My Life in Video Games: The Klik & Play Days
June 28, 2009 – 5:18 pm
Let me start this episode by saying the history of Klik & Play is a confusing one, and nearly all of my work created using this legendary program are long lost to the sands of time. You’ll just have to trust me.
In desperation, the image to the left was unceremoniously stolen from SixSecondFiesta, and I think it accurately describes much of the style you’d get from Klik & Play: heavily-aliased Win32 fonts, remora-like attachment to 16-bit lopsided gradients, and mountains of uncoordinated, disturbing clip-art.
With that said, I’m going to chat a little bit about how my early years intertwined with this program to create some of the worst games ever. Strap in.
The Klik & Play years began during the eventual sunset of my beloved Level B4 BBS, sometime around 1993. MS-DOS 6.0 and the DOSSHELL environment inevitably lost ground to Windows 3.1, but in the transition away from EGA/VGA or text-based console interaction, gaming suffered greatly. Most of us, in search of gaming satisfaction in this new age, were expecting all of the fruits afforded by the confluence of the CD-ROM, the Windows GUI, and rapid advances in hard drive space and RAM. Instead, we got Jewel Thief.
(To be fair, we did get Inner Space and Proliferation, eventually).
If playing games in the hybrid space between console mode and genuine graphical UI was difficult, making them was damned near impossible. You’d have to ask Charles Petzold what was so difficult about getting access to the video layer in the Windows 3.1 days (between 1992 and 1994), but it’s telling to realize that Microsoft themselves (including Alex St. John, who had the honor of speaking in the illustrious basement meeting room of the Sea-Tac Marriott at my college commencement) didn’t decide something needed to be done to open up Windows to game programmers until Windows 95, three years later.
I feel obliged at this point to include a shot of Jewel Thief.
Notice our main character - controlled entirely and unmolestedly by the direct mouse movements of the player (he is essentially a cursor), trying to grab gems on the surface of Mars while avoiding what are either flying elephants with swords or miniature cartographic drawings of Angola.
To be sure, we, the game players now itching to be game creators, took a serious blow to the heart (and head and neck) by what looked all the world like a regression.
We had MS-DOS still at the heart of it all, of course, and most games of the time were still made to be run in command mode at the prompt; indeed, the games themselves would unceremoniously puke if any attempt was made to run them in Windows 3.1. But if you weren’t a big-budget title good enough to make people want to back out of Windows into DOS mode to run you, (I’m not kidding, this was a serious consideration) and you knew Windows 3.1 turned your entire idea of a game into shuffling around random dialog boxes, what was left for the little guy?
In 1994, the answer came, published by Maxis and appearing in the mysterious CD-ROM format that the kids were whispering about in hushed tones along the hallway: Klik & Play.
While the title was developed by a European consortium, you’ll notice that Maxis, as the American publisher, put all the necessary stuff on the box to make an implicit promise of fulfillment to every single demographic they could think of:
- D&D Nuts (Dragon)
- Simulation Junkies (Stealth Fighter + Tank)
- Fans of the Atari 2600 “ET” (Jetpack and UFO)
- Your Mom, Who Thinks Games are the Devil (Clown)
- Your Dad, Who Just Discovered Solitare on Win 3.1 (Playing Cards)
It’s hard to fault them (I’m talking legally here) for overpromising the wages of their product, as by rights you *could* make any of those games, though they weren’t necessarily already in the box - the ingredients to do so were there or easy enough to make with the included tools.
But of course, that’s not quite true either.
Klik & Play was revolutionary, but that in no way should that superlative ever apply to actually using the thing. Computer usability in 1994 was hardly an established science, but American users of the product suffered two strikes against them: the standard horrible usability, plus European iconography.
Let me put it to you, the reader - could you use this?
Among the icons that stand out at first glance you’ll notice TWO identical clapboard icons, the door to 10 Downing Street in Westminster (the UK Prime Minister’s house), an amateur sketch of the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic half-smile as described by Max Fleischer, an English court judge, and something I can only describe as a nightmarish scenario involving an annelid worm and a waiting Yellow Cab/Angler fish transformer.
Despite your first impulse, these are not images that psychiatrists show to children to diagnose hidden problems at home.
They are buttons, and by clicking them, you’re supposed to make a game. I’m not kidding.
Were there other limitations? Of course.
- Images needed to be made up of uncompressed single-frames with manually drawn-in transparent regions. Too big and the program would flop over dead or drop frames until it was on par with a PowerPoint slideshow - this of course included small images scaled up to large ones on the fly, as there really wasn’t such a thing as hardware scaling at the time.
- Logic was defined using a complicated if-then matrix of icons that would put the ones above in the category of high art.
- Sounds were a combination of 16 kHz uncompressed waves and MIDI music tracks that started about 3 seconds after you called them.
- There’s a button for a gradient there - I know you see it, and you’re tempted. Don’t. We’re working in 16-bit color and that means all gradients not only band into ugly stairstep-looking things like this, but on some video cards, they end up with a snot-green tint as well, since three colors don’t share 16 bits equally and the extra bit usually went to green.
Finally, if you really did get through all of that, you’d get a game that ended up looking something like this (and thanks to Glorious Trainwrecks for this one):
Pragmatists have finally already blown their stack and asked, “So, with all of these obvious handicaps and failures, why did you use it?”
Well, because it was there, and it made games that other people liked to play.
We knew that the future would be brighter.
We knew that one day we’d have the tools to do great things.
Until then, we used what we had.
Just like now.
