Spaceship Warlock

Spaceship Warlock was one of the first, or maybe even the first, cinematic CD-ROM adventures, yet it is rembered very little nowadays. In its time it was successful enough to cause a nasty lawsuit:

Two leading multimedia developers, Michael Saenz and Joe Sparks have been in court since the fall of 1993 in a dispute about the ownership of the copyright in their successful game, Spaceship Warlock. The dispute focuses on whether Joe was an employee or independent contractor of Reactor, Inc. (Mike Saenz's company) when they developed the game. If Joe is right in claiming that he was an independent contractor, he is co-owner of the copyright and has a right to half of the profits from the game. These profits could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.—IP Law Primer (1994, offline)

For 1990, when it first came out (some sources say 1991, but fall 1990 seems to be correct), it was certainly spectacular. There wasn't anything like it. There was Defender of the Crown, but it looked real good only on the Amiga, and still Spaceship Warlock was a step ahead of it. PC developers were only just discovering VGA. Most games on the Mac were still black & white, and the few color games were usually board or puzzle games like Ishido or Darwin's Dilemma.

But 1994, when it was ported to Windows, it had become far less impressive. Now there was Myst. There was Under a Killing Moon. There was Poker Party, which even supported high color. Live actors and full motion video was the hot thing. And apart from its flashy graphics, Spaceship Warlock had little outstanding to offer.

But it does not deserve to be forgotten the way it is. It was ahead of its time and is still a fun science fiction adventure to play.

Reviews

• This was a game that didn't receive half the recognition it deserved, TECHtite muses:

  Its storyline, at least, was quite unique: an advanced alien race took over Earth, then stole the entire planet(!). A band of renegade space pirates, aboard the Spaceship Warlock, is our only hope of finding our stolen planet, before its too late! The premise was good, as was one of the first offerings of a fully-voiced interactive movie, with lip-synched characters, amusing sound effects, and cool event music.

• Warlock is the single most craptacular gaming experience I've ever had, jerm recalls:

  After a prologue that went by too fast for me to read, I was treated to Warlock's title screen. It was at this moment that I knew what I was about to experience was something special. The faux 3d graphics impressed me, but what left a really lasting impression on me was the theme song. Imagine someone with a baritone voice singing OOOOOOH OOOOOOOOOH! SPACE-SHIP WARLOCK!! with a cheesy fanfare in the background and you've basically got the idea.

Links

• Burning Image, the band of which Joe Sparks is a member.
• A Conversation with Mike Saenz
• Blog entry that credits Spaceship Warlock for the us of the word tub for a vehicle:

  The use of the word tub to describe it comes from the game Spaceship Warlock, where Captain Hammer says, I hereby take command of this tub in the name of the Warlock.

Technical Notes (PC)

As with most Windows 3.1 programs, there are no essential problems with later Windows versions or fast computers. There are however a few minor problems:

1. Starship Warlock is supposed to be played right off the CD. This might become a problem on a fast computer. You can copy everything to a harddrive, but it must be in the root of the partition. You could either create a seperate partition for the game, which takes up about 180MB, or simply assign the folder it resides in to a virtual drive letter with the SUBST command. If, for example, the game is in C:\WARLOCK and E: was your first available drive letter, you'd type:

   SUBST E: C:\WARLOCK

   This works in any version of MS-DOS that can run Windows 3.1, and any Windows version including XP.
2. The display should be set to 640×480, 256 colors. A higher resolution will just result in the game not filling the screen, a higher color depth may cause erroneous behavior. In compatibility mode on XP, you can set it to run in this resolution and color depth.

Taking into account the overall low system requirements of Spaceship Warlock, it might not be a bad idea to run it in DOSBox. This way you could have it run in a window.