12 ms·
Hypercard is largely responsible for my love of programming. As a kid, I would work with my sisters on making games in it. It was a beautiful combination of h
by rhencke 9y ago
Hypercard is largely responsible for my love of programming. As a kid, I would work with my sisters on making games in it. It was a beautiful combination of half painting program, half drag'n'drop GUI creation that we used to make adventure games. Each card represented a room, and my sisters would draw on it using the paint tools, and I would follow up after and add invisible buttons over doors and the like to allow for 'moving' through rooms. We'd then use the built-in MacInTalk speech stuff to make characters say things, too. Granted, they were silly little games without much point to them, but... as a kid, man. It was like magic, learning you could have computers do this.
I was sad when Hypercard fell out of general distribution with the Mac, but I'm happy to see it here.
- kilroy123 9y agoWow, are all of you software engineers? That would be cool to have a family engineers.
- rhencke 9y agoI ended up being the only software engineer, but computers definitely stuck with all of us (both my sisters ended up working in the gaming industry).
- donohoe 9y agoNot to be "me too", but ME TOO! Commodore 64 BASIC got me started, but HyperCard kept me moving.
- jandrese 9y agoI'm in the same boat. Stated out with the C64 but found "drawing" by working out the hex codes to poke into the sprite gen a bit too much for 10 year old me. Then my parents bought a Mac LC with System 7 that came with a full Hypercard dev stack. We also scrounged a copy of ResEdit and were off to the races. I learned the language mostly from opening up existing stacks and inspecting the code, sometimes with a text editor if the stack was protected (like many games were).
- m_mueller 9y agoI did exactly the same as a kid, only I didn't have a mac. But my parents bought me some kind of German learning program (Addi?). It had a card painting mode with visually programmable events exactly as you describe - must have been a Hypercard clone then.
- nihonde 9y agoWhen I was 14 years old, I demoed my HyperCard-based game for none other than Bill Gates. My recollection is that he seemed genuinely interested in how I built it, and he knew more than I expected about Macs and HyperCard.
- saganus 9y agoThat sounds like a very interesting story! Care to share (if possible) how you ended up showing your game to Bill Gates when you were 14? Hiw old was he at that time?
- nihonde 9y agoI was (maybe) a freshman at Lakeside High School at that time, which is his Alma Mater. I believe the occasion was the opening of the Gates-Allen Math and Science Building. The year would have been 1987 or so.
- hypercardonline 9y agoWhat was the stack you demoed? You still have it lying around?
- nihonde 9y agoIt was a space travel game not unlike a very rudimentary (and 1-bit) version of Faster Than Light. It could be on a floppy somewhere. I still have the original 128k Mac that I built it on, but it's in storage. Edit: Fun thing that I just remembered—the game had a picture of your space ship that showed damage to various areas during battles. The image was scanned on an ImageWriter (Thunderscan!) from a magazine photo of a Delorean, and then I used MacPaint (Fatbits!) to erase the wheels and make the undercarriage look like a space ship. Pretty awesome for those early days, if I do say so myself.
- hypercardonline 9y agoIf you ever get the stack of that disk, please do upload it. I'd love to see it!
- npsimons 9y agoI'll just add my little "me too!": my first experience programming was when I got the chance to play with hypercard in middle school, and I created an interactive periodic table of the elements in it. Nothing fancy, just click to get details on an element. From there I went on to the New Mexico Supercomputer challenge in high school (good memories), and then on to an undergraduate degree in CS. Still coding science oriented software decades later.
- orblivion 9y agoI made probably my second game on Hypercard. It was called "Dessert Storm". It was a misspelling which I was oblivious to at the time (which gives you an idea how old I was and what decade it was). Later in life I made a point-and-click game similar to the one you described, on a newer version of Hypercard. This one had sound. I made this with a couple classmates in elementary or middle school. It was based on caricatures we had made of our school life, teachers, and classmates.
- ascorbic 9y agoHah! I made a Desert Storm game too. You had to shoot down Scuds with Patriots. I think I had a level with tanks too, which had a giant Saddam head as a target for no reason other than the fact I was pleased with how I could draw him.
- orblivion 9y agoYours sounds way better.
- ascorbic 9y agoThere's a very good chance that I'm remembering it as better than it was. I'm gutted that I don't know where all my Hypercard games are now.
- orblivion 9y agoHeh, I didn't even have levels. In fact, the planes stopped when you shot the bullet. I hadn't learned about event loops yet.
- ascorbic 9y agoI was very pleased with my two frame explosion animations.
- hypercardonline 9y ago
- ascorbic 9y agoAnother here. I'd played with BASIC and Logo for a couple of years by then, but HyperCard blew my mind. It was the first time I could make games that were actually fun to play. It was 1991 and I remember, age 11, making a Desert Storm game, where you had to shoot down Scuds with Patriot missiles. By all accounts that was more successful that the real thing! I didn't consider I could do it as a job until I bought my first iMac seven years later though.