Stonequest (Wizardry clone) Web game

The Origin of Stonequest

Jeffrey Getzin started working on Stonequest before his sophomore year at Clark. His freshman year had been devoted to learning Pascal, but his first semester of his sophomore year was going to be spent on the mathematics his major required. Getzin was concerned his programming skills would atrophy, so he conceived the project of writing Wizardry for the VAX.

This would prove trickier than it sounded.

First, he did not have access to Wizardry's source code. He had to write the entire game logic from scratch. At the time, Pascal was the language of choice, the same language used to write Wizardry, making it the logical choice for Stonequest.

Second, the VAXes and their terminals had no graphics to speak of at the time. They were entirely text-based, though as mentioned earlier, they had extremely rudimentary line-drawing capabilities. However, the task of writing the windowing and line drawing was simplified by the availability of a clever runtime library on the VAX called SMG$ (Screen Management). This library allowed the programmer to create windows, draw lines, and even create virtual displays that could be scrolled up and down.

The SMG$ library worked with abstractions of the terminals being used, so if you wanted to draw a horizontal line and the currrent display supported line-drawing, you'd get a horizontal line. However, if the display did not support line-drawing, the SMG$ would render the text equivalent. Even the 3D maze had to be drawn with text characters!

There were a number of other libraries on the VAX that enabled advanced (for the time) file management, which was crucial for Stonequest's data, which could be shared with multiple users simultaneously.

In addition, VAX Pascal was an enhanced superset of ordinary Pascal, and offered a number of advanced features, including some that would later be associated with languages like C.

The initial app was very simple but playable. However, to have a playable game, you needed to have data for the monsters, the maze levels, the magic items, and so on. And before the author could even create this data, he had to write editors for that data. Thus, the application was gradually bootstrapped: functionality in the game needed data, the author created an editor to enter that data, and then entered the data. Then more functionality was implemented, and so on.

As Stonequest grew in popularity, the players began taking up so many terminals and using so much computing power that eventually the system administrator had the author set up a schedule in the game so that it could only be played after hours and on weekends.

Flash forward to 2023. A little thing called the Internet had come along. We used our smartphones to watch cat videos. Our cars drove themselves. Pluto was no longer a planet.

And Jeffrey Getzin was annoyed by the binder sitting on top of a high bookshelf.

Inside the binder was the last remaining copy of the original Stonequest source code. Its pages were yellowed with age and darkened with water stains. Even the type of printer used to print it, a dot-matrix printer, was obsolete. Yet, that binder taunted Getzin.

So one fine night (well, several months), Getzin typed the entire thing in, got it to work on a emulated Alpha, and then ported the whole darn thing to a web application!!

And that's the story of how Stonequest came to be.