The Adventures of MicroMan

Development

From an interview with Brian Goble:

Back when Windows 3.0 had just come out, I had already written a nifty graphics engine for DOS and had made a few games with it that were published by SoftDisk. I decided to see what was possible, graphically, with Windows and proceeded to create "WAP" (Windows Animation Package) which was (as far as I know) one of the first 2D gaming engines (with flicker-free software sprites) created specifically for Windows.

I needed to create a demo game for my new engine so I stole some art from a DOS game I had been working on called Alien Planet. Alien Planet ran in 320x200 (in DOS) so when I brought the graphics over to Windows, the objects looked tiny in 640x480. This was a minor problem--I just called the game MicroMan. :)

When the six of us (the Monolith founding members) got together and created Monolith and The Monolith CD, one of the things we did was to create a special version of MicroMan with a rendered intro movie, pumped up sounds, and new music. I still get emails from people asking for more MicroMan adventures.

On a related note, I eventually rewrote WAP from scratch for Windows 95 and DirectX, called it WAP32, and it's the engine we used for Claw, Get Medieval, and Gruntz! :)

Music

The game-play midi music added to version 1.5 and later of The Adventures Of MicroMan - Adventure 1: Crazy Computers appears to have been quite heavily influenced by the 1985 electro / hip-hop track Juice by The World Class Wreckin' Cru.