Engineering on Friday Halloween: Snipes Revenge!

I’ve been thinking about drawing this one for years. Yes, I was scared of the fast-moving Snipes! I think we all have a silly old video game that scared us. A capital “L” entered an ASCII maze, and you lost it—things like that.

The game “Snipes” was special. Made by the company Novell in 1983. It was a competitive, player-vs.-player network-playable game (played over Novell NetWare systems). One of the first of its kind. Top Novell products you might know: IPX/SPX protocol, Network Operating System (NOS), WordPerfect, QuadroPro. A lot of their success came from acquiring other successful businesses, Like WordPerfect Corporation.

Novell, themselves, have been acquired a few times. The Attachmate Group, and by the current owners, Micro Focus International and OpenText. Novell, as a company, seems to be scrubbed from relevance now, much like all their old software. Personally, I think the latest owners should have banked on the Snipes legacy. Make new versions. Really embrace it and the fans. But, alas…

To really scrub them off the map, the “Novell BrainShare” conference ended the year they were last acquired, 2014. Anyway, back to Snipes!

The all ASCII graphics added to the charm. I always wondered what the two acsii faces were for, aside from this game. The Snipes running around gave the game some obstacles, goals and something to play against in single player. The slow Snipes could shoot ASCII arrows at you. The fast Snipes didn’t shoot, but they could get to you fast and overwhelm you. To be honest, scary at first, I then began to love the fast ones. I would make sure the little Snipe generators in the game would produce hundreds of them. Maybe this was an early farming game too?

You can play Snipes in your browser right now! A few different places too. Higher level difficulties are where the fast ones show up in droves.