DOS Games Discussion

My name is Joseph Rhea, and in the late 80s, bored with commercial videogames, I decided to create my own. This was long before rendering engines existed so everything had to be built from scratch. 5 years and 100,000 lines of C code later, I created a first-person simulator called CYBERDROME.

It was huge and detailed virtual environment filled with thousands of independent digital creatures that ate, slept, fought, and "procreated," all without human control. They also evolved over time in ways that couldn't be predicted (using genetic algorithms). That made it a simulation.

However, it was also a place where you (and a friend) could enter and explore, using virtual vehicles called Tracers. You could work together (or compete) to explore, map, find weapons, and blow things up to complete levels. That made it a game.

The first magazine reviewers called it "too cerebral" for most players.

However, in 1993, facing stiff competitio from new games like Doom, I ended up shelving Cyberdrome and switched to writing scifi books in my spare time.

Now, after a 30 year slumber, I'm finally considering releasing it, probably as freeware, just because I think other "old timers" like me might enjoy something different.

Below is a 6-min video I just made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1twDYQh5mc

And here is some background info from my website:
http://josephrhea.com/games/

Please check these out and tell me what you think.

Hello Joseph, and welcome to the forums! We're happy to have you here

I've fixed the links in your post. Cyberdrome looks very impressive and is certainly of historical interest. Would be wonderful if you released the full game -- I understand that it is in a complete state? Perhaps you'd also make the source code available?

Thanks for the welcome.
My source code is literally 100,000 lines of Watcom C, and it was a massive rewrite of my older AtariST game of the same name. It might be a bit embarrassing to let newer better programmers see how I pulled this thing off 20 years ago (I said 30 years in my original post, but then realized that I stopped working on this in the early 2000s, not 1993). In any event, as you pointed out, it's all a part of history now.