Beast

Beast was created in 1984 by Dan Baker, Alan Brown, Mark Hamilton and Derrick Shadel, but it's Dan Baker who is listed as the main author. (The game itself was written by Dan Baker, while Alan Brown wrote the routine that would make sound, Derrick Shadel wrote the disk I/O routine for saving the high scores, and Mark Hamilton wrote the random number generator.)

One remarkable thing about Beast (well, remarkable in my eyes at least) is that it uses two characters as a unit, resulting in near-square tiles and sprites. Tetris and many Tetris clones did the same, but otherwise I have never seen it.

Gameplay

The red H-shaped critters are beasts. Everything that is yellow is solid wall. Everything that is green is blocks you can push. Unlike Soko-Ban, you can push multiple blocks at a time. The beasts are after you. You have to try to crush them between two blocks, or shut them into a confined space where they will turn insane and explode. Beasts can move diagonally, you need eight blocks to shut in a beast. Whenever a beast gets you, you lose one life. Luckily you can run faster.

On higher levels there are additional elements like eggs that hatch into super beasts which can push blocks and crush you. There are various options to choose, like the ability to pull blocks, not just push them, the number of eggs, exploding blocks and various other details.

At first I felt rather lost. A good strategy, I soon found out, is to lock yourself in in the beginning: build yourself an impenetrable fortress, and then slowly expand it. The beasts are dumb, they'll try to get at you even though they can't, and put themselves in positions where you can crush them with ease.

Hardware

Beast has three speed settings, for PC, PCjr, and AT. If you guess that it won't run well on anything faster, you guess right. I played it on my IBM PS/2 50.

History

Dan Baker wrote in an email to a Wikipedia editor:

I write computer games during Junior High and High School on the schools mainframe computer (teletype). My brother is an electrical engineer, and he bought a TRS-80 when they first came out. We wrote games on that thing all the time. I went to college in 1980, and got a job at a little software company. Eventually the IBM-PC came out, and I started working on it. The first thing I did was write a game (Beast). The PC only came with a BASIC interpreter, so the first version was written in BASIC, and didn't work very well. After we got the assembler, I started re-writing Beast in ASM. Alan Brown wrote a routine that would make sound, Derrick wrote a disk I/O routine for saving the high scores, and Mark wrote a random number generator for me. I distributed Beast as shareware for a few years, and made some money (not much, maybe $100). After WordPerfect came out with the Shell (which allowed multiple programs to be loaded at the same time, but the user could only interact with one at time), I fixed Beast to be "Shell Compatible". WordPerfect bought Beast from me for about $1000 (which my wife and I quickly spent on a video camera), and Beast started shipping with Shell (or Library, what ever they called it). That was kind-a the end of Beast for me.