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Snipes

Snipes!
(download 9k)
Author: SuperSet Software

Description
One of the coolest things about text-mode
games is the way so many of them are steeped in computing history. It is
well known that a number of great software companies—Apogee and Epic Games, to name two—got their
start by selling text-mode games. But did you know that the computer
industry giant Novell Inc. also began
life as an unassuming little text-mode game?
Back in the fall of
1981, three friends from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah formed a
consulting group named SuperSet Software. Their first big assignment was
at a hardware company then known as Novell Data Systems. Novell asked the SuperSet
partners—Drew Major, Kyle Powell, and Dale Neibaur—to network the CP/M
hardware Novell was selling at the time. SuperSet obliged Novell's
request, but privately they had become convinced that CP/M was a doomed
platform.
In November 1981,
Drew Major bought one of the very first IBM PCs to hit the market, and
SuperSet began looking for ways to connect the PC to their CP/M network.
The local area network (LAN), a heterogeneous system of PCs connected by a
common data transmission medium, was born. They needed only one thing more
to prove their concept: an application that could be used to test the network and
demonstrate its capabilities. The application they wrote for that purpose
was a text-mode game called Snipes.
Within two years of
the creation of Snipes, Novell Data Systems had transformed into
Novell Inc., Ray Noorda had taken over as CEO, 1984 had been declared the
"Year of the LAN", and Novell was well on its way to becoming a
billion-dollar company. By the early 1990s, Snipes had been bundled
with Novell Netware and distributed to thousands of Novell LANs all over
the world, which is how most people, myself included, came to know
it.
When you play
Snipes, know that you are holding a small piece of history in your
hands. Not only was it one of the very first network applications ever
written, it is also the ancient precursor of multi-player games like Doom
and Quake that are so popular today. They may not want to admit it now,
but I am quite certain that Drew Major and Kyle Powell played the world's
first over-the-network "deathmatch" with Snipes, using the software
that was to become Novell Netware, over twenty years ago. How's that for a
little history?

Troubleshooting
Snipes is amazingly well behaved for
a twenty-year-old program. I have tested it on a Pentium IV processor
running several versions of Windows; it appears to work just fine on all
of them, and it does not require MoSlo. If you try to launch it from
Windows Explorer, you might get a message "not a valid Win32 application",
but that's OK, just open a DOS box and run it from the command
line.
Snipes does,
however, leave something to be desired where usability is concerned.
One problem is that, when you start the game, you will be asked to
enter a skill level ranging from A1 through Z9. Unfortunately, no
explanation is given of which levels correspond to which game options. A
quick investigation revealed the following:

Beginner level, no advanced options

Add rubber bullets

Add ghost snipes

Add electrified walls

Everything above + deadliest snipes and ghosts

The
numbers correspond to the difficulty level within a certain option set.
For example, entering J1 will start a game with the options of rubber
bullets and ghosts snipes, and a skill level of three snipe generators and
five lives. Entering Z9 starts a game with all options turned on, and a
skill level of ten snipes generators and only two lives.
A second
problem is that there is no explanation of the control keys. Movement
is controlled by the standard cursor keys: Up, Down, Left, and Right. You
can hold down more than one cursor key at a time for diagonal movement,
and if you hold down the spacebar while moving, your speed is doubled. F1
toggles the sound on and off. The firing keys are as follows:

Up

Left

Right

Down

Down

Note that these are the same key combinations
used in Islands of
Danger, so if you have played Islands, you should have no
problem with Snipes. As with the movement keys, you can hold down
two firing keys at once for diagonal shots, and if the rubber bullets
option is turned on, the diagonal shots will bounce off the walls and
around corners, which is very useful for wiping out clusters of snipes
from a safe hiding place.
The last
usability problem is that there are only two ways to exit the game: 1)
by using up all your lives, or 2) by pressing CTRL+Break. The game does
not respond to the ESC key, so remember to press CTRL+Break when you want
to stop playing.
One more thing: the
version of Snipes I am distributing here is the original version
from 1982, with the SuperSet Software name on the title screen. If you are
looking for the later version that was distributed with Netware (called
NLSNIPES), you can download it for free from the Novell
support site. NLSNIPES is the version to use if you want to run it as
a network application, that is, with two or more live players in the same
game.

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