[Lunick]

I don't actually know a lot about this game but it is based on the Raven Engine which powered ShadowCaster from Raven Software



Anyway, the sourcecode and an unfinished Windows port were put up on the developer's website today: http://www.redshadow.../projects/greed
It seemed to use some of engine between the Wolf 3D and Doom engines.

(I also made this post because I know Daedolon won't be able to resist replying to it)

[Malgon]

I reckon I've played this, a long time back. Don't remember much about it though.

Edit: Yeah, just quickly checked the intro on Youtube and I definitely have played it, briefly.

[MrBlackCat]

I was just thinking "I have this game, why don't I remember it?"
I did play the demo back when I was released I am sure.
But... I don't have it... strange because I know it was a unique engine big-boxed FPS. Then I did an eBay email archive search/scan. Nothing... for years. So I did a manual search and nothing boxed, then I did a Completed Items and there it was. A NEW one just sold for 32 USD. WHAAAT!
Turns out my search lost its "email flag" in one of the many eBay data migrations. (I think the whole Following thing is inaccurate, and ridiculous) I just re-enabled search emails... I have a demo in storage, but I don't own this game.
I went through my searches (400+ of them) and found numerous searches with the email flags off. <sigh> Thanks eBay.

Well, at least I finally found a game I DON'T have that I want.
Thanks for posting.

MrBlackCat

[Gambini]

I remember this game pretty clearly, I even gave a go to it a few years ago. The colorful levels gave some life to it and looked kindof cool but gameplay in general wasn´t that much interesting at all. You are offeted to play as a cyborg female, a dude and some kind of human lizard (liztroop).

[♥Coraline♥]

I remember this game!

Cool to see the source released, though I doubt anything terribly useful will come from it. Whelp, that's what I'll be doing later tonight!

[MrFlibble]

I didn't know the engine was the same as in ShadowCaster (neither did I know it was called the Raven Engine!). In Pursuit of Greed is a bit more advanced though as it allows for sloped surfaces, different elevations, and Doom like platform elevators. The walls are still all 90 degrees only IIRC

I haven't played the full game but there exist two demo versions. An early one by Channel 7 Software (available here) which takes place in a huge temple complex on the surface of a planet, and a later one (of which at least three different versions exist) which takes places in a space prison built inside an asteroid. There's a larger version of that demo which includes the full intro cinematic (get it here).

Also this game features soundtrack by Andrew Sega.

The Wayback Machine preserved a couple of official pages of the game:
http://www.softdisk.com/sd/greed/
http://www.softdisk.com/comp/mss/greed.html

[Carl Winslow]

Gambini, on 14 December 2014 - 09:46 AM, said:

I remember this game pretty clearly, I even gave a go to it a few years ago. The colorful levels gave some life to it and looked kindof cool but gameplay in general wasn´t that much interesting at all. You are offeted to play as a cyborg female, a dude and some kind of human lizard (liztroop).

you forgot the 'new and unique bovinian' character.

[Daedolon]

Holy shit.

What's with this recent wave of all of my childhood classic games popping up on a form or another.

The game is great as is ShadowCaster, and I couldn't be more happy for its newfound fame.

[zykov eddy]

The music is the best thing about this game. Composed by Andrew Sega - the same guy who worked on Unreal soundtracks.

[Micky C]

Could any of the more recent attention to old games be attributed to 3DR's pledge to release their betas?

[Daedolon]

zykov eddy, on 15 December 2014 - 12:55 AM, said:

Composed by Andrew Sega - the same guy who worked on Unreal soundtracks.

Man, forget Unreal, this is something more unreal

[Lunick]

Micky C, on 15 December 2014 - 01:29 AM, said:

Could any of the more recent attention to old games be attributed to 3DR's pledge to release their betas?

This was thanks to Blzut3. I believe he simply asked.

[MrFlibble]

The DOS source zip seems to include a complete build of the full game. Does this mean that the game is now legally freeware and open source? Is it allowed to distribute it (e.g. upload at DOS gaming websites etc.)? Who holds the game license ATM anyway?

[Lunick]

MrFlibble, on 15 December 2014 - 01:40 PM, said:

The DOS source zip seems to include a complete build of the full game. Does this mean that the game is now legally freeware and open source? Is it allowed to distribute it (e.g. upload at DOS gaming websites etc.)? Who holds the game license ATM anyway?

I assume the site owner (since he developed the game) still owns the rights. The source was released until GPL so I guess it is technically freeware now if you build the exe...? I don't know how these things work.

[MrFlibble]

Lunick, on 15 December 2014 - 05:17 PM, said:

it is technically freeware now if you build the exe...?

