| The Colony | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | David Alan Smith |
| Publisher(s) | Mindscape |
| Designer(s) | David Alan Smith |
| Engine | FLY-BY Environment Simulator |
| Platform(s) | Macintosh,MS-DOS,Amiga |
| Release | 1988: Macintosh, MS-DOS 1990: Amiga |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter,Adventure,Puzzle |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
The Colony is afirst-person shooter developed byDavid Alan Smith. It was published byMindscape.
The 1988 Macintosh release came in two versions, one in color and one with black-and-white graphics. The MS-DOS version, released the same year, was available in black-and-white only. The 1990 Amiga version was in color.
Previous first-person perspective games of the era used precomputed views, such asThe Sentinel, or fixed-perspective graphics, such asPhantom Slayer.The Colony was one of the first games of its kind to let the player move freely while rendering graphics inreal time.[citation needed] It was also one of the first3D games to let the player enter and exit a vehicle.[citation needed]
The player takes the role of a marshal responding to a distress call from a research colony. After crash-landing on the planet, the marshal must repair their damaged ship, investigate the colony, and eventually discover and stop an alien race plotting to take over the universe.[1]
Instead of a 360-degree circle, The Colony used 256 "pseudo-degrees" which allowed the game engine to rotate the player's perspective using only one byte of data. Bit-map graphics were drawn usingMacPaint, while2D images such as doors, letters, and the Applelogo were crafted using the game engine.
David Alan Smith completed the first scenes ofThe Colony with aCcompilerported to the Macintosh bySoftworks. Those first scenes were developed on a Macintosh with only 128KB ofRAM and a single floppy disk drive. Eventually, development tools were made available on the Macintosh, allowing Mr. Smith to complete his work using theMegamax C andLightspeed C compilers—on a Macintoshupgraded to 512KB of RAM and a 20MBhard drive.
Computer Gaming World commented favorably on the combination of both action and adventure elements, but noted the immense difficulty of the game.[1]Amiga Format echoed this feeling by giving it a 51% score and complaining that "the graphics are sketchy and unrealistic and the gameplay is repetitive and frustrating".[2]Macworld named it Best Adventure Game of the Year in 1988, however, and in 2000 listed it as one of The Top Ten Mac Gaming Thingies of the Last 1,000 Years.[3]Orson Scott Card, who dislikedThe Colony, wrote inCompute! "How did this game ever become a "game of the year"? Only because it originally appeared on the game-poor Mac", with excellent graphics that accompanied "a very limited puzzle game that became so annoying and confining" that he and his son gave up. Card stated that the game arbitrarily punished players for exploring, giving as example immediately dying from picking up cigarettes.[4]
On June 6, 2023, Smith released the source code for the MS-DOS, Macintosh and Amiga versions onGitHub under theApache License 2.0.[5] Writer Richard Moss cited it as an example of the inventiveness of the Macintosh development scene.[6]
Small and unique games were commonplace on the Mac in those early years, with influential titles including Dark Castle, Balance of Power, Fool's Errand, Spelunx, Myst, Sim City 2000, Marathon, and The Colony.