A lot has changed in the gaming landscape since the release of the first Mac. And when we say a lot, we mean a lot, a lot. And if not, tell one of the first games released for the original 1984 Macintosh: Mouse Stampede.
Stampede! (more or less)
Mouse Stampede is a curious game in which, with our arrow shooter mouse, you have to break up the pieces of cheese on the screen, avoiding touching them. Also avoid cats, other mice, bats, brushes, shopping carts, shoes and turtles.
The game is developed by Mark of the Unicorn, and was originally released in 1984 for the original Macintosh
Hay big differences between the credits of the first and the second version. As we can see in the previous image, there are two different names, two credits and two developers. Jason Linhart is well attested as a Mouse Stampede developer, from a caption in the Baltimore Sun to a Slashdot commentary by MS sprite artist Bill Spitzak.
A piece of history in the form of zeros and ones that leaves more questions than answers.
A 1983 Byte article also names Linhart president of MOTU (Mark of the Unicorn) at the time. On the contrary, there is no record of Tom Wade having any association with the company. Why the first version came out under this author remains anyone’s guess, let alone “Walter” and “A Herd of Walruses.”
The instruction screen, as can be seen above these lines, count the rules of the gamewith a slight touch of humor, as well as the points that we earn depending on the object that we manage to make disappear from the screen.
The game even had its own rules to avoid copiesas we are told on tcrf.net:
Disk check compares two outdated strings in the application, FarmersWomanSculptureKnife in 70DF and 1.0.0 in 70B3, along with their counterparts at the start of the Stampede Stuff file. If one of the two does not match, the game is “cut” by a spontaneous restart. (And you’ll never, ever succeed in copying that file, because it’s locked behind a little bozo impregnable).
The truth is that these little bits of history contain a good amount of curiosities. Curiosities, in this case, important, because between appearing the game accredited to “someone” of whom we know little or nothing, we we have more questions than answers. Anyway, a little piece of history in the form of ones and zeros.