Video games - Snipes

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	Video games - Snipes

Snipes (Diminutive for Snipers) is a text-mode networked computer game that was created in 1983 by SuperSet software. Snipes is officially credited as being the original inspiration for Novell Netware.

Background

SuperSet Software was a group founded by the friends Drew Major, Dale Neibauer, Kyle Powell and later Mark Hurst. Their work was based on their classwork that started in October 1981 at Brigham Young University, Provo Utah.

In 1983 Raymond Noorda from Novell hired the Superset crew. The team was originally assigned to create a CP/M disk sharing system to help network the CP/M hardware that Novell was selling at the time. The team was privately convinced that CP/M was a doomed platform and instead came up with a successful file sharing system for the newly introduced IBM-compatible PC.

They wrote the text-mode game called Snipes and used it to test their new PC based network and demonstrate its capabilities. Snipes was the first network application ever written for a commercial personal computer, and it along with Maze War is recognised to be the precursor of multi-player games such as Doom and Quake.

Snipes has made a fascinating contribution to the success of the new Network operating system that was later released by Novell as Netware. For many years, Snipes has been bundled with Netware, and recently, it has been officially credited as being the original inspiration for it.

It has been suggested that in 1983, Drew Major and Kyle Powell probably played the world's first over-the-network deathmatch with Snipes, although multiplayer games which involved different players at different terminals had been around for almost a decade, going back to Spasim in 1974.

Game play

The objective of the game is to control your creature by moving it around a maze to destroy snipes and their hives.

The player must first specify the number of snipes, hives and difficulty before they play. Each game is different because the computer generates a random new maze.

The creature is moved using the keyboard arrow keys and shoots in different directions with the A, S, D and W keys. By combining keys, diagonal movement and shooting can be achieved. Pressing the spacebar can provide extra velocity to run away from difficult situations from the snipes.

Several level options are available. First, a letter is chosen, which controls the environment settings. These include what bad guys are available, whether or not diagonal shots bounce off the walls, and whether running into a wall will simply block or kill you. The next choice is a number, which controls the maximum number of snipes that may exist and how many hives are initially created within the maze.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Snipes ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Snipes; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

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