In deceptively simpler times, meaning over a decade ago in the mid-1990s, I'd just discovered the Internet. Thanx to a trusty Point & Click starter kit, I found myself on the World Wide Web after learning that there was a local ISP (Internet Service Provider) in my area.
The price was $2 Cdn./hour, and I bought access time in bulk chunks of 50 hours. My Mother was very surprised when she saw my first overuse bill; not too long from then, she would cease to be surprised. A lot of details blur together, but even before this, I was on AOL, running up long distance charges. A common occurrence back then which has greatly diminished in today's climate, with wifi acting like a present Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" in its staunch yet dreamy ubiquity.
Those days, I found myself playing a lot of computer games. This was on my first Mac, a Quadra 660AV. How times have changed, and how they haven't—I'm typing this in a MacBook Pro, coming full circle for reasons I'll detail shortly.
My involvement with the online world Second Life is well-known: what isn't so heard of is my background that led to my current circumstances. For all the Snow Crash references that get bandied about, there's one I often hear glossed over: the fact that Spectre VR, one of my fave games, was bundled with that very Neal Stephenson book. As luck (?) would have it, I didn't get that combo. My copy of Spectre VR came on 3 floppy disks of the 1'44" persuasion. It certainly wasn't the later CD-ROM edition, altho I fondly remember it did have the map editor included.
Now, Spectre VR's roots can be found in the likes of Battlezone and other combat tank games, where your perspective comes from inside the mechanical weaponry and you roll around the field, shooting enemy vehicles and, in this specific case, collecting flags so you could advance to the next level. There was a healthy assortment of powerups, and I remember pooling around the green health "blobs" on the floor frequently to replenish my energy.
The reason why I've quoted "blobs" is because Spectre VR's graphics are tremendously crude by today's standards. Infact, they're audaciously blocky when lined up around other titles of the '93-'94 era. Wasn't much in the way of texturing to speak of. An exception that would later induce great pangs of nostalgia in me: QuickTime movies playing on walls of the battlefield, which of course I'd flashback to upon the advent of Second Life 1.6, where QuickTime-on-a-prim became a reality… or a virtual reality.
But let's look carefully, sidestep the overall un-abundance of eye candy, and dig deep into the gameplay itself. Maybe it's become too much of a cliche among some, but games… aren't they supposed to be fun? Damn straight!
Spectre VR was madly, feverishly, passionately, insatiably addictive to me. I would play it up to 5-6 AM in the morning and then hear the distinctive sound effects pan through my skull. That wasn't the end of it—even more stunning was the music, consisted of a stark, comparatively few samples, wrapped around a spinal cord of meaty arrangements. (I found some of this out later by using ResEdit to dig into the SND resources.) Many tunes from the game, including the splash screen's military-cum-news march hybrid, the bastard Hendrixesque guitar crunch that'd accompany you on certain levels, a healthy gulp of what was literally labeled as "Cyber/Techno" and would fuel my later electronic music adventures, and the VR Bach…
which was in itself intriguing, because it consisted of some preludes and fugues I hadn't studied up to that point. In the midst of my parallel classical music training, I delved into finding out what were the original compositions, and learning to perform some of them. It's well-worth noting that there was something haunting, melancholy, definitely emotional about blowing polygons across the landscape at 4 o'clock in the morn, quickly approaching 5 with no end in sight, with the signature counterpoint bringing its lofty soul to the cold, gradient horizon.
So the music rocked bigtime. Hardcore.
To this day, I've been looking for a convenient recording of the soundtrack. I haven't found out how to extract the tunes aside from perhaps recording them manually, but I don't have the time nor the inclination for this.
Today, I visited the past again: after much wrestling with various Mac emulators, attempting to get my old Spectre VR disks to play again (and yes, I still have them!), I found solace in simply downloading a DOS archive from Home of the Underdogs, a haven of abandonware… like good pets long forgotten—and remembered again.
Like the speedy tank I often chose, my hard drives became littered with the skittery mess of various ROM files and executables. The Mac version of Basilisk II was oddly unable to produce my desired results, and gave me an incredibly frustrating "error -199". So I headed from my laptop back to my main compy, an Opteron with an odd stare (I say this because it has dual-monitors, and unlike my younger years, for some reason, I don't anthropomorphize my boxes by giving them names anymore). Bringing DOSbox back into my arms and reading this helpful post on the Underdogs forum, I was able to finally kickstart the past into high gear again.
A lot makes sense to me that didn't before.
For example, the training in my early years that's unconsciously seeped its way into my being. Some call it second nature, I see it as the relaxed result of repeating actions over and over again. Muscle memory generates fractal branches like an alternate After Dark module.
You'll note that in the Spectre VR screenshots, there's a mini-map on the upper-right, not all too different from Second Life's. Different colors are different things, and the blinking yellow (these aren't animated so you can't see that) are flags.
My reactions to all of this, of course, are overjoyed. I'm enthused right now! Imagine hearing a friend say he was going out for a walk one day, and then not coming back until many years later. This is how it felt, altho the decision to put Spectre VR down the first time came with other games oncoming into my arms, and the adolescent pressure of growing up and learning to master productivity software to get my grades steady, in lieu of crazy shoot-'em-ups. Too many things competing for my attention. At least that hasn't changed.
But everything stands, and I don't regret a thing.
This is why I'm writing this now, in the uncluttered space of my mind's eye, tapping the words rapidly out in clusters, thanx to the isolated-yet-open environment of WriteRoom and the blessedly comfortable keyboard of my MacBook Pro. I've made a return to form in some way: not grand, certainly not epic, but my own quiet, personal triumph. My own "Eureka!" upon having discovered that as small as some things seemed at the time, they'd be historical milestones far down the road, like I find myself now writing.
With each new experience comes reminders of old ones, or at least, the realization how everything is connected. And just like those blocky tanks strolling gracefully across the battlefield, roll on, roll on.
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Hey, I got Basilisk II working with all of the Spectre games if you're interested in playing the original Mac versions.
Frankly, I like the music in the Mac versions a lot better to be honest. The PC ones like the YouTube video that led me to this page are a bit iffy and high-pitched compared to the Mac versions.
How many levels are there in Spectre VR? Mac version..
I know that there are at least 55, because that was where I maxed out, due to too many slicers at once. Also this is the Mac version.
When you say "This is the Mac Version?" you're referring to the Mac Spectre VR you played right Joseph?
Because I can tell you right now the Spectre VR shown in these screenshots is certainly *not* the Mac version – the HUD is very different and the quality of the actual display is a lot better.
As for the amount of levels that are in it, I don't think you're far off. If you like I'll try and relocate a PDF I found of the game's manual (for Mac, of course) and see if it mentions the amount of levels there, but I don't think there could be much more than 60 or 70.
Yes, I am talking about the Mac version. I would love screenshots, and (You tube videos would be nice from levels 50 and beyond).
I created a website featuring some screenshots and video footage of the entire Mac OS versions of the Spectre series, however there is the issue of actually uploading it somewhere. I don't know anywhere of large enough size that I could host it on. Maybe if you've got an email address or something I could send some to you? Or better yet, if you want I could help you actually set up Basilisk II to actually run the game on your PC. =D
I have an email address. It is greyson.findley@yahoo.com, However I don't know the size limit and I don't have a PC either. Thank you so much for posting.
No worries, man. You're the first person that's a Spectre fan on the internet that I've seen in a long time – and few people I know personally have ever played it.