This sparked arguments within the team, which grew more serious as pressure and interest grew in expanding the scope to other non-SCUMM games. ScummVM 0.2.0, released on May 14, 2002, added support for Adventure Soft's popular point-and-click adventure Simon the Sorcerer, renowned for its humor, puzzles, story, and visuals. The first non-SCUMM engine added to ScummVM actually came quite early in the project's life. New games-and even entire game engines-were added. The developers simply plowed ahead, hoping that a lawyer's call to shut down the project would never come. But the threat of legal action from LucasArts still lurked in the background, as it had since the very first release of ScummVM code. After looking at the iMUSE patent, and going on advice from other developers and Slashdot commenters, Strigeus went ahead with his code. Strigeus managed to complete support for LucasArts' patented iMUSE technology, a SCUMM component that varied the game's music in response to player actions, but he delayed adding it to ScummVM because he worried that he could be sued for infringement. The userbase exploded, and calls to "please support game x" became common. ScummVM had shot its way into the big time. "This got a lot of people interested, and next thing I knew, there were developers working on all aspects of the project," said Hamm. The project immediately attracted developer attention. On November 3, 2001, ScummVM was picked up by popular tech news website Slashdot. Once Hamm's Indiana Jones work was playable, it was added to the official source tree. Strigeus worked on the "official" source tree while Hamm experimented on his own. In October 2001, the pair started using a CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) repository to store their code and its revisions. We didn't even have a proper code repository." But then the team would have a "magic moment" when a game finally started working, and they were rejuvenated. Hamm recalls that " early stages were completely dis-coordinated. He got the game to work with the ScummVM project, but his code remained separate until Strigeus could review it. One of the earliest screenshots of ScummVM in existence-this one's from version 0.0.2 in November 2001.īefore Monkey Island 2 support was completed, Hamm grew interested in adding support for Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which had a very similar engine. But Strigeus was miles ahead, and soon after learning about the other project, Hamm dropped his own efforts and joined Strigeus-initially as a beta tester, then as a co-author. Vincent Hamm had been trying in parallel to build a SCUMM interpreter of his own, using as a model the limited documentation available online, in conjunction with whatever insights he could gain from reading the scripts buried inside the code for Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Strigeus thought it would be a good idea to first learn about the inner workings of SCUMM in order to borrow some of its ideas and features, so he started writing an interpreter capable of playing Monkey Island 2. ScummVM owes its birth to the drive of computer science student Ludvig Strigeus, who wanted to write his own adventure game engine. How did an ever-changing group of volunteers manage to do it-and avoid being sued out of existence? Early days Today, ScummVM has become almost a general-purpose adventure game interpreter that can run on nearly any architecture. Little did its earliest developers know, however, that it would grow far beyond its origins, taking on a life of its own as more than 100 people contributed a million lines of code over the next decade. Expanded and revised through the years, SCUMM helped LucasArts build a huge line of popular adventure games in the 1980s and 1990s, but the DOS-based games became increasingly difficult to play on modern systems. The program was meant as an interpreter that could play classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games such as Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Day of the Tentacle in a virtual machine (VM).Īs for the name, "SCUMM" was the "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion," itself a reference to the first LucasArts game that relied on the company's proprietary game design tool. ScummVM was born on September 17, 2001, at 5:57pm GMT+1.
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