Supaplex: a history
Posted on January 24, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
The old adage that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” defiantly holds true in the gaming industry where clones are par for the course. Take a successful game, change the environment, enemies, weapons, story and maybe throw in a new game mechanic and bingo you have your own game.
A good clone can set the bar even higher and become more popular than the game it copied. Or it can be a complete failure that fades into obscurity.
Take ID’s Wolfenstine 3D for example, it never gained the critical acclaim it deserved. After Wolfenstine 3D ID released Doom which is commonly sighted as the game that put the FPS genre on the map. Doom was essentially an updated copy of Wolfenstine 3D. Since Doom there have been plenty of clones based it’s engine and the Doom engine that have reinvented the genre and taken it to new levels like Quake and Half-Life. Now the FPS genre is worth millions to the gaming industry.
If it wasn’t for clones games wouldn’t evolve, they wouldn’t get refined or polished, and the industry would be pretty stagnate and boring. You could also argue that the other side of the coin is that clones have the opposite effect, it’s clones that stagnate the gaming industry and make it dull and boring but I digress. That’s a whole other can of worms and an argument for another time because today I want to share the history of one particular game that proves clones can be successful. Released in 1991, it’s a clone of an equally legendary 8-bit game and a game that took puzzle games to the next level. It’s a game I still play to this day 21 years after it’s release; Supaplex.
The 80′s were the 8-bit glory days of computing an era that gave birth to some legendary games like Boulder Dash. Created circa 1983 by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray Boulder Dash is an arcade game where you play a cave explorer called Rockford. Your task is to collect enough diamonds to activate the exit while trying to avoid death by diamond, boulder, butterfly, or firefly.
On October 28, 1983 Liepa and Gray sold the Boulder Dash rights to First Star Software who to this day still own the rights to Boulder Dash. First Star Software released Boulder Dash in 1984 for Atari 8-bit computers initially. Boulder Dash would go on to spawn multiple official sequels, more than 50 remakes/clones and was (and continues to be) released on a wide range of platforms including the Apple II, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, ColecoVision home computers, NES, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, PC, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Symbian, Android, to name just a few.
I didn’t discover Boulder Dash until around 1988 when the family got it’s first computer, a Commodore 64 that came with hundreds of disks loaded with pirated games. I was too young to realise or care that those games were pirated, I just enjoyed discovering and playing new games. When I discovered Boulder Dash it became an instant favourite.
About the same time I discovered Boulder Dash a clone was born. In the summer of 1988 two teenage Boulder Dash fans, Michael Stopp & Philip Jespersen, launched a project to code a clone of Boulder Dash. Stopp says “there were really two reasons why we started to create our own Boulder Dash clone.”, he explains that “Having played and loved Boulder Dash for a long time, we simply couldn’t find a decent replacement for it when we switched from C64 to Amiga. I think there was no official Boulder Dash version in the early days of Amiga. There were other clones, like Emerald Mine, but they all seemed to have a number of flaws”. As good as the original Boulder Dash was it still had it’s flaws, Stopp & Jespersen thought they could do a better job of creating a game, a game that they would enjoy playing. So they did, they created a better game and they called it THINK! It would take about one year and 111 levels before THINK! was finished.
Some time after THINK! was finished the team decided to try and sell their game. The guys hooked up with a small one man Swiss company called Tension Software to bring their game to the market. In the meantime Tension Software sold THINK! to Digital Integration who suggested that the THINK! team work directly with them. The guys were able to get out of their contract with Tension Software because the contract stated that the game was to be brought to the market within 6 months which hadn’t happened. Tension Software was little more than a stumbling block on the road to getting THINK! released commercially.
There was one last road block stopping Digital Integration from releasing THINK! because of a trademark conflict with IBM who used the THINK (sans exclamation mark) as a slogan. To get around this issue THINK! was renamed to Supaplex and released in 1991 for the Amiga. You can still see references to the original name of the game in some levels.
Piracy was a problem even in 1991, it was a problem that affected Supaplex which had been leaked. It was discovered on BBSes or Usenet (via UUCP) that a cracked version of Supaplex was available illegally before it hit the shops. The team were under no illusions that Supaplex would get pirated eventually although they were disappointed it happened so quickly. Supaplex was only moderately successful commercially (possibly because of piracy) and was later re released for the budget market.
In November of 1992 Maarten “Elmer” Egmond came across a review of Supaplex, he was suitably impressed and picked up a copy of Supaplex for 13.60 Euros, about $17 (sans inflation, just over $30 including inflation) in Australian currency.
