Ancient Web: Morgan McGuire Kept the Games That Never Shipped

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A developer's résumé usually lists the successful products. Morgan McGuire's old game-industry page spends almost as much time on experiments that never reached players.

Read McGuire's game-development diary.

McGuire says he began working on professional, independent and hobby games in 1994. His early company, Morgan Systems, produced Windows 3.1 shareware during an era when DOS still dominated PC games. The catalog includes Xenon, a terrain-destroying artillery game he built with his brother Max in 1995, and Ricochet, a brick-breaker with tilting paddle controls.

The author reports that his titles received roughly a million AOL downloads in total. That's his retrospective estimate, not an independently verified readership figure. More useful is what he says he learned about installers, customer support, testing and shipping small products.

Prototypes preserve discarded possibilities

A section on the short-lived company Blue Axion describes Gods and Warriors, an unreleased 2002 multiplayer strategy prototype with classes for builders, soldiers and priests, and Freedom Hunter, a 2001 experiment in mouse-gesture interfaces. McGuire explains what the prototypes attempted and why they were technically interesting, rather than presenting them as released games.

Even older experiments receive entries: a 1996 Windows ray-casting engine called Zero, a 1998 puzzle game named Radon, and a Scheme-like development environment called Laser3D.

The page also catches later projects at a revealing moment. It describes McGuire's graphics and level-design work on a 2005 prototype of Roblox, then calls Titan Quest an upcoming game for 2006. Those future-tense descriptions place the document in a specific development era. They should not be mistaken for current information about either product.

The page's technical artifacts also reveal the limitations of earlier Windows graphics. McGuire describes creating the illusion of three dimensions using GDI operations before modern consumer 3D APIs became standard.

No programs or movie files were run in this review. This is a historical first-person project record, where the author's descriptions are distinguished from independent certification of every feature.

Explore the released games and abandoned prototypes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.