Hypercard Stacks - Macintosh Mainstay and Homebrew Oddity

Who wouldn't want a black and white pixelated Samantha Fox? (Link)

    Time and time again I have expressed my love for early 80's and 90's Macintosh gaming and computers. The classic beige boxes and tiny screens fascinated me, and rules the roost both at home and school when I was but a wee lad. For more on my experience with Macs, read here and here, oh and here and here as well. Of course now-a-days you can emulate a classic Mac in a browser window, download all the files you need in seconds automatically; This is the future after all. 

Welcome! Look at all this cool shit you can do in the 80's.

      What is Hypercard you ask? It's one of the very first hypermedia systems that gained any kind of traction before the adoption of the World Wide Web. Links, audio, video, and text- all presented as an easy to use development kit free of charge to the lucky people who bought an early Macintosh or Apple IIGS. Think of Hypercard as a primitive Microsoft Powerpoint, but with a more simple front end and without any kind of database engine. You could essentially code something without the knowledge of coding, redirect and link different media types, and add controls, links and text in the "Stack". A Stack is terminology for a bunch of documents, individual documents are called 'Cards'. Basically it's just how the documents and data are stored, and how you link to them. Compare this to how Powerpoint has slides and how they link and interact. Using this subsystem, Hypercard users could make presentations, educational software, or even games. What is a good example of a game with Hypercard you ask?

Ahhhh Myst. The game that changed everything. Including making people buy 1x speed tray loading CD drives.

          Yes. This primitive black and white program with limited programming abilities, was just a bunch of Hypercard stacks linked together to play animation or show pictures and audio at predetermined times, was used to create this groundbreaking game that we know and love. Myst is a game that was revolutionary for it's day, had industry leading graphics and cutting edge gameplay that changed the way people thought how game should be designed and played. Unfortunately, for every one game like Myst, there was 100000 Hypercard games uploaded to Keyword: Download on AOL that defied logic and sense. Let's look at a couple shining examples below. I'll provide links to all the games, all you have to do is click the green power button on the screen, it will load the rom into the Macintosh Emulator automatically, and all you have to do is open the disk on the virtual desktop to launch the program. Let's get started.

Xenophilia

    Description by the author: "Xenophiles do not seek enlightenment as it is usually conceived. There is no Nirvana to which we attain. Rather, we seek an enlightenment of this, the sensual world, to be used here and now in the present, in acts of the flesh. In the expression of our feral glee we feast on raw, primal truths. We are monkey nerve junkies, ever alert for the mainline primacy of unfiltered experienceâa visceral knowing of the moment as absolute apotheosis, carnal crescendo, culmination of desire. The razor that opens our eyes to beauty." Insert Keanu 'Woah' here, and leave sanity at the door.

Clicking on a number leads you to the follow screen, which can be all over the place. 

Which leads you to these screens, and explanations of the image. Really trippy. Music is confusing.

Sean's World

     No real description of the game. Presumably you play as Sean, the dude pictured, also created this stack. He must have got ahold of a Connetix Quick Cam to get that picture digitized. Appears to be a quickly drawn click and point adventure. Bizarre, but adventurous.
. 

     Fun little game, but super strange. Love the comic book feel of it. If you press control and hold it down, it accuses you of cheating. The screen often went black, so the emulator didn't really like this one. 

Anyways. That's all the time I have for now, but I'll do a part two of the Hypercard stacks soon enough, where we really go in to the bizarre and homemade. Explore here if you still are interested enough in this.