jeevesSV (1) on 7/21/2022 11:17 PM · Permalink · Report

In 1997 in a certain high school computer lab in the USA, we had a bunch of obsolete hardware. There was a row of 4 IBM PC-AT computers along one side of the room, which I never actually saw anyone use, though I did some assembly hacking on them just for fun, in my junior year. The main computers we were meant to use were IBM PS/2s (model M I think?) running DOS, but only via a DOS shell. On the "Games" menu were a bunch of old games, such as Sopwith 2 and Caverns of Gink. Netwars (included with Novell Netware, which powered the LAN) was the most popular by far. Of course many of us figured out how to escape the shell to the command line.

My friend in that class indeed used a hex editor to change the strings in Caverns of Gink to silly stuff like "Caverns of Bob". For some reason he thought Bob was a funny name and often used it in computer programs, example math problems, etc. He did it as a prank, and to show other students how you can edit binary files. I believe there were some other such string hacks in other programs and games; it was a sort of prank/trick people did to show off and get some giggles from others. There was no intention of "stealing" the game, and everyone knew that it was really Caverns of Gink (Gink was still installed alongside it) and that it was a little prank by a classmate. Well, everyone who played these games, which was not many people. Gink was briefly popular among our little programming clique because we saw my friend playing it and beating the levels, which seemed impossibly difficult to me, but he is very skilled and tenacious when it comes to platform games. I tried it myself a few times but gave up quickly. (No offense to Mr. Ginko at all; I think it's good work for a 13-year-old programmer in 1985.)

The thing is, we have NO idea how "Caverns of Bob" escaped from the lab!! Those PS/2 computers had no internet access, and they were replaced a year or two later with more modern machines that ran Windows. It is difficult for me to imagine, but someone must have copied the game or games to a floppy, taken it home, and at some point uploaded it somewhere. I suppose it's possible that those games were copied to the new Windows machines when they were installed, but that seems unlikely, as no one liked those old games, and I'm not sure they would have even run on Windows 95 or 98 or whatever they put on there. I would have assumed that all that DOS software would have been discarded, and end up languishing on stacks of dusty old hardware in a storeroom, as is common at schools.

I was astonished when I searched up "Caverns of Gink" recently and Caverns of Bob came up. I messaged my friend about it, and he was equally surprised. It's weird and unfortunate that the prank version got spread on the internet somehow. My friend's name is not even Bob or Robert or anything like that, so it really was not a matter of trying to claim credit, not at all. He's not that kind of person, and as I keep saying, no one ever expected this version would eventually end up on the internet and in the top Google results due to automatic content-scraping sites and the like.

Hopefully this clears up why there's a string-edited version of the game floating around, to some extent. The missing piece of the puzzle is who uploaded it to where, and why, but I don't think we will ever get the answer to that question unless that person happens to see these forum threads and tells us about it.