Stratego bits & pieces




This is what my first Stratego computer game looked like, back in 1987.

The piece set and game board were drawn so that everything would fit within the confines of the original Macintosh screen (512 x 342 pixels). I drew each piece in MacPaint, one pixel at a time, while staring at the physical game piece sitting on top of my Mac. Clearly, I was insane (or just avoiding other work I should have been doing at the time.) To save precious vertical space, the crenellations were left off the tops of the human player's pieces:



When I updated the graphics for the Accolade version, machines with higher screen resolution (640 x 480 pixels) were on the market, so the pieces got correspondingly larger:



The next step (after getting a new Mac II) was just a matter of colorizing:



I briefly experimented with trying to duplicate the exact look of the original plastic pieces. The Milton Bradley piece set had a high-contrast monochrome silhouette embossed on the face of each piece, usually in silver or gold. Unfortunately this look turned out to be much harder to read on a computer screen. The only piece from these experiments that worked relatively well was the flag, which survived as the game's icon (at the top of this page.)

Beckett Gladney (an artist working for Accolade) then came up with several variations on this design, including realistic "wood" and "stone" block pieces, which were available as options in the game.




This is actually a picture of the IBM PC edition (denoted by a blue sticker on the lower left edge of the box.) The game featured a "code wheel" as copy protection: in order to start playing, you had to enter a number which was revealed in a cutout on the wheel. While this clearly sucked, it was considered progressive at the time, since most games had some form of on-disk protection which required the original diskette to be inserted in the drive. (CD-ROM? Huh? What's that?)

Easter eggs

In the Mac version, selecting the "About Stratego..." menu item displayed the credits, along with a picture of the Spy. If you left the about box open and watched the Spy carefully, he would sometimes wink at you, or on rare occasions, open his eyes wide in surprise.

Also in the Mac version, pressing Command and Option while selecting "About Stratego..." displayed an alternate about box with a moving starfield. This was a tribute to LightspeedC (later "THINK C"), the development environment used to create the game. In those days, many applications which were written with LightspeedC (as well as the compiler itself) featured a "warp speed" starfield in their about boxes. The alternate about box gives credit to Blue Cloud Software (the name of my 1-man "company"), and to Jerry Pape, the guy who called me up out of the blue on that day in 1987.

There were a few other key combinations that did interesting things, but I don't remember exactly what they were.

Last updated Monday, July 17, 2000 by KCM
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