There is an exe already in the zip (in the BUILD folder). I assume it is from the full version (not a demo).

Mr. Robert W. Morgan III was, according to his own CV, the lead programmer at Mind Shear Software (formerly Channel 7 Software). It does not entail that he owned/owns the rights to the game.

Sometimes individual developers release stuff they have under a freeware license, but it is not always clear who held the original copyright. It would be nice to clarify this matter because if a developer privately distributes something it doesn't automatically mean the game might be uploaded at another website.

[Edit] According to the Iron Seed page, Mr. Morgan is one of the two original founders of Channel 7 Software (the other being Jeremy D. Stanton). So the question is apparently narrowed down to whether Softdisk had any rights to the game which did not expire or weren't made void.

[Blzut3]

MrFlibble, on 16 December 2014 - 11:13 AM, said:

[Edit] According to the Iron Seed page, Mr. Morgan is one of the two original founders of Channel 7 Software (the other being Jeremy D. Stanton). So the question is apparently narrowed down to whether Softdisk had any rights to the game which did not expire or weren't made void.

They retained the rights to the game. It is unclear who owns the game engine though. It could be Softdisk or id. I'm currently working on trying to get Richard Mandel to approve the release to whatever extent Softdisk is able to. Which is probably as far as we'll be able to go since getting id's approval would involve dragging lawyers into the picture and I hear that would be expensive, so it probably won't happen.

I will be asking Robert to clarify the license on the included game data in the release soon.

[MrFlibble]

Blzut3, thank you very much for doing this! In Pursuit of Greed is a very noteworthy game with some unique concepts that weren't really explored much in other FPS titles (well, at least before the arena FPS times, and even then it's not the same).

On a related note, I've just discovered that the game was at some point re-released under a different title, Assassinators. The publisher was Memorex Software (never heard of this company). Box scans of this version can be found here. 3D Shooter Legends suggests that there was a "CD Shareware Episode 1" release of this version, but how accurate the information is I have no idea.

[Edit] Also Online Games DatenBank mentions a Softdisk release called In Pursuit of Greed: The Hunter Awakes - Worlds II - III.

[Blzut3]

MrFlibble, on 16 December 2014 - 01:08 PM, said:

On a related note, I've just discovered that the game was at some point re-released under a different title, Assassinators. The publisher was Memorex Software (never heard of this company). Box scans of this version can be found here. 3D Shooter Legends suggests that there was a "CD Shareware Episode 1" release of this version, but how accurate the information is I have no idea.

You might find this interesting then:

Robert Morgan said:

Never heard of "Assassinators" until today.

Asked about the other release you linked. The game being divided into three episodes does show up in the source code.

More interesting trivia from the email today:

Robert Morgan said:

Mind Shear Software / Channel 7 owns exclusive rights to the sound track by Andrew Sega (Necros of the Psychic Monks). 30 songs if I remember. However, the exact tracklist was a bit fuzzy at the very end so Dimension was one of the songs that was used in other games such as Fallout. Greed used a couple of Ironseed tracks.

Something interesting - there is code in the sgrab utility for Doom, Lynx, and Raven. Don't know what Lynx is.

To answer an earlier question, we did get a map editor with Raven but it sucked. So I wrote a new one. Added some level scripting and some other stuff to it. It was quick and dirty though. Next time I would spend more time on tools.

In Pursuit of Greed was supposed to be called just "Greed" but SD felt it conflicted too much with some GameBoy game title.

Honestly, it's amazing I even have this much stuff from 20 years ago. Back then we didn't have CD-ROM burners so easily available. My hard drive was measured in the dozens of megabytes. Greed was written on a 286 desktop and 386 laptop. Later a 486-25mhz. We used a floppy disk to transfer data a lot. We did get a 10Base2 network later on which rocked. Played so much Doom!

[MrFlibble]

I would be interested to learn more about Andrew Sega's cooperation with Channel 7/Mind Shear.

Blzut3, on 16 December 2014 - 03:18 PM, said:

You might find this interesting then:

Robert Morgan said:

Never heard of "Assassinators" until today.

Someone at 3D Shooter Legends apparently made an ISO of the "Shareware Episode 1" of Assassinators and uploaded it here:
http://www.4shared.c...inator_CCD.html

Might be worth a check.

[Person of Color]

I never played this game, or heard of it before, but the soundtrack is so great now I wanna play it! Andrew Sega's a fucking boss.

[Lunick]

Clarification on ownership and release details are now on the page with the CD-Rom files now downloadable.

[MrFlibble]

Yup, noticed that. Thanks!

Do you know if it is allowed for other sites to re-distribute the game non-commercially?

