Love this. I did something similar myself. I wanted to create a sequel to one of my favorite old PC trivia edutainment games for MS-DOS that I played as a kid, RedHook's Revenge, which came out in the early ’90s. This was decades later, but the original author was happy to work with me and gave me permission to release an official sequel which I did! So I really like this approach.
I’ve personally never played Realmz, but I watched a few Let’s Plays, and I have to say the music feels hilariously out of place. I found a great article [1] which speculates that the original devs just dropped in some random tracker/mod music. You should definitely ask the original authors about it if you get the chance!
> but the original author was happy to work with me and gave me permission to release an official sequel which I did!
That's awesome, congrats! I know how difficult that process can be. I'd love to compare notes on how you went about contacting the author and creating the sequel. Do you have a write up or post you can share?
> I’ve personally never played Realmz, but I watched a few Let’s Plays, and I have to say the music feels hilariously out of place. I found a great article [1] which speculates that the original devs just dropped in some random tracker/mod music. You should definitely ask the original authors about it if you get the chance!
That music is forever seared into my brain! It was so kitschy and out of place, but that made it all the more endearing. I don't recall discussing the music specifically with the original Fantasoft guys, but based on the other fascinating stories they shared, I have no doubt the music was added just as that post described. Sadly, all of the music code had been deleted in the repository as we received it, with no commit history left for us to try to reconstruct it. So our version of the game unfortunately lacks any music. We have a todo item to add a mod file player library, but I'm not sure when we'll get to it. Stay tuned!
> So our version of the game unfortunately lacks any music. We have a todo item to add a mod file player library, but I'm not sure when we'll get to it. Stay "tuned"!
I see what you did there! :)
> Do you have a write up or post you can share?
I've been meaning to do one forever. I'll definitely let you know if I ever end up creating one. And I'll probably link to your article as well, since I love these types of postmortems.
I had to approach it in a pretty unusual way. I actually just reached out directly to the original author (I tracked him down on LinkedIn, of all places) and shared my enthusiasm for the game and asked for permission.
The game had a really limited distribution. It mostly appeared on those mega 200-game shareware CD compilations that came out in the early ’90s for MS-DOS and early Windows. So while he was happy to let me tinker with it, he no longer had the original source code. The application was pretty limited in terms of a small executable and a large packed binary with all the resources embedded.
My goal was to keep the core game the same. It’s basically a board game: you roll dice, move your ships, and depending on where you land, you answer trivia questions. But all of the questions were maritime themed. I thought it would be great to expand that with general trivia kind of like Trivial Pursuit meets naval Risk.
The tricky part was making sure that when I injected the new questions into the existing data file, I didn’t break anything else, being careful not to shift any of the memory offsets that pointed to sound effects or graphics otherwise it would crash.
Really cool project and interesting read. What a blast from the past. Sounds like quite a journey but well worth it. As more games age, their code will need to be preserved and projects like this are even more vital. We can't lose this piece of gaming history and should ensure that future generations have access to the games we grew up on.
I was a huge fan of this game back in the day, never got far in it, but I can't wait to try out some of the other scenarios besides City of Bywater that I never played. Kudos!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 17.8 ms ] threadI’ve personally never played Realmz, but I watched a few Let’s Plays, and I have to say the music feels hilariously out of place. I found a great article [1] which speculates that the original devs just dropped in some random tracker/mod music. You should definitely ask the original authors about it if you get the chance!
[1] - https://frostillic.us/blog/posts/2024/3/31/realmz
That's awesome, congrats! I know how difficult that process can be. I'd love to compare notes on how you went about contacting the author and creating the sequel. Do you have a write up or post you can share?
> I’ve personally never played Realmz, but I watched a few Let’s Plays, and I have to say the music feels hilariously out of place. I found a great article [1] which speculates that the original devs just dropped in some random tracker/mod music. You should definitely ask the original authors about it if you get the chance!
That music is forever seared into my brain! It was so kitschy and out of place, but that made it all the more endearing. I don't recall discussing the music specifically with the original Fantasoft guys, but based on the other fascinating stories they shared, I have no doubt the music was added just as that post described. Sadly, all of the music code had been deleted in the repository as we received it, with no commit history left for us to try to reconstruct it. So our version of the game unfortunately lacks any music. We have a todo item to add a mod file player library, but I'm not sure when we'll get to it. Stay tuned!
I see what you did there! :)
> Do you have a write up or post you can share?
I've been meaning to do one forever. I'll definitely let you know if I ever end up creating one. And I'll probably link to your article as well, since I love these types of postmortems.
I had to approach it in a pretty unusual way. I actually just reached out directly to the original author (I tracked him down on LinkedIn, of all places) and shared my enthusiasm for the game and asked for permission.
The game had a really limited distribution. It mostly appeared on those mega 200-game shareware CD compilations that came out in the early ’90s for MS-DOS and early Windows. So while he was happy to let me tinker with it, he no longer had the original source code. The application was pretty limited in terms of a small executable and a large packed binary with all the resources embedded.
My goal was to keep the core game the same. It’s basically a board game: you roll dice, move your ships, and depending on where you land, you answer trivia questions. But all of the questions were maritime themed. I thought it would be great to expand that with general trivia kind of like Trivial Pursuit meets naval Risk.
The tricky part was making sure that when I injected the new questions into the existing data file, I didn’t break anything else, being careful not to shift any of the memory offsets that pointed to sound effects or graphics otherwise it would crash.