Lost Works: the early VB games

VB · ~2002 · three games from the Software Division that never got backed up

The Superterran Software Division shipped four little freeware apps off my Tripod page, most of them written in “a preliminary Computer programming class i took a while ago. it really didn’t teach me anything because i already knew it all.” One of the four — the Superterran Password Generator — survives, and you can run it right now in the museum’s Windows 98 VM as SPG.exe. The other three are gone.

This is the honest record of the three that didn’t make it: what they were, in my own period words, and why there’s nothing here to download.

Superterran Tic Tac Toe

A two-player-only tic-tac-toe, and the page is refreshingly clear about why it’s two-player-only:

This is a simple two player tic tac toe game. it is a cool game, I wrote it so [two friends] and I would have somthing to do after we got done with our work. it was originaly designed to be 1 & 2 players, but i concure with [a friend], who reminded me “Who wants to play a computer in tic tac toe?”. So i made it only 2 players instead.

The credits are the best part — "[two friends] for helping me test it, becuase playing Tic tac toe against your self sucks," plus "[my brother] for telling me how he would have done it" and “me for not listening to [my brother].” A 119 KB tictactoe.zip. Never archived.

Superterran 21

A blackjack game that grew out of another forced class assignment and, by my own account, turned out genuinely good:

What started out as a dumb CP project for that trick [a teacher] has accually became a pretty cool game… Basicly, it’s like Blackjack, exept it is kinda futuristic. realy have to play to understand, it’s a great game. i have spend many a class block captivated by it. It’s fun and small. an updated version will have sound (WOW!)

It was posted as a beta — “I am having a couple of problems with it, none serious, so i am going to post a beta version on the site” — which makes the 6 KB st21.zip the smallest and most fragile of the lot. The thank-yous run to a whole class block of testers, including a pointed note about “having that Moron [a classmate] forget to save.” The irony writes itself: the lecture about saving your work, on the one game we couldn’t.

Superterran One Armed Bandit

The one I’d most want back. A slot machine, and the reels tell you everything about the year 2002 in one line:

This was another dumb project [a teacher] had me do. i turned it cool though. Pretty much it’s a simple slot machine game. Images are Bill Gates, Tux, Pac Man, and the STS logo.

Bill Gates, Tux the penguin, Pac-Man, and the Superterran crosshair spinning on a slot machine — the entire identity of a teenage Windows-tweaking, Linux-curious, retro-gaming geek, rendered as gambling iconography. At 224 KB, oab.zip was the biggest of the three (all those reel graphics) and, predictably, “By my self on this one” — with a credit to "[a friend] for making me redo the interface" and "[a friend] for coping my work."

What survived, and why these didn’t

The Superterran Password Generator — the one that made it

SPG is the control case. It’s identical in pedigree to the lost three — same page, same class, same (119 Kb) download link — and it survives only because a copy happened to be in the personal stash that seeded the museum’s VM. The other three weren’t in that stash, and Tripod blocked the Wayback Machine from crawling binaries — only the HTML pages were ever captured, never the .zip files behind them. We’ve checked the Internet Archive, Tucows, Softpedia, and download.com for the superterran name; the full trail is in the private research log. There are zero captures of any of these files anywhere.

So they sit here as descriptions, not downloads — three games we can prove existed, quote at length, and even tell you the file sizes of, but cannot play. If an old drive of mine turns up with oab.zip on it, those reels go back to spinning in the Win98 VM next to SPG. Until then: never archived, and lost.