 23, 2018 16:39
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 09:58 |
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