vintage Mac shareware: Tetris Max

[bigmessowires]

Was anybody active in the Macintosh shareware community back in the day? What programs did you write?

My 15 minutes of shareware fame was Tetris Max. I wrote it while at univeristy in 1992. It was just plain tetris, but was much better tuned and polished than the other Mac tetris games of the period, and it developed a pretty big following.



I had a small army of student testers at my disposal, who helped fine-tune the speed at the final level so that you could *almost* play indefinitely, if you maintained a trance-like, catatonic focus on the screen. For years I'd get emails from people asking if their score was the WORLD BEST. The music by Peter Wagner was also hypnotic and memorable, and had many fans. You can hear it here.

The game was written-up in MacUser magazine in 1993 and 1996, as well as in a couple of books, and was also repackaged into a shareware collection sold at retail stores.

I even received a $10 shareware registration check from Woz. Signed "Woz". Which I cashed. :-(

The concept of intellectual property was lost on me back then. In 1998 I had two different companies pursue me for infringing on tetris. If I recall correctly, one was Atari, who sent me a "cease and desist" letter. The Tetris Company also brought legal action against the publisher of the retail shareware collection, and indirectly me. Why two different companies would both claim I'd infringed on their IP wasn't clear, but I stopped selling the game, and that was the end of the heyday of Tetris Max.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I seem to recall that being my favorite Tetris. (I specifically remember the tessellated-horses background. If it wasn't for that, I likely wouldn't remember it.) At that time, I was a poor college student, but I know I would register some shareware. If I didn't register yours, sorry. :I

 

[IPalindromeI]

I like that game, not as much as Space Junkie, but still

 

[olePigeon]

Solarian II > Space Junkie.

Yeah, that's right. I opened that can of worms.

 

[quinterro]

I didn't write Mac shareware, but did write some PC shareware back in the DOS days, mainly focused around FASA's BattleTech universe. Contacted FASA to make sure my programs were OK with them, which it was as long as I did not include any of their maps or mech's stats. Only 12 registrations in 2 years. Woohoo! Didn't have any sort of Mac until the late 90's/early 2000s.

Since I started programming full-time in 1996 I have not done any projects for my own amusement. Would love to do it again, but need to find the time.

 

[elSchus]

I remember that Tetris! It was listening to the music that made me sure. Sorry I didn't pay the fee... I was 12, I think, when I played it. At that time, I too had a poor concept of intellectual property.

I wrote a freeware game in World Builder. I remember being really excited when I saw it in the AOL file downloads area. It was about what you would expect from a 12 year old. :beige:

 

[Byrd]

Hi bigmessofwires,

thanks for sharing your story! Certainly from pretty much any Mac I came by in this era, Tetris Max was pretty much a mainstay on the hard disk of any Mac I came across (ie. not put on by me). It was easily the best Tetris game on Mac at the time, the best music of any Mac game and I also recall is was one of the few B&W games that needed an '030 to run - is that right?

Could I ask perhaps for an upload of the registered version by any chance?

My best friend coded Play It Cool!, a quicktime movie/basic editing program from a similar time, I think that was pretty popular too.

JB

 

[bigmessowires]

The game I played the most myself was Jewelbox. Anyone remember that? I don't remember the rules exactly, but I think it was mostly a Columns clone.

I remember having a long, long discussion with a friend one night about what was the maximum number of jewels that could possibly be destroyed in a single move. We went around and around, and finally decided it was 23 jewels, and later I went to bed. Then at like 3:00 AM I was awakened by a rustling sound, and I sat up to see a piece of paper being stuffed under my door. On it was drawn a ridiculously complex Jewelbox diagram full of lines and arrows, with the title "25 jewels will be destroyed". My friend had stayed up all night working on it. Ah, those were the days...

 

[slomacuser]

I have played both, the Tetris Max and Jewelbox. Got them on one of Macworlds CD's. Great games

 

[Emehr]

I love Tetris Max! I discovered it shortly after getting my first Mac in early '96 (a Performa 6116CD). The graphics are clean (I love the backgrounds), the sound effects are nice and effective (the pops and moos were great), and Peter Wagner's music is fantastic. Congratulations on a nice bit of programming!