[Blzut3]

I have not yet heard back if anything has been cleared. I stopped being a middle man between Robert and Richard in order to hopefully make things easier. Until everything is done, it's best to assume the license can change at any time (note that the GPL notice on the IPoG source is removed.)

Edit: Forgot to mention, he did confirm that the game was split into three parts by request of Softdisk. This was apparently done after the fact so each part comes with the full game data, just the binary being different. Sounds like, and looks like, the game was later released in its complete form.

[MrFlibble]

Blzut3, thanks again for all your efforts!

[MrFlibble]

A quick note for launching the original DOS version: be sure to mount the contents of the CD-ROM archive as CD-ROM in DOSBox and set the label to "greed" (without quotes).

For some reason Sound Blaster detection is a bit shaky in DOSBox. IIRC the demo versions handle this somewhat better.

[Edit] The sound works okay with max settings (SB16, highest quality, 8 channels), but for some reason the Test Sound option in the setup complains that it can't initialize the sound card. Just don't test the sound in the setup/ignore that message. I'm not sure if it's the same in the demo versions now.

[Striker]

zykov eddy, on 15 December 2014 - 12:55 AM, said:

The music is the best thing about this game. Composed by Andrew Sega - the same guy who worked on Unreal soundtracks.

I thought the guy who worked on the Unreal Soundtracks was Alexander Brandon.

[Carl Winslow]

They both did. The Isotoxin track used for Greed's intro is also in Unreal Gold with a few changes. I can assume they didn't care who owned the music in the production of this game, or simply didn't have the money for such legal stuff.

[Blzut3]

MrFlibble, on 28 December 2014 - 10:32 AM, said:

A quick note for launching the original DOS version: be sure to mount the contents of the CD-ROM archive as CD-ROM in DOSBox and set the label to "greed" (without quotes).

You actually don't need to have it mounted as a CD-ROM at all, just mount it to drive A and then use the parameter "nocdromcheck". I'm not entirely sure why that backdoor is there given the A drive requirement, but I'm going to assume they modified the code so that it either pointed to another drive or removed the movie code temporarily.

Carl Winslow, on 28 December 2014 - 08:19 PM, said:

They both did. The Isotoxin track used for Greed's intro is also in Unreal Gold with a few changes. I can assume they didn't care who owned the music in the production of this game, or simply didn't have the money for such legal stuff.

A few posts up I have the explanation for the reused tracks quoted. Apparently there was some miscommunication over which tracks were used.

[MrFlibble]

Blzut3, on 29 December 2014 - 02:00 AM, said:

You actually don't need to have it mounted as a CD-ROM at all, just mount it to drive A and then use the parameter "nocdromcheck". I'm not entirely sure why that backdoor is there given the A drive requirement, but I'm going to assume they modified the code so that it either pointed to another drive or removed the movie code temporarily.

I noticed that nocdromcheck parameter when checking the executable contents, but to mount as CD-ROM and use a label seemed logical enough to me

[MrFlibble]

There have been several demo releases of the game, out of which four are known (all available here among other places):

• v2.0 (Sep 25, 1995) - the earliest known version with some very noticeable differences, such as character art (YouTube video); displays the Channel 7 Software logo at startup; also uses the city-temple episode instead of the asteroid penal colony;
  
• v4.0 (Nov 10, 1995) - this version already features some of the levels from the first episode of the full game (asteroid penal colony), but still shows the Channel 7 logo (YouTube video); most art and sounds seem close to or identical to the final release;
  
• v5.0 (Dec 19, 1995) - the large demo which came with the entire intro cinematic; it was mentioned on the official download page at Softdisk as the "20 megabyte version with some cool animations";
  
• v7.0 (Feb 13, 1996) - the most recent known version; has a slideshow intro sequence and three levels from the first episode of the full game.

There's room for at least two more hypothetical demo releases (v3.0 and v6.0), I wonder if there's any info on them?

As an interesting note, completing the demo levels gives a secret phrase which could be used to get a discount from Softdisk or something. The tricky part is that the message and the phrase are completely unencrypted in the demo executable.

Another thing I wanted to ask, there's some scaled down screenshots and art found on the old Softdisk pages (preserved by the Wayback Machine):
http://www.softdisk.com/comp/mss/Gspecs.html
http://www.softdisk.com/comp/mss/Gmusic.html
http://www.softdisk.com/comp/mss/Gaction.html

Maybe at least for some of them, higher resolution versions have been preserved? Some stuff can be found at the old Paradigm Productions website, but not everything is there.

[Edit] Another original screenshot, from Softdisk Download Store website:
http://web.archive.o...ens/d30366s.gif