darkness was quite obviously inspired by lord, possibly the best door game ever. there's not many games out there that have the same type of appeal as lord does, or should i say did. more than being inspired by lord, darkness was inspired by lord's current situation. seth able robinson sold the game and apparently all it's rights to a large game company called gameport. well, it was bound to happen, right? but gameport refuses to update the games in anyway, and infact, they barely support them. when robinson technologies was in control of the game they updated it frequently, kept dibs of 3rd party development, and even helped out with 3rd party development.

this has naturally caused a lot of disapproval in the bbs scene. one of the few services gameport did provide us was forums for each of rtsoft's games. these forums are usually hot places for debate, people complaining about gameport's lack of cooperation, and (seemly) lust for money. to me, I do not believe the games will ever be updated, even though people have volunteered to work for gameport for free, and continue updating the games while letting them rake in their money. one of the biggest pieces of evidence is probably the fact that gameport would not even release new versions of the games patched for the pentium-2/crt unit bug, which would only be a simple 3 step process of them unzipping the games, running the patch program, and rezipping them.

anyway, back to the story. in the forums people complained quite a lot, and one common argument was “if you guys bitch so much about wanting to update lord, why not make your own?!” a few people apparently set out to it, and I thought “what a nifty idea, i'm bored” so I started doing it just to see if i could. the project started out pretty smoothly, and was much easier than I had ever thought. I quicky came up with a small plot, or should I say a setting in which the game would take place. I figured, while I was at it I might as well make it better than lord (feature wise) and throw in some things that only igms had. I also decide to incorporate other things, like some of the features in exitilus, and other games.

It's also free. why? I could make a lot of money doing this, right? well, nothing to live off, but maybe. I don't really like shareware, unless it's something semi-playable (like rtsofts games) and commercial ware is right out. besides, if you didn't have the money, or didn't want to a pay for it, you'd pirate it. I'm sure someone would crack it, or spread the registration codes around. I know I wouldn't pay for this game if I had to. besides, it's just another slap in gameport's face. their in it for the money, i'm in it for the hell of it.

anyway, as you check out darkness, just remember… it's a product of your complaining. If I decide not to continue with it, I won't sell it to some huge corporation so they can add a reg code system to it and take my name out of it. I'll release the source code so more people out there can carry on with the same message. lord once had a huge following, and the release of lord II brought a once dying BBS scene back to life. without games like lord, the scene is once again drying out.

update (5/19/00)