Descent 3 Source Code

Once we get it cleaned up and have added MIT licensing and copyright notices to the code, it should be possible to build and release the Windows sources, but the Nintendo Gameboy sources are chock full of proprietary Nintendo stuff. I would love to release a Windows build that fixes the save crashing bug that LGR encountered in his excellent video about Yoot Tower. He says the Mac version was rock solid but the Window version crashed. But I don't have the Mac code, just the Windows.

LGR: Yoot Tower: The Sequel to SimTower

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqNECXCd9iU

Yoot Saito did a lot of the original development on the Mac, and was one of the people instrumental in evangelizing and introducing the Mac to Japan!

https://www.mymac.com/1999/02/the-my-mac-interview-mr-yoot-s...

>My Mac: When you developed YOOT TOWER and were preparing it for release, you made it very clear that you wanted the Mac version to appear first before the Windows version. Why did you do so and what resistance did you encounter?

>Mr. Saito: In making the initial prototypes, the Mac was a great sketchbook. However, in America, much more so than in Japan there is a lot of skepticism toward the Mac market. That was a very difficult point from a marketing angle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoot_Saito

>Yutaka Saitou was at one point considered a Mac Evangelist. He published "Under the Apple Tree" (Ringo no ki no shita de, 林檎の樹の下で) which details the turbulent events between the first Apple computer being imported into Japan and Apple Japan being established. He also published "The Secrets of Macintosh's creation" (Makkintosshu Tanjou no Hiwa, マッキントッシュ誕生の秘話), which features interviews with both the founding members and other core developers.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/6/20850674/yoot-saito-interv...

>Yoot Saito was previously best known as a Mac-focused developer who created The Tower, a tower management game that SimCity studio Maxis released worldwide as SimTower. (Its sequel, The Tower II, came to be known as Yoot Tower outside Japan.) After Seaman and its PS2 sequel, Saito designed Odama, a pinball-strategy hybrid for the GameCube where players used voice commands to direct soldiers on the table.

https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/the-secret-history-of-mac-...

>On Commodore 64, “Micropolis” had been a full-screen game controlled entirely with a keyboard and its palette of tools was laid out at the bottom of the screen. On Mac, it became a windowed application with mouse control, a MacPaint-inspired tool palette and menu system, and a separate window for the mini-map. It was, in essence, an interactive paint program — a MacPaint for city building. As the player painted her city on the canvas, its population would fall and rise and its visual appearance would evolve before her eyes. Its roads would come to life with traffic, its busiest districts patrolled by a helicopter, and its residents would build (or sometimes abandon) homes and businesses. [...]

>SimCity made a particularly great impact on Japanese Macintosh enthusiast Yutaka “Yoot” Saito. He felt the Nintendo Entertainment System games he had played before SimCity were more suitable for kids. They had bright, colorful graphics and animation and cute, synthesized sounds, and they tended to be fast-paced. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in loudness — in frantic button presses and lots of on-screen action. SimCity seemed totally different. It was visually very static, and it wasn’t even displayed in color.

>Above: Yoot Tower, the pseudo-sequel to SimTower

>But Saito thought it was very smart. In its simple graphics he could imagine many rich and colorful scenes around a city. “I didn’t leave the Macintosh for almost twenty-four hours,” he recalls. “I so much admired who created this genius and crazy software.” SimCity had an aura not unlike the Mac itself. Saito had been attracted to the Mac’s revolutionary air soon after it first came out. Apple’s presence in Japan was tiny at the time, as Japanese computers such as the NEC PC-98 and MSX dominated, but he grew fascinated as he learnt more about the Mac through advertisements and magazine articles. It appealed to him as a charismatic counterculture, a kind of rock ‘n’ roll for his generation. He desperately wanted to be part of it.

>But it seemed so far away — almost unreachable. Neither the thriving online Mac shareware scene nor the Apple team and the excitement of all the top developers appearing at the Macworld Expo were at all accessible. Japan had a few Mac-centric magazines and a small (but growing) Macworld Expo in Tokyo, but with limited online access it was very much detached from the happenings elsewhere in the Macintosh world.

>In homage to SimCity’s brilliance, Saito decided to make his own simulation game for the Mac. Rather than asking the player to plan and manage a city, he opted for a single skyscraper.

>With an interface similar to SimCity, The Tower swapped residential blocks for condominiums and hotel suites; commercial zones for offices, restaurants, and shops; and industry for parking, medical centers, housekeeping and laundry facilities, recycling facilities, and the like. In place of roads and rail, it had stairs, escalators, and elevators. The goal was to build a hundred-floor tower with a five-star rating. To get there, the player divided her time between expanding the tower, managing elevator traffic and capacity, monitoring the happiness of tenants (their silhouettes turned increasingly red as their happiness decreased), and handling business affairs such as number of staff and cost of a room, office, or condo.

>The Tower took around three years to develop. It came out for Mac in Japan in 1994. “It became a kind of phenomenon,” Saito says. “I was introduced on a TV show and in some magazines.” He also received multiple offers to adapt the game for the console market. A short time later Saito heard from Jeff Braun, the president of SimCity publisher Maxis, who had been informed by Will Wright that his game was “interesting”. Maxis cut a deal for international publishing rights and re-released it as SimTower. Its international success didn’t match the celebrity scale of the Japanese release, but SimTower nonetheless became a bestseller and cult favorite.

I don't know, there are lots of games that feature the same die-and-repeat mechanics - roguelikes, soulslikes, metroidvanias, shmups, survival games - and I don't play those games precisely because I find them tedious and disrespectful of my time. This game for some reason gets grouped in with walking sims and adventure games but in fact it shares little in common with those genres due to the instadeath scenarios, time limits, resource limits, and so on.

Have you asked Mr Saito if they still have the Mac version in particular? A lot of the content seems specific depending on the platform it was released on. Getting everything archived would be great for preservation

I’m about to try it in VR. I’ve gotten over most of my VR nausea, but I will say, the original Decent series games gave made me nauseated/gave me vertigo and headaches if I played them too much. Therefore, I am a little worried.

So much fun, though!

Zork Nemesis one of my favorite games from the 90's was heavily inspired by Myst it was one of the first games I played where I felt immersed in the game world.