Bio Hazard / Bio Menace Beta (July 15, 1992)

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CuteFloor

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Published on September 12, 2020 9:30:01 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWB03crpf4s

Game:

Bio Menace (1993)

Duration: 9:34

1,566 views

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Bio Menace is a platform game developed by Jim Norwood and published by Apogee Software on August 3, 1993. In this video, you can see an early beta version from July 1992, which was still called Bio Hazard at this point. Apogee released it on the game's 25th anniversary.

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Some technical notes from Evan Ramos, who assembled a working copy of this beta:

There are several interesting things to note in this prototype. First and foremost, it can be seen that the final game's Episode 2 was originally slotted to be Episode 1. The final boss of the episode is a floating head of Dr. Mangle (whose art can still be found in the final game's data) rather than The Enforcer, though their behavior is functionally similar, if not identical. The in-level save feature inherited as part of the Keen Galaxy engine is still active in this build, before being disabled for technical reasons in the final game. Some of the item sprites differ in this beta. I'm sure there are more curiosities waiting to be discovered and documented.

Unfortunately, some of the files that make up the game's graphics banks were found to have experienced some kind of data corruption. The data was collected into a zip file that passed all checksum tests, meaning whatever happened took place before archival. My collaborator NY00123 stepped up and repaired the damage by inspecting it with various tools, including one of his own design, and cross-referencing with the final BM2 where necessary.

In testing, NY discovered a crash that manifests at two points in the episode, and we agreed that he would make a one-byte edit to fix the problem, improving Quality of Life for players. As copy protection, the executable performs a date check that aims to make the beta expire after a certain time. Bypassing this would require changing the system clock or intercepting the call with a TSR, but since we already modified the exe, he simply disabled the check with another one-byte change. Additionally, the executable requires a password to be entered on the command line, so we inspected the exe to find it and have provided it for you as part of PLAY.BAT. (If you wish to compare our modified exe with the original, you will need to use UNLZEXE to unpack both files.)

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What Jim Norwood, the developer of this game, had to say:

Bio Menace was really the first game that I ever designed, did all the level design, art, and code for as my first full on game project. And if that wasn't enough, it had to be a Trilogy! That was quite a project for a lone dude that was completely new to the gaming industry, but, it got done eventually and we shipped that full Trilogy in the end.

Bobby Prince did the music and I used Id's Keen Dreams engine to back the 2D game. Having the Keen Dreams engine is the only thing that made doing this game alone possible.

As John Carmack used to quote, 'There really is no such thing as a trivial game.' So true! Every game that is worth anything is going to take significant effort to finish and bring to market. However, I had some of the most fun working on this title that I've ever had working on any game since. Working nowadays in the AAA industry, I'm no longer the 'driving force' behind new IP's and as a Senior Engineer, I am a significant contributor to really large titles, but I'm really more now a piece of machinery in the giant teams required to ship such ambitious projects. That's just how this industry has evolved and I'm ok with that. But that doesn't stop me from looking back fondly on the glory days when I lone guy could make a great selling 2D platformer by himself. In some ways, those days have come back with mobile games, and then grew again to where even top tier mobile games are still going to require a competent team to create anything great.

I did manage to do another game called Tekken Bowling for iOS while I was at Namco where I was the sole programmer for the entire project, and I worked with only one designer and two artists on it. That was the closest I've come to making a game alone since the Bio Menace days.

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