At the time Maarten was a hobbyist programmer in need of an ideas for a project. After pondering for a while about what to code he eventually decided that he wanted to figure out how Supaplex stored the levels so he could hopefully decode them so he could code a Supaplex level editor. To his surprise he discovered that it was relatively easy to decode the Supaplex levels, so he set about coding a Supaplex level editor. Maarten built some new levels for Supaplex with his level editor then the project stagnated until 1994 when Maarten got connected to the internet.
After getting connected to the internet Maarten decided to publish his Supaplex level editor and levels so he set up a web site, his reasoning was that although he didn’t know any other Supaplex fans it didn’t cost him anything (other than time) to code the editor or create the levels so “why not?”.
As Maarten continued to work on his level editor he learned that there were other people that enjoyed Supaplex thanks to “Hilde’s Supaplex page”, which is cited as being the first Supaplex fan page. Maarten started publishing other peoples custom Supaplex levels.
Some people started asking questions about the legal status of Supaplex. I imagine they were asking if what he was doing was legal, did Digital Integration mind what he was doing, did he have the code, could he provide a copy of Supaplex?
By this time it was nigh on impossible to purchase Supaplex legally except for maybe the odd second hand copy if you were lucky enough to come across a second hand copy. The questions that Maarten received prompted him to seek some answers. He was under the impression that Digital Integration was broke so he contacted the original authors of Supaplex to ask them if he could distribute Supaplex for free. They agreed to let Maarten distribute Supaplex for free, they were happy and enjoyed seeing that the game was still alive. So Maarten put up a copy of the game for download.
Later on Maarten discovered that Digital Integration was still in business, so he contacted them to ask if it was ok for him to continue distributing Supaplex for free. Luckily Digital Integration were kind enough to let Maarten continue distributing Supaplex for free.
Then something important happened. Maarten met Herman Perk who told him that Supaplex was actually running at twice the original speed. It was Herman that debugged the Assembler code, found the problem and coded a fix for it thus creating the first “SpeedFix” version of Supaplex.
Over time Maarten and Herman made improvements and coded additional features.
Maarten had plans for and started making Supaplex 2 which turned into Igor because of a legal issue, namely that Digital Integration still owned the rights for Supaplex and they had their own plans to make Supaplex 2.
According to Michael Stopp has said that “[Digital Integration] planed [sic] to release a 2nd part of SUPAPLEX and I even started to build some 20 new levels…” Unfortunately Supaplex 2 never happened because Digital Integration faded into obscurity.
So what happened to Digital Integration? How did they manage to fade into history? In 1998 Digital Integration became a wholly owned subsidiary of Titus Games plc (the holding company for Titus Interactive) then in 2005 Titus Interactive went bankrupt, it apparently didn’t affect Titus’ international subsidiaries, including Digital integration who were continuing to operate as usual using its own name and identity. I’m assuming the bankruptcy some how affected Digital Integration because since then nothing has been heard of Digital Integration who seem to have faded into history.
Supaplex is one of the earliest games that I know of where the developer has allowed their game to be distributed legally for free.
It’s more common now to see game developers release their games for free or for the source code of a game to be open-sourced.
For example ID Softwares John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major ID Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.
Consequently, many home grown projects have sprung up to clean up the code and port the code to different languages and platforms, Some projects provide major modifications to the core engine or updates to the game by improving or adding new game mechanics. Projects like ioquake3, and games like Urban Terror, Tremulous and Alien Arena are all based on ID game engines that have been open-sourced. Although the code for Supaplex was never open-sourced the game was haphazardly released into the public domain for free.
Supaplex is commonly cited as the best Boulder Dash clone ever made and is a bona fide classic so much so that Supaplex spawned clones of it’s own for various platforms like New Supaplex for Windows, a Russian Supaplex clone (that looks strangely like Igor with different graphics), MegaPlex a Windows compatible clone of Supaplex and WinPlex another Russian Supaplex clone. SwibPlex, a Linux port/clone. The Mac has it’s own clone called Inferon. Supaplex has even been ported to modern smart phones, I know of 3 Android Supaplex clones; DroidPlex!, and two different clones both called Supaplex. Apples iOS (the operating system that runs on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch hardware) has two ports/clones called Supaplex and Nanoplex.
I still enjoy playing Supaplex (it still runs on the most modern PC although you will need to run it under DOSBox) and have launched a new web site; THINK! Supaplex to, celebrate it’s 21st birth day. THINK! Supaplex is the most comprehensive source of up to date Supaplex information.
A legend lives on.
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I'm Jingles, I'm like the Keith Miller of geeks, i.e. an all rounder, I'm a web scientist, an A+ certified (it means I'm not a “noob”) computer technician, and this is my blog. I'm your curator of all things awesome, cool and geeky on and off the net. More...
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