I've done some Mac coding myself but never released anything officially. My biggest enemy was myself, starting projects anew instead of just trudging through and finishing what I started. I was just organizing my Inside Macintosh books today (all twenty pounds of them! lol) and was thinking I need to get back into it and finish my game.

 

[mjgleason]

Coincidentally (considering my recent post about Daleks Forever), I wrote a Tetris clone myself, named Cumulonimbus. Most of my software had ridiculous names, so it is somewhat surprising that the game did as well as it did. The first version was basically an overnighter written in 1990 for B/W macs using Think Pascal. With an asking price of only $1 and better gameplay and audio/video than the other clones available at the time, it gathered a good enough following to justify a new version in 1991 written using Think C. I didn't have access to a color Mac until years later, so adding color support was frustrating and by the time I got that working OK I got busy at school and never had time to work on it again. Nevertheless, upon release of version 2.0 in January 1991 I was firmly convinced my game was the most fun and best overall version of Tetris available for the Mac. (Fun Fact: I didn't play the real Tetris myself until years later; it was written based on what a friend described.)

My game was aimed at a windowed (i.e. not full screen) environment, so you could click out to a real application if the Boss game by. I also believe there were a few innovations, such as: allowing the player to resize the well, select the pieces to use (including a few other shapes not in the original game), starting the game with pre-placed obstacle bricks, rotating the zig-zag brick into the flipside conformations, and maybe even the concept of levels.

Apparently more advanced clones came along but at the time it was good enough to earn money for pizzas so I didn't have to eat dorm food every day!

 

[Strimkind]

I remember playing Tetris Max. Not entirely sure where we got it from, but I think we played it for years until my family migrated to OSX.

I think it was used from an original LC up until a PM 7500.

 

[Mr. Ksoft]

I always put Tetris Max on my Macs. I love it! I'm surprised you managed to get away with using the name Tetris for as long as you did, though.

 

[tt]

bigmessowires, great story.... sounds like a good future article for LEM.

 

[bigmessowires]

After enjoying a bit of a Tetris Max revival on my new collection of classic Macs, I've discovered something I never could have back in the early days: the gameplay feels substantially different on different models of Macs. I only ever had one machine to test it on, so I never noticed this, but the difference is pretty huge! The game uses TickCount to drop the pieces at a constant real-time rate, but somehow it still feels slower on some Macs than others.

I had been playing the game a fair bit using the Basilisk II emulator, and was finding it pretty difficult. I decided my reflexes just weren't what they used to be, and I consistently lost at about 90-95 rows. Then the first time I tried the game on the Power Mac 8500, I got 104 rows, and I'm sure I could have done more with a few more tries. This morning I tried it on my new LC II (thanks Coius!), and I got 204 rows without hardly trying! Who wrote this buggy software anyway??

So after all these years, it seems that any direct comparison of high scores obtained on different Mac models is invalid.

 

[coius]

try it on a powermac G3 and get back to us

that would be rather funny to see them fly down the screen as if they were falling in real-life at terminal speed. I could imagine clicking "start" then "You lose!" shows up

 

[classic]

Tetris Max is always installed in my games folder on the various macs I own.

I particularly like the sound effects.

Tetris Max=Best Tetris Clone ever

 

[superpantoufle]

thanks for sharing your story! Certainly from pretty much any Mac I came by in this era, Tetris Max was pretty much a mainstay on the hard disk of any Mac I came across (ie. not put on by me). It was easily the best Tetris game on Mac at the time, the best music of any Mac game

Couldn't have said it better!

Thanks bigmessowires fot that great story! I remember opening it up with ResEdit to or something just to get the music and listen to it in loop on the family's LC III.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I think I got that on a Special (Macworld?) Shareware Games CD, I tried it a few times and liked it, but I get bored easily, I'm not really a gamer.

Solarian II, Patriot Command and Tetris Max (GREAT SOUNDTRACK) were the games we played off that CD on "family game nights" one winter, thanks for the fun! My ex played it enough that I told her she should pay the shareware fee, but I'm pretty sure she didn't.

GREAT job on that piece of work!