 I want to talk a little bit about another game that you might have actually played. It came out in 1984, not for the NES, but for the Commodore 64 and the Atari computers. It didn't actually make it to the NES in North America until 88. It is called Spy versus Spy. Has anyone played Spy versus Spy? Oh, a lot of people. Wow. Do you remember this game? It's not so forgotten. Can any of you think of a game that's like Spy versus Spy that has come out since Spy versus Spy in 1988? There are very few. So Spy versus Spy for Game Boy. It's interesting you bring that up. That was made. Hey, stop it. It was made by a company you've never heard of called First Star Software. And there's this whole story behind it that's actually not that interesting. They made two games, Spy versus Spy and Boulder Dash. And the company exists today, as far as I can tell, to continue to make money real licensing Spy versus Spy and Boulder Dash. So the deal with this game, those of you who haven't played it, is that it is a direct versus game again. Two players, perfect information. There's nothing to hide. Yet it's hide and seek. You have to get four items, put them in a briefcase, and go out that little door with the airplane out of it. That lets you fly away. And then the building explodes and kills the other Spy. Now, you can only hold one item at a time. And so you get the briefcase. So what ends up happening is you find like the money bag. All right, the other player sees the screen. He sees you got the money bag. This game wouldn't work if you couldn't see each other's screens. Most games, I mean you played Bond as a kid on the N64. And people would yell at you if you looked at other people's screens to see where they were and snipe them. This game, if you didn't look at the other guy's screen, you couldn't win. The game was stupid if you didn't look at the other screen. So rather than trying to like get around the limitations of the console and the split screen multiplayer, because you couldn't really network to Nintendo's together, they decided to make a game that it was okay to look at the other guy's screen you were expected to. So I gotta hide the money bag somewhere. Like I gotta hide it in the bookshelf. I have to remember where I hid it. I have to remember all the traps I've laid along the way. I have to hope that he doesn't remember where I laid it. And I gotta protect it from him. Yeah, the best idea is to usually put it somewhere and then put a trap in the same room, right? Perhaps you put a water bucket on the door of the room or you put the money bag in the dresser. But then before you, if he tries to go in that room, he'll die. And he probably didn't see, he probably couldn't pay attention long enough to see you set the trap and hide the money bag. So then when you go to get the money bag, you make sure you bring the umbrella with you so that the water bucket doesn't get you. Of course, you'll forget and just die a million times. Yeah. The game is not great. It's actually very deeply flawed due to the limitations of the console. Unlike Outlaw, which kind of maximized the potential of the console, this game, you really only have two buttons and it doesn't work that well. Like you have to cycle through all the traps to figure out which one you're going to use. And it's really fiddly. And if you play it on any difficulty other than basic, it's a gigantic map so big I've never seen a human being beat it. Yeah. See, there's only six rooms on the easiest mode. The hardest mode is like a gigantic mansion. It's like, you can't even remember where you left your socks, let alone the money bag in the briefcase. So why don't people make games like this anymore? I mean, why don't people try to make a hide-and-seek versus multiplayer direct competition game? So here's a game that I can't get to go full screen. This game, I doubt any of you have heard of it. So basically in 1984, there was a company called BMB CompuScience. And obviously they were not a game maker. They were a hardware maker. And they made a networking system called ImagineNet. Obviously ImagineNet didn't work out so well. That's why you all use Ethernet. But the idea was that if you were some company and you needed networking in 1984, there really, you know, there were a hundred different choices to choose from. So some people, I guess, might have bought ImagineNet and probably went out of business because of it. It's not a very interesting story. No. But so they wanted to sell ImagineNet to people. They needed some sort of software to demonstrate that used ImagineNet. It was very impressive. So they had this guy, also named David, David Clark, and he made a game that was a network game in 1984. It was called Sopwith. Sopwith 1 really sucks. So I have swapped Sopwith 3 to show you. Now, the game itself is not that amazing, right? Has anyone seen this ever or played it? Wow. Really? It must have had some, it didn't make the run for the internet or something. We'll get this thing going. So here's the deal. It's pretty much a multiplayer LAN versus a choplifter defender. Are you going to play or not? All mixed together in one. Now, a choplifter is a game that really hasn't been remade that much. Defender is a game that... I died. I died again. Oh, there he goes. It's basically a choplifter. The game itself isn't really that exciting. Though it has a surprisingly dedicated fan out. See, one of the annoying things about this game... It's like a choplifter. You got bombs, you got guns, you fly around. One of the annoying things about this game is that when you fly to the left, your controls suddenly flip. So up is down and down is up. And then when you flip, right? But there's also a button to do a barrel roll. And that basically lets you reverse the controls sort of. Wow, the computer's really just gunning for me here. But the magic of this game, right, is that I wanted people to realize this. This game was out in 1984, and you could network play on Imagine It. In 1984, there was LAN play. Mega Man 2 did not exist. Zelda 1 did not exist. Mario Brothers. Five versus five is not even in the US yet. Mario Brothers, maybe around that was 85, right? But there was a LAN game. And if you went to like any college that had, you know, the second version of software, software 2 after Imagine It went out of business, right? When that came out, it actually let you play with regular old networking. So everyone who had just DOS computers in a, you know, LAN in a school computer lab and a college computer lab and a company, they all had software because they all got it for free. It was open source, whatever. But the thing is, right, if you did LAN mode, right, there's a lot of things to be gained from LAN mode that people aren't taking advantage of because they're not even thinking about it anymore, right? The one thing, obviously, is everyone has their own screen and their own set of controls, right? Which, you know, counts for a lot. But also there's that, you know, that feeling that you're in the same room as the other guy. It's one thing to have the Xbox 360 headset. But when you're in the same room as the other people playing, you can yell out of them, you piece of shit, right? Because with the webcam, the picture of your genitalia is kind of grainy. It's not like really full feature. Right? When they're... You get the full 3D experience in person. Right? But the real thing is when there's no lab, right? When you're developing a game, when you're programming a game, network code is the hardest thing to write. People don't realize this. And you see a lot of indie games come out and they just mess up the network play completely. It just doesn't work because it's so hard. They don't learn the lessons, you know, from the old, you know, people who've already figured it out, like John Carman. Now, LANs, I mean, people aren't going to go to LAN parties as much as they used to. I don't really expect people to. Gaming laptops are usually not the most economical thing. But what we could do is that a lot of people aren't doing, especially with these iPad apps, these phone apps, is that they don't give you local wireless multiplayer that works. And even with like the DS and the DSi, a lot of games don't take advantage of the fact. You can have 10 people in a room and play a multiplayer game and do something interesting with it. They usually take an existing normal game and tech cons from sort of multiplayer. You could make a game like SOPWIFT, put it on the DSi, and have like the planes flying around the room in 3D. Like everyone's using the camera to look at the space. Imagine if there were like 10 SOPWIFTS against 10 SOPWIFTS. Like, and everyone was flying around and they couldn't, and you were crashing into your friends. Right? That would be a good time, even though the graphics are really sad. They're not that sad. The cows are also at a lot of humor factor. Those are cows? Yeah, that right there is a cow on the bottom, right? That looks like a camel with a gun. Sure.