pouët.net

I created this adventure game to use in lieu of slides for my ZeroNights 2014 keynote talk entitled "Is infosec a game?" (The event focuses on practical computer security.) As such, the game contains relatively few puzzles, yet it is not a simple slideshow either. I've since setup a
homepage for the talk materials, which includes a lot of screenshots (and thus a walkthrough with all the spoilers), a magic PDF file by Ange Albertini (contains both screenshots and playable game if unzipped), an online playable version (uses JsDOSBox), a sub-page with related material and links (for the infosec and society topics I brought up during the talk), links to YouTube video of the talk (I spoke Russian, sorry) and to Picasa gallery from the event. The game features WarGames, Alley Cat, Star Wars, 1984, Back to the Future, All About Eve, In the First Circle themes, as well as many historical and contemporary real-world references in the 1885 to 2015 range.

I wrote the game engine ("code") in 1994-1995 and the game itself ("data") in 2014. I refrained from the temptation to make any changes at all to game.exe (leaving it at the 1995 build), which helped me make langsec.org point on the lack of fundamental difference between code and data.

The idea to revive this ~20 year old unreleased game engine came last year from my (now) 8 year old son after I mentioned to him I had a thing like that on my 386. He is now developing his own "Save the cat" game using it (not intended for release). In fact, he recently added so many sprites that he triggered a stack overflow in the ZIP extractor (which, I must admit, contains some borrowed code... I didn't care back then). It turns out my own game was just below the limit. In case one of you wants to play with the engine too (rather than merely play the existing game), the patch to eliminate this limitation is changing the last instance of 00 C5 in game.exe to e.g. 00 F5 (this controls the ZIP extractor's stack size). Also see errata.txt for issues with running on modern machines. Obviously, running in DOSBox avoids those. I used DOSBox on Alpine Linux for my ZeroNights talk.

@britelite I think it's demoscene related roughly to the same (limited) extent as other games in here are. If type=game weren't a supported choice on this site, I surely wouldn't submit a game. Besides, there were a couple of my old intros submitted to this site by others, which made me feel welcome here.