It’s now possible to play early ’90s CD-ROM games via ScummVM
The ScummVM community has just made the early CD-ROM gaming era more accessible. For five years, multiple people have worked on making Macromedia Director games playable on modern hardware, and today, that work is done.
In terms of tools for running old software, ScummVM is in a class of its own. It’s a long-running project that “reimplements” old games, reconstructing the game code so they can be played on other platforms. Back when ScummVM was first under development twenty years ago (!), it was meant for games created with the SCUMM engine, a toolset by the developer LucasArts that powered their famous adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle.
Since then, ScummVM has broadened considerably in scope. ScummVM now supports over 200 games, including other adventure game engines, like Sierra On-Line’s Adventure Game Interpreter; individual titles like The 7th Guest; and even unrelated vintage software like the Living Books interactive children’s book series by Brøderbund. The ability to run these games on modern platforms using a free, lightweight, open-source program — without needing to emulate an entire computer operating system — has made ScummVM a boon for video game preservation. In fact, several game publishers have turned to ScummVM when re-releasing their old games!
Macromedia Director? Why does this matter?
It was a tool with a simple drag-and-drop interface that developers could use to place and manipulate elements like text, buttons, graphics, and sounds. Then they could link those scenes together, like pages in a book, or rooms in a virtual world. Even if you didn’t know much programming, you could use Director to make a presentation, an encyclopedia, or a digital magazine, or most relevant to this post, you could use it to make a game. Creating a fast-paced action game with Director was a tall order, but for point-and-click adventure-style games that move between static scenes — the type popularized by breakout CD-ROM titles like The 7th Guest and Myst — Director took out a ton of the work.
At a time when the barrier to computer game design was still fairly high, Macromedia Director was a lifeline for small and independent developers. If you wanted to create interactive media art but didn’t know how to program an application for Windows 95 from scratch, you probably used Director. It’s the reason why the ’90s computer game scene is filled with unusual Myst-inspired titles from new developers. It’s why Theresa Duncan could produce a series of children’s discovery games, or why an artist like Osamu Sato was able to seamlessly transition from digital art to designing a surreal, cosmic exploration of mortality in Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou.
The collective body of work produced with Macromedia Director represents some of the most creative, inventive, and experimental games and interactive art of the 1990s. That’s why it’s alarming that these games are so difficult to play today!
Here’s the problem: Macromedia Director is built on top of old versions of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. In order to play a Director game, you need to emulate an old Windows or Macintosh computer, neither of which is an easy task for somebody who’s accustomed to downloading and playing games with the click of a button.
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Gepostet von ScummVM am Sonntag, 2. Januar 2022
Let’s say you want to play the 1992 adventure game The Legend of Kyrandia. Right now, you can purchase it on a digital storefront like GOG.com, where it comes wrapped up in an emulator and runs on your choice of computer with minimal setup. Meanwhile, if you want to play Cosmology of Kyoto, a critically acclaimed game designed in Macromedia Director, you have to manually set up an installation of Windows 3.1 using the DOSBox emulator… and at that point, unless you’re really committed to playing this game, it might not seem worth the effort. This is also one of the reasons why many of these games haven’t been re-released, because you can’t legally just bundle Cosmology of Kyoto with an emulated copy of Windows and call it a day.
Expanding ScummVM to support Macromedia Director solves this problem. Once Director support in ScummVM is robust enough, it will make it easier than ever to play an expansive library of bold, creative titles that have been left out of the conversation for decades. That’s the promise here.
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- Hands-on with Macromedia Director in ScummVM
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