Wayback Wednesday: Bolo
When I was but a wee teenager deep in the dark heart of suburbia I spent an impressive amount of time holed up in my bedroom with various distractions. Usually it was video games, but I would read a ton of books (comic and otherwise) and listen to music. I was able to save up my allowance for a while to buy an old Mac LCII from my step-dad and load it with shareware. I didn't have an internet connection at the time (that was in the garage on the main family computer, using an old 14.4 modem) but I played Escape Velocity, Taskmaker, and Bolo. I would also make humorous Hypercard stack games. At least, they were humorous to me at the time. I remember they involved a lot of images of stick figures getting mangled and blown up.
Bolo was a networked multi-player tank game that occupied a ton of my time after school. We'd load it on all the computers in the computer lab, but that still wasn't enough. We'd then load it on all the computers in the neighboring classrooms, spreading like some sort of "computerized virus". It was a team based affair for the most part, you'd move your tank around a map looking for recharge stations to capture. They would fill up your ammo and health and were vital to your success. There were also pillboxes, which would automatically shoot at you. You could destroy these pillboxes (which was fairly difficult) and capture them, using them as sentries for your base. You also had this little man that could come out of your tank, harvest trees, build walls and roads and generally improve your base. I remember playing epic matches of 16 players, even the teachers got in on the action. Someone brought in Warcraft II one day and we all snubbed him in favor of Bolo. Yes it was that good.
It was my first foray into what online multi-player could be like, and it was the most intense strategy game I can remember playing for a long time. It combined sim elements with brilliantly balanced multi-player combat that is still unmatched to this day. A couple years ago I looked around for a version that could work with Mac OS X so I could install it on the computers in my college lab, but all I could find was this buggy version which appears to no longer have support.
I'd kill to have a version of Bolo I could play today. It's a fantastically lightweight, simple network game that I think could hold up pretty well. Someone get on it!
What say you?!