Snipes (video game)
Early text-mode networked multiplayer maze game.
Snipes, a text-mode networked game from 1983, was built by SuperSet Software. It is recognized as the direct forerunner to NetWars and ranks among the earliest text-mode multiplayer titles, operating on Novell NetWare systems.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Drew Major
- Dale Neibaur
- Mark Hurst
- Kyle Powell
- Latest release version
- v1.0
- Latest release date
- 1983
- Operating system
- Novell NetWare, MS-DOS
- Genre
- Maze
Facts from the source article.
Gameplay
The player controls a creature moving through a maze to destroy snipes and their hives, or to destroy other networked players. Before playing, the number of snipes, hives, and difficulty must be specified. Each game is different because the computer generates a random new maze. Arrow keys move the creature, while A, S, D, and W keys shoot in different directions; combining keys allows diagonal movement and shooting. Pressing the spacebar gives extra velocity to escape snipes. Level options are chosen with a letter and a number: the letter controls environment settings such as which enemies appear, their accuracy, whether diagonal shots bounce off walls, whether running into a wall blocks or kills the player, and whether hives resist snipe shots. The number sets the maximum snipes, initial hives, and player lives. There are 234 possible levels from A1 to Z9. For multiplayer, all users must share a common network drive; clients likely communicate via a shared file. The exact implementation details are not known, but experiments show Snipes can be played between Windows workstations in a Command Prompt window under Windows XP if each user maps a drive to the executable location with read/write rights, implying IPX is not directly used.
Legacy
SuperSet Software sold thousands of copies of the single-player Snipes through ComputerLand. They built a networked multiplayer version to showcase their networking tech at the June 1982 National Computer Conference. When Safeguard Scientifics, owner of Novell, saw Snipes running simultaneously on Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET machines, they decided SuperSet's networking technology was worth acquiring. That technology became the basis for NetWare. At the time, NetWare was only used for sharing files and printers, so Snipes was the first software to actually use the network. Sales demos often wrapped up with a round of Snipes. SuperSet kept ownership of the game even though it shipped with NetWare. Drew Major noted that many customers told him about employees playing deathmatches after hours. Novell also used the game as a stress test to certify network cards and drivers as NetWare-compatible. A newer version came with NetWare Lite 1.1 in September 1991; its NLSNIPES.EXE file was under 18 KB. It was later replaced by NetWars 2.06, which shipped with Personal NetWare 1.0 and Novell DOS 7 starting in late 1993. In July 2016, a port to the Simple Direct Media Layer was released, created by reverse-engineering the original code with permission from Major and Kyle Powell. The C++ source code is on GitHub. Clones appeared for Linux and Android.
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