Glider
What is it?
Glider has a special place among the Macintosh game. It is a rare event that games on this platform gather a community around them, with fan pages and fan-made add-ons. Marathon did. Wolfenstein 3D did, in spite of being a port from the PC. And Glider did.
Glider is a simple arcade game where you control a paper airplane. You have to steer it through 15 rooms of a house without hitting the floor or furniture. Other dangers are candles, electric outlets, little helicopters, and cats.
Your control is limited to whether the plane is supposed to fly right or left. Upward movement comes from vents distributed across the house. As soon as you hit anything, you lose one plane and have to restart the room you are just in. Sometimes there is a vent in the ceiling, if you fly through this you get back to the first room.
At first I thought this game was simply too hard to be any fun.
That was until I found out how configurable it is. You can choose
between glider and dart; these are just two different paper planes,
and the dart is a whole lot easier. You can choose how many planes
(lifes
) you have, between one and six. And you can even choose
in which room you want to start, so you can experience all the rooms
even if you cannot play that long.
As with many shareware games, it is nearly impossible and not really interesting to list all the versions. I restrict myself to those with significant changes either in graphics, features, or system requirements:
probablyran on any Mac. John Calhoun wasn't quite sure himself a couple of years later. It seems impossible to get hold of this first version any more.
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The early versions of Glider were distributed as shareware. Then, in 1990 or so, John Calhoun signed a contract with meanwhile defunct Casady & Greene. They wanted color, a reasonable request, for color support had become a standard feature in Macintosh games. The result was Glider 4.0.
Color was not the only new feature in Glider 4.0. The game was now based on scenarios. It came with an editor so players could create their own houses. However, more than with other games of the time, steps were taken to assure that it would run well on weak systems. The game runs in 16 colors only (and requires you to set your desktop to 16 colors), and the main window is only 512×342, on a 13" display the rest of the screen is filled with an instruction how to fold a real glider.
The game still ran on everything from 6.0 up, and of course, it could still run in black & white if necessary. I would not recommend this, though. On old compacts, harddrive space is usually an issue, so the old, far smaller, shareware versions are preferrable.
In its time, Glider 4.0 had quite a community. But it seems they all moved on to Glider Pro when it came out. Nowadays, you won't find any houses for this old version on the Web any more.
Glider 4.0 was the only game in the series that was ported to Windows, but with only moderate success.
This is the final version. On a 13" or larger monitor you could now play in 9-room mode, seeing more than one room at a time. Houses could contain outdoor spaces. The game ran in 256 colors. The editor had more features.
A debugging feature in the Mac OS 9 version of Glider PRO allows all of the graphics and sounds in the game (including the ones that cannot be directly replaced by a house's resource fork) to be overridden by alternative graphics. This is done by placing a file namedMermaid, containing all of the replacement graphics and sounds, in the same directory as the Glider PRO application. This feature was forgotten about by the time Glider PRO was released, but John Calhoun later rediscovered it in April 2004. As of today, at least three houses exist that exploit this feature.—Wikipedia
Glider Pro has been continuously developed right into the early millennium:
Jump into your Glider and take off in the paper airplane ride of your life! Fly within a labyrinth of rooms or discover pathways outside to the skies above or caverns below the ground. Amazing graphics, eerie sound effects and a complete musical score! Watch for the QuickTime movies that pop up when you least expect them.
Casady & Greene have closed down with 2003-07-03. John Calhoun has consequently decided to release all versions (as he explicitely told me in an email) of Glider as freeware. You will find download links below. Thanks a lot, John!
![Jotto ][](icon/mac/jotto2.png){kind=icon}
