User-Generated Content On IBM OS/2 Warp

[freshfeeling]

In a previous post about user-generated content I discussed not having an NES until quite a bit after many of my friends. This was at least in part because I grew up in a fairly large family and - though we lived well - finances were tight for the types of technological indulgences I sought. Those indulgences would later be my career! But it didn’t start that way.

It was a long time before we had access to a family PC. I think our second one -  a 586 Pentium! - was in 1994, just as home internet access was starting to proliferate. When we got this computer, my parents were told we could have it installed with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 and they chose Windows 3.1 because they were already familiar with it. Overall, I'd say this was a bad choice... but it wasn’t all bad! Because it was an IBM machine it came with a dual boot to OS/2 Warp!

IBM legitimately thought they could make headway in the PC operating system business for a while. In their defense, this hadn't yet been proven crazy, and especially for the time the product was actually pretty good. Some folks still sing its praises!

Personally, I didn’t hate OS/2, though I’ll admit I don’t remember very much about it. For the sake of writing this and getting some screenshots, I wanted to get it running again myself... and I did, with a fair bit of guidance from gekk.info. There were many versions of this operating system over time, but I chose OS/2 Warp 3: the exact one we had on our Pentium machine that we got around Christmas 1994.

The most memorable aspects for me were two of the games that came with the IBM Family FunPak for OS/2, which came with our new computer: a sokoban game called SokoPM and The Wall. For some reason there were tons of small, Windows-like games ported to this system in "paks", but these two games were relatively unique compared to what I could get going on Windows 3.1 at the time. They were in a subset of the FunPak called the MicroLearn Game Pack Volume 1.
  

Both of these games were forms of block-pushing puzzle games, and both of them allowed for the user to make and save their own puzzles. To do this in The Wall, for example, you would open WALLEDIT.EXE, choose from a palette of tiles/blocks, and drag them into a configurable field of play. The levels can be quickly and easily tested from within the editing interface, sort of: the test play pops up in another window. I sometimes forget how window-y things were in this era.
 

Although these small-scale games along the lines of Solitaire and Minesweeper tend to be ported to everything ever, I don't believe I've ever seen a clone of The Wall. This is unusual to me; it's a good game! Maybe I should make it myself.
Interestingly, the majority of these small-scale OS/2 games from various packs got ported to Windows 3.1 multiple times! SokoPM was available in something of an alternate version (titled "Store") on both OS/2 and Windows 3.1, and there are about a million sokoban games in general. I can't find any reference to The Wall for Windows 3.1 or elsewhere though.

Anyway, the objective in The Wall is to match the like-patterned boxes together by moving them. Sometimes there are several different pairs or trios of patterned blocks and it can be tougher to make matches in the right order. The blocks move one space at a time in general, though they can slide across ice and they are subject to gravity. I find it much easier to control with arrow keys than mouse, personally.
 

There are even some levels that have a "platforming" feel to them.


Although I enjoyed The Wall’s graphics and I played a lot of the packed-in puzzles, I spent more time with OS/2’s sokoban game. As I said this is one of those genres that is reproduced everywhere, but this was my first sokoban.
 

 

Like with The Wall, to create your own levels or level sets for SokoPM, you would open SOKOEDIT.EXE which also allowed lots of configuration and inline testing. This game had a large number of “gadget” tiles with different effects on how blocks would move: one-way walls, no-walk tiles, conveyors, and warps. I recall using setups involving a large number of these gimmicky tiles, trying to make complex puzzles that either took the highest possible number of moves or the highest possible amount of time to complete. I dumped a lot of hours into making block-pushing puzzles.
 

 

What is funny about this, of course, is that I literally never knew a single other person who used IBM OS/2 and consequently there was nobody with whom to share these puzzles. My family certainly didn’t care to play. There was no means to distribute these at the time other than a floppy disk or something, and I had nobody with whom to share a floppy disk of sokoban levels anyway. Regardless, I remember OS/2 sokoban fondly.

During my experiments running OS/2 Warp in VirtualBox to get these screenshots, I was entirely unable to save.

 

User-generated content is a funny thing: I've said that my kids and I kept making Super Mario Maker (1) levels after the uploads were disabled. For some people like me, I guess, making the material is a very large part of the fun and distribution is, in some cases, a total afterthought.

 

And that’s fine, right? It’s not like every artists’ sketches end up in museums, but people don’t stop drawing.