vga256 , 4 months ago to random

did some game preservation research today.

a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.

no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.

thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.

but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.

that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.

the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.

but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.

as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.

recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.

http://macintoshgarden.org/games/portal

#macintosh #gamePreservation #vintageApple #history #hyperText

The user boots a copy of Portal (disk 1) on the mini vMac macintosh emulator. The game boots, showing a login screen. The user types in vga256 as his username, and the game loads black and white graphics. The splash screen for Portal shows, and credits the designers and writer. The player then begins playing the game. The game consists of a series of icons on the screen that can be clicked on, which yield text windows that tell the story. As the player clicks through text, certain desktop icons unlock which allow the player to progress through the storyline.