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The Section as an Interior Landscape: Glider, a videogame by John Calhoun (1988-1994)

September 6, 2020 by Mariabruna Fabrizi Leave a Comment

Video game developer John Calhoun published Glider in 1988. The whole Macintosh video-game is structured on the section of a house with a series of interconnected rooms without inhabitants.

Glider + 3.14, Soft Dorothy Software, 1991
(Still from Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, 2018)
Glider, Soft Dorothy Software, 1988

A paper plane must fly through the section avoiding household objects and furniture and continue its flight without colliding with the floor. Several objects can provide help, like heating vents and coolers, while the movement of others can cause trouble to the flight.

Ordinary furniture becomes wonders, while the domestic mundane turns into an endless interior landscape filled with hidden puzzles. Pixelated graphics allows a pretty detailed description of the interior environment and a huge variety of rooms develops through the recombination of objects.

Several versions of the game came out over the years, notably the version 4.0, which included a level editor, and version 5, called Glider PRO, which kept the two-dimensional side view but multiplied the effects, the quantity of moving features and the number of rooms and houses.

Glider 4.0, Casady & Greene, 1994
(Still from Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, 2018)

Glider PRO, Casady & Greene, 1994(
Still from Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, 2018)

(Still from Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, 2018)

Further material:

Glider-Pro is freely available onliner at Macintoshgarden.

Some of the previous images come from: Richard Moss, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, a book which features an article entirely dedicated to Calhoun’s Glider and Glider Pro.

Glider 4.0 complete playthrough.

Via: Antifurniture.

https://github.com/softdorothy/glider_pro/wiki

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SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
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