
The Making of Stunt Island - ingve
http://fabiensanglard.net/stunt_island/index.html
======
hvs
I can't remember why I bought this game (I was in the middle of high school at
the time), but I logged hundreds of hours in this game. It's hard to
appreciate games from a generation before you because you've developed a
certain expectation of how games are supposed to look, features you've come to
expect in every game, etc. But there was really nothing like this game at the
time. 3D games barely existed (they were mostly flight sims, as this game
nominally is), but it had so much more. You have to remember that this was
before the web (actually one year after its creation), and most people weren't
on the Internet. Some of us nerds were on BBSes, Compuserve, etc. But
discovery of new games came from gaming magazines, friends, and just going to
the game store and seeing what was on the shelves (which, as I think about it,
is probably how I ended up with it. I probably thought it looked cool on the
shelf).

I don't really have a point, but this article brought back some memories of
that time.

~~~
leetrout
If memory serves me This was an upgrade for me from Corncob 3D.

~~~
readwind
Corncob was the shit. What was that other Amiga game? With the cones, and
everything, it looked like corncob, but it was something else. I bet someone
knows. Good times anyways.

~~~
readwind
Backlash? Is that the title? Internal view, tons of cones, etc, pretty good
gfx, fucking cannon shots out of your mouth/view. Backlash? The corncob person
gave me memories. Loved backlash, it was fantastically graphic for its time.

~~~
readwind
Djeeah, guess we're fucking back-lashing, or backlash, as the title is and
goes: enjoy
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOG1p2DbDCI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOG1p2DbDCI)
thanks corncob most valued person enjoy

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Jaruzel
> _And I had an extra hercules graphics card that allowed me to debug on a
> separate monochrome monitor._

For anyone wondering how that worked... Hercules graphics cards had their
screen RAM in a different part of the memory map than CGA/EGA/VGA. So a bit of
clever coding could get you 'dual screens' even at the DOS level.

There's a few YouTube videos showing ancient IBM XTs running with two
simultaneous monitors - one CGA, and the other Monochrome.

~~~
danparsonson
As it happens it was also possible (although not really practical :-) to run
two VGA cards in the same machine. The secondary card was left uninitialised
by the boot process (since it would have conflicted with the primary), but it
was possible to download the ROM, call into the initialisation routine (thus
firing up the card and making it the primary), and thereafter switch which
card was the one currently mapped into the PC address space to control which
display you were writing to.

Source: I managed to achieve it once, although only with a great deal of help
from people on Usenet...

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Razengan
I can still recall its intro and sound bites.

That was such a weird era in gaming history; all these cool ideas being
explored, but average computing power was _not quite enough_ to do them
justice. An odd limbo between the era when most games didn't attempt to be
realistic, and before games could actually be realistic.

So you had all these games that thought they were being realistic, and we did
what we had always done: nodded along and pretended that they were indeed
realistic, and helped them by sticking to their rails. :)

~~~
neuronexmachina
I still remember one of the amusing sound bites it would play if you crashed
your plane while filming a stunt:

"Wait a minute, uh... up is down, down is up, and left is left... right?"

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thom
This was so much fun. I mostly just flew planes through canyons and did cool
loop-the-loops, but my brother created a whole mini film called Attack of the
Killer Christmas Trees... just because he could.

It's worth noting that the slightly less slick and less fun, but possibly more
powerful 3D Construction Kit predated Stunt Island:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Construction_Kit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Construction_Kit)

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penciljencil
> _Disney put me in an apartment nearby from which I could walk to their
> offices, and I tended to get in in the afternoon and work long into the
> night. Corporate America is not my natural habitat and I think I was
> regarded with bemusement by most of the Disney employees. We were receiving
> no money from Disney during this period, and I couldn’t afford to eat, so I
> lived on whatever I could find in the office kitchen._

It seems odd that Disney was willing to provide housing, but unwilling to
spend even a dime for this man to eat.

~~~
VHRanger
Could be bureaucratic categories he fell into

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unixhero
The graphics kind of remind me of the car game STUNTS.

[https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/stunts](https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/stunts)

~~~
tincholio
It was pretty much the same style of play, too, only more elaborate, and with
planes. Both were great games, really.

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dividuum
Still available on GOG:
[https://www.gog.com/game/stunt_island](https://www.gog.com/game/stunt_island)

I regret not getting into it back in the day as I was too busy with Flight
Simulator 4 and all its expansions :)

~~~
smcl
I love the minimum hardware requirements they list on GOG. I suspect you can
get away with a slightly less powerful machine

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cpach
I like the picture with they guy standing on the boat deck.

Does anyone here know how pictures like that where made? With Deluxepaint...?

It doesn't really look like a photo, but close enough. But I doubt it was
scanned? On the other hand, doing it by hand seems quite tricky :)

[http://fabiensanglard.net/stunt_island/leaving_the_island.pn...](http://fabiensanglard.net/stunt_island/leaving_the_island.png)

~~~
underwater
The cloud and water look like photographs. Everything else, including the
island, seems to be digital drawings.

~~~
fabiensanglard
It is a highly likely the photograph were modified with Deluxe Paint 3. I
don't see what else they would have used at the time.

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readwind
I wish he would run through "Midwinter" and "Midwinter II Flames of Freedom,"
though there are probably greater and more acute games. I love this guy and
his work.

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peignoir
Oh so many memories, I spent so many hours as a kid setting up my own stunt.
Would def want a new version running with a modern 3d engine (GTA V is a
little like that)

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GrumpyNl
I love this quot under a 16 pixel image, A Mirage 2000 approaching the Golden
Gate. Notice the city made of hundreds of polygons and the Gouraud shading.

~~~
recursive
It looks like at least 320x240.

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christkv
This is a game I would love to see a modern remake off. It would be great for
my kids as a sandbox to play in and make their own movies.

