Tools

Incentive's Freescape system sold to the public in 1991, published by Domark at £24.99. Buyers built solid 3D worlds from stretched and shaded shapes, gave them rules with a simple command language, and saved the result as a stand-alone game. It came with a tutorial video, went out in North America as Virtual Reality Studio, and had a sequel in 1992.

Chris Ainsley’s Adventuron brings locations, objects, pictures and rules into a browser-based adventure editor. Its links to earlier authoring systems helped writers return to old games and make new ones.

The Adventure Game Interpreter ran Sierra's 3-D Animated Adventures, from King's Quest on IBM's PCjr in 1984 to Manhunter: San Francisco in 1989: 16-colour rooms redrawn from stored drawing instructions, a walking hero who could pass behind the scenery, room logic in Sierra's own scripting language and a typed verb-noun parser. SCI replaced it from King's Quest IV, and fan-written interpreters such as NAGI, Sarien and ScummVM keep the games running.

Jonathan Cauldwell's free game-making tool for the ZX Spectrum, first released in 2008, lets people who cannot write Z80 assembly build arcade games out of sprites, blocks, screens and short event scripts. Hundreds of new Spectrum games have been made with it, and its Windows successor builds games for the Amstrad CPC, MSX, BBC Micro and other 8-bit machines.

BRender was Argonaut’s reusable 3D rendering library. Its models, materials, lights and cameras let game teams describe a scene without writing every stage of the drawing machinery themselves.

Ken Silverman’s Build combines a sector-based renderer with an editor for constructing spaces. Games such as Duke Nukem 3D added their own behaviour to that shared foundation.

ByteBoozer is HCL’s compression tool for C64 programs and data. Its later B2 format and host-side implementations let authors prepare packed material elsewhere, while a C64 routine restores the bytes when needed.

Crinkler combines a Windows linker and compressor for small executable programs. By arranging compiled code and data together, it helps demoscene authors spend more of a 4K intro’s limited space on the production itself.

DAAD is Tim Gilberts’s adventure-writing system for Aventuras AD. A source file becomes a game database for a machine-specific interpreter, while graphics and special behaviour still require attention to each computer.

Exomizer is Magnus Lind’s cross-cruncher for small computers. Its version 2 documentation distinguishes self-extracting programs, memory blocks, streamed levels and raw data, each with a different job for the decompressor.

Filmation was Ultimate Play the Game's name for the way Knight Lore drew its castle in 1984: solid-looking isometric rooms in which masked objects passed behind one another without flicker, all built from a few bytes of data per room. Filmation II made the view scroll for Nightshade and Gunfright, and the look was copied so widely that by 1986 CRASH was tired of it.

Incentive's 3D system, built by its in-house team Major Developments from 1986 and first used in Driller in 1987. It drew solid, shaded objects in true perspective from wherever the player stood, on the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 and later the Atari ST, Amiga and PC, and ran four Incentive games before the company sold it to the public as the 3D Construction Kit.

Mark Overmars, a computer scientist at Utrecht University, released the first version of Game Maker on 15 November 1999. It began as a program for making 2D animations, became a free drag-and-drop game builder with its own scripting language, and passed to YoYo Games in 2007. As GameMaker: Studio and its successors it was used for Spelunky, Hotline Miami, Undertale and Hyper Light Drifter. Playtech bought YoYo Games in 2015 and Opera in 2021.

Activision’s Garry Kitchen’s GameMaker combines scene, sprite, sound and music editors with a command-based game program. It made several kinds of creative work available inside one home-computer package.

GLQuake brought Quake’s world to an OpenGL renderer. It connected the game’s geometry, textures and lighting to the growing role of 3D graphics hardware on PCs.

GoldSrc is Valve’s Half-Life engine family. Its mod tools exposed game entities and client behaviour, helping other teams build new games around a shared runtime.

Incentive Software's adventure writing system, written by Sean Ellis on the Amstrad CPC in 1985 and converted for the Spectrum by Brendan Kelly in 1986, with Commodore 64 and BBC Micro versions the same year. At £22.95 it combined a sentence-reading parser, text compression and a drawing program in one package, won a CRASH Smash and a ZZAP!64 Gold Medal, and let its users sell what they wrote without paying a royalty.

GrimE powered LucasArts’ move to 3D characters in Grim Fandango. Its use of Lua connected authored adventure behaviour to the engine and contributed to a wider history of game scripting.

Havok is the physics engine that Steve Collins and Hugh Reynolds's Dublin company, spun out of Trinity College research in 1998, released to developers as beta code in 1999. Its first customers were mostly racing games; Havok 2.0 in 2003 turned it towards ragdoll characters, and by 2005 Edge called it the standard by which the others were judged, with Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 to show for it. Intel bought the company in 2007 and Microsoft bought it from Intel in 2015.

Devpac packaged the separate jobs of writing assembly, turning it into machine code and inspecting a running program. Its Spectrum GENS3/MONS3 manual makes those boundaries visible; later platform editions target different processors.

Apple’s HyperCard combines cards, pictures, text fields, buttons and HyperTalk scripts. It let Macintosh users begin by arranging information visually, then add behaviour to make tools, interactive works and games.

id Tech is the name id Software gave, from 2007, to the line of game engines that began with Doom in 1993. John Carmack wrote the early ones; id licensed them to other studios and released the source code of each older engine, from Doom to Doom 3, under the GNU General Public License. Later engines, from id Tech 5 onwards, have stayed closed.

Michael Land and Peter McConnell’s iMUSE joins game events to authored musical transitions. It lets a score respond to the player while preserving musical timing.

Graham Nelson’s Inform let authors create new adventures for the Z-machine after Infocom’s commercial era. Its compiler and library separate the author’s world from much of the work of understanding commands and carrying them out.

Vince Lee’s INSANE engine supported interactive streamed animation at LucasArts. Its history connects Rebel Assault’s CD-ROM video to reusable systems in later adventures.

kkrunchy is Fabian Giesen’s executable packer for Windows 64K intros. Its reversible treatment of x86 instructions helps expose patterns to the compressor, trading preparation and unpacking work for a smaller production.

Alexis Janson created MegaZeux in 1994 as a DOS game creation system. Boards, editable character graphics and Robotic scripts let authors build worlds whose behaviour went beyond the appearance of a text screen.

Gilsoft's 1987 successor to The Quill gave amateur adventure writers a full sentence parser, pronouns, object weights, containers, characters and graphics in one Spectrum package at £22.95. CRASH gave it 97%, Sinclair User made it a Classic, and more than 500 Spectrum games were written with it.

Nico François’s PowerPacker compresses Amiga commands and data. Self-extracting executables, a shared library and supporting readers made compression part of everyday disk use as well as software development.

Rob Northen’s ProPack compresses data and executable files, with methods aimed at either smaller output or faster unpacking. Its distributed routines let programmers decide where and how to restore packed material.

Pucrunch is Pasi Ojala’s compressor for small Commodore computers. It combines repeated-sequence copies with run-length encoding, doing the expensive search on a host computer and keeping decompression practical on the target.

QuakeWorld adapted Quake’s multiplayer technology to internet connections. Client prediction made local movement responsive while the server continued to determine the shared game state.

Criterion Software's 3D library, launched in 1994 as a software renderer that ran on a 386 PC. Rewritten from scratch as RenderWare3 for the PlayStation 2 generation, it carried Grand Theft Auto III, Tony Hawk's and Pro Evolution Soccer, until Electronic Arts bought Criterion in 2004 and stopped other publishers getting new versions.

David Lawrence and David Acton’s Repton Infinity pairs playable games with tools for making more. Its Reptol language lets an author change what objects do, beyond editing the screens and graphics of an existing Repton game.

RPG Maker (RPG Tsukūru in Japan) is ASCII's series of programs for building Japanese-style role-playing games from maps, menus and events instead of code. It began on NEC's PC-98 computers in 1992, reached the Super Famicom and PlayStation, and on Windows became the tool behind Corpse Party, Yume Nikki and To the Moon.

The Sierra Creative Interpreter replaced AGI from King's Quest IV (1988): an object-oriented scripting language, run by a separate interpreter on each machine, with 320×200 graphics and music for the MT-32 and AdLib. It dropped the typed parser for icons from King's Quest V (1990), went to 256 colours and then, as SCI-32, to 386 PCs by 1994, and ScummVM runs its games today.

The scripting language and interpreter Ron Gilbert built at Lucasfilm Games to finish Maniac Mansion (1987), with Aric Wilmunder carrying it to the PC. Game logic went into scripts that a small interpreter ran on each machine, so the same adventure could be moved to the C64, PC, Amiga, Atari ST and beyond by rewriting only the interpreter. LucasArts used it for every adventure up to The Curse of Monkey Island (1997); ScummVM, a fan reimplementation begun in 2001, keeps the games running.

SEUCK let Commodore 64 owners draw and animate sprites, build backgrounds, record enemy movements and save a stand-alone shooting game without writing its engine. Sensible Software’s 1987 kit supplied a defined framework rather than a general programming language; later enhancements extended what it could do.

Michael J. Roberts’s Text Adventure Development System supplies a language, libraries and tools for interactive fiction. TADS 2 and TADS 3 are different generations, each with its own games and development model.

Graeme Yeandle's adventure writing system, published by Gilsoft of Barry in South Wales for the 48K Spectrum in late 1983 at £14.95, let people with no programming knowledge write text adventures in fast machine code and sell them without paying a royalty. Conversions followed for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Oric and BBC Micro, and publishers from Firebird to Melbourne House sold games written with it.

Turbo Imploder compresses Amiga executables while respecting their separate code, data and memory requirements. Its documentation explains why saving disk space can still require extra memory during startup.

Unity began as the home-made engine of three developers in Copenhagen and launched at Apple's developer conference in June 2005 as a Mac-only tool. Support for the iPhone in 2008 and a free version in October 2009 turned it into the engine of choice for small studios and students: 13,000 users before it went free, 1.9 million registered developers by 2013. Its 2023 plan to charge developers per install provoked a revolt among developers; its chief executive retired within a month, and the fee was dropped a year later.

Tim Sweeney wrote most of the engine behind Epic's 1998 shooter Unreal, and other studios were building games on it before Unreal itself came out. Mark Rein sold the licences; Unreal Engine 2 and 3 followed in 2002 and 2006, and by 2007 Edge called version 3 the industry's leading middleware. Epic then changed how it sold the engine: $99 for the Unreal Development Kit in 2009, $19 a month for Unreal Engine 4 in 2014, free to download in 2015 with a royalty on success, and Unreal Engine 5 in 2022.

Revolution’s Virtual Theatre gave adventure characters routines beyond the player’s immediate actions. Its history shows both the possibilities and the puzzle-design costs of a world that keeps moving.

Ben Morris’s Worldcraft made three-dimensional level editing approachable through brushes, plan views and a textured preview. Valve adopted the editor, whose later history continued under the Hammer name.

Worldmaker was The Edge's name for the 3D system Bo Jangeborg built for Fairlight in 1985: rooms drawn in overhead perspective and stored as compact drawing instructions by his graphics language, Grax, filled with objects that had weight and inertia. The Edge planned more games with it and promised to sell Grax as a utility; only Fairlight II followed.

Infocom fitted a megabyte mainframe game onto 32K home computers by compiling it for a computer that did not exist, the Z-machine, and writing a small interpreter for each real one. Marc Blank and S. W. Galley described it in July 1980; by 1984 Infocom's games ran on nineteen machines. Graham Nelson's Inform brought it back in 1993, and people still write games for it.

A 5K Z80 assembler for the 16K ZX81, sold by Bug-Byte from autumn 1981 at £3.95. Programs were typed into REM statements with full stops instead of commas, and assembled straight into memory. Sinclair User called it 'a remarkable program', and it became one of the best-selling ZX81 programming tools, two years before the same publisher released Manic Miner.

A 1991 MS-DOS adventure drawn entirely in text characters, sold as shareware by Tim Sweeney's one-man company Potomac Computer Systems. It shipped with its own world editor and a small programming language, ZZT-OOP, and its players made thousands of worlds of their own. Its sales paid for Sweeney's next game, and the company became Epic MegaGames. The original source was lost; a byte-exact reconstruction was released in 2020 and a surviving 1991 development copy in 2023.