Glider PRO

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Glider PRO is an Apple Macintosh game first published by Casady & Greene in 1991. It is the final installment of the Glider series as of early 2006. When Casady & Greene went bankrupt, the rights to the series reverted to the author, John Calhoun, who opted to give a few versions of the game away for free on his [website].

The game

Game basics

In the game, you fly a paper plane around a house trying to get all the stars in the game. To play, you have to float on air currents or slide on greased surfaces. There are obstacles, like furniture, flying paper darts, balloons and paper shredders and the like. There are also prizes you can get to increase your score, which are all clocks, or to help win the game, like rubber bands to shoot at enemies, aluminum foil and helium.

Houses

The game comes with one real house called Slumberland, and one demonstration house. Beyond this, a sizable number of houses are available for download on fan sites.

Versions of the game

Differences between OS X/Carbon and System 7-OS 9/Classic versions

Glider PRO was initially released for System 7 and was continuously updated through a Mac OS 9 version, the final release on the "Classic" Mac OSes. It was later ported to Mac OS X as a native Carbon application, and while this version has reworked graphics and a more muted color scheme it lacks a variety of preferences and the built-in house editor present in the Mac OS 9 version. Mac OS X users can still run the Mac OS 9 version of Glider in the Classic environment, giving them access to the multitude of additional preferences and the house editor.

Glider PRO (\"Classic\") CD

This was an update that included Glider PRO, new houses, and a few utilities. Houses: Art Museum, In the Mirror, Davis Station, Castle o' the Air, Teddy World, Land of Illusion, Imaginehouse PRO II, The Asylum PRO, Nemo's Market, Titanic, SpacePods, Rainbow's End, Leviathan, Grand Prix, Metropolis, and obviously Slumberland, Empty House and Demo House.

In addition, the utilities Moving Van - A utility for moving graphics and sound between houses and libraries (and any combination of the two), and Foundation Mover - A utility for sliding an entire house over (in terms of on the map, if you ran out of room) and CD-ROM special instructions and some graphics libraries were included.

House building

Houses are created using the built-in house editor in the "Classic" version and allow for custom images and sounds via embedding of 'PICT' and 'snd' resources in the house's resource fork.

Mermaid files

A debugging feature in the Mac OS 9 version of Glider PRO allows all of the graphics and sounds in the game (including the ones that cannot be directly replaced by a house's resource fork) to be overridden by alternative graphics. This is done by placing a file named "Mermaid", containing all of the replacement graphics and sounds, in the same directory as the Glider PRO application. This feature was forgotten about by the time Glider PRO was released, but John Calhoun later rediscovered it in April 2004. As of today, at least three houses exist that exploit this feature.

The word "Mermaid" was used as a reference to three lines from the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

:We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

:By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

:Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The first of these lines also appears in the About box of Glider PRO.

Objects in the game

Note that other objects may appear in houses - these are custom images combined with built-in objects in order to create a special effect.

Community and future of Glider series

Probably due to its House-creating ability, Glider PRO has enjoyed an active and involved fan community during most of its life. A periodical zine called GliderTech was published by Paul Finn between 1995 and 1997 - Glider PRO's heydays. GliderTech published editorials, house reviews, house building tips and each issue was accompanied by a house or two with some examples of obstacles or techniques that could be used in houses. (GliderTech issues can be found for download on various house repositories, and the actual zine is an OS 9 application.)

Following 1998 or so, with brief bumps coinciding with the release of the OS X version and the emancipation of Glider PRO, the community activity dropped, but a [Yahoo! group] is still active. John Calhoun has mentioned that he'd like to create a successor to Glider PRO that goes back to the roots of Glider (for example, by having fewer objects and all-indoor houses) but that it will have to wait until he's done with his work at Apple.

The Intel transition and its effect on Glider PRO

Influx of new house creators may over time grind to a halt following Apple's decision to switch the CPU architecture of their Mac computer line-up to Intel microprocessors, scheduled to start in June 2006. Only the "Classic" version of Glider PRO includes a house editor, and since Classic runs the now abandoned Mac OS 9 operating system which only functions on PowerPC processors, Glider PRO enthusiasts buying a new Intel-based Mac will not be able to build houses without resorting to a second, PowerPC-based Mac (or emulation of one).

Glider PRO for Mac OS X will continue to run on Intel-based Macs through the Rosetta compatibility layer, but the potential for a Universal Binary (that runs natively on Intel and PowerPC alike) is highly dubious at best.

Houses

(a): The number of rooms in the whole house (p): The number of rooms you can actually fly the glider into

Absolute Glider

• Author: Ryan Tooley
• Rooms: 323 (a)
• Big house, with lots of custom art, and different places like a jungle gym and restaurant

Art Museum

• Author: John Calhoun
• Rooms: 138 (a)
• Fly through an art museum. Paintings are actual, real paintings.

Castle o' The Air

• Author: John Calhoun
• Rooms: 85 (a)
• A castle. Fun house, with traps, dungeons, and dark passages

Christmas in Lumberland

• Author: Matthew Hershberger
• Rooms: 107 (a)
• A log house in the winter. See Lumberland, below

Davis Station

• Author: Johnathan Chin (aka Paul Finn) and john calhoun
• Rooms: 65 (a)
• Fly on a train track, station, grain elevator and a small house

Death To Barney

• Author: Matt Wolfe
• Rooms:488 (a)
• Fly on several missions to embarrass Barney. A house with a surprise ending

Grand Prix

• Author: Paul Finn
• Rooms:175(a)
• A driving-themed house, with pictures of cars and road signs.

House of Food

• Author: Matt Wolfe
• Rooms:320 (a) 205 (p)
• Really big house, hard, you get points for hitting pictures of food

ImagineHouse PRO

• Author: Paul Finn
• Rooms: ?
• Some say it is better than II, but lots of fun rooms!

ImagineHouse PRO II

• Author: Paul Finn
• Rooms: 279 (a)
• Fly through 4 houses, and the basement

In the Mirror

• Author: Paul Finn
• Rooms:97 (a)
• Short house, strange things appear in mirrors

Jocular

• Author: Matt Wolfe
• Rooms:115 (p) 260(a)
• 5 houses, lots of bonuses, and a big basement.

Land of Illusion

• Author: Ward Hartenstein
