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| Snipes | |
|---|---|
 Screenshot | |
| Developers | Drew Major Dale Neibaur Mark Hurst Kyle Powell |
| Stable release | v1.0 /1983 |
| Operating system | Novell NetWare,MS-DOS |
| Type | Maze |
| Website | www |
Snipes (diminutive forSnipers) is atext-mode networkedcomputer game that was created in 1983 bySuperSet Software. Snipes is officially credited as being the original inspiration forNetWars.[1][2] It was one of the earliest text modemulti player games, running onNovell NetWare systems.
The objective of the game is to control the creature by moving it around a maze to destroy snipes and their hives, and/or destroy other networked players.
The player must first specify the number of snipes, hives and difficulty before they play. Each game is different because the computer generates a random new maze.
The creature is moved using the keyboard arrow keys and shoots in different directions with theA,S,D andW keys. By combining keys, diagonal movement and shooting can be achieved. Pressing the spacebar can provide extra velocity to run away from difficult situations from the snipes.
Several level options are available. First, a letter is chosen, which controls the environment settings: what bad guys are available, their accuracy at attacking, whether or not the player's diagonal shots bounce off walls, whether running into a wall will simply block or kill the player, and whether the hives have a partial resistance to snipes' shots. The next choice is a number, which controls the maximum number of snipes that may exist, how many hives are initially created within the maze, and how many lives the player is given. There are 234 possible levels, from A1 to Z9, that the player can select in the game.
A requirement to play the multiplayer version ofSnipes is that all users share a common network drive. It suggests that the various clients communicate to each other via shared file. The exact implementation details of this are not known but experiments have shown thatSnipes can be played between Windows workstations in a Command Prompt window underWindows XP, provided that each user maps a drive to the executable location with read/write rights. This also implies thatIPX is not directly used bySnipes to communicate between clients.
SuperSet Software sold several thousand copies of the single-player version ofSnipes throughComputerLand. The company wrote a networked multiplayer version to demonstrate its networking technology at the June 1982National Computer Conference.[3] SeeingSnipes being played simultaneously onApple II,TRS-80, andCommodore PET persuaded Novell ownerSafeguard Scientifics that SuperSoft's networking technology was valuable. Novell used the technology to developNetWare.[4]
As the first networking-aware software when users only used NetWare to share files and printers, sales demonstrations typically ended withSnipes. SuperSet retained ownership of the game although shipping with NetWare;Drew Major reported that many customers told him of employees' Snipesdeathmatches after work hours. Novell also used it as astress test to certify network cards and drivers as NetWare-compatible.[3] A newer implementation of the game was developed and shipped withNetWare Lite 1.1 in September 1991.[5] Its NLSNIPES.EXE executable had a filesize of less than 18 KB. It was replaced by theNetWars 2.06 game, that came bundled withPersonal NetWare 1.0 andNovell DOS 7 since late 1993.
In July 2016, a port of the original Snipes to theSimple Direct Media Layer became available. The port was done byreverse engineering the original code and permission was granted by Major and Kyle Powell[6] to make it public. The C++ source code is available atGitHub.[7]
Clones were released for Linux[8] and Android.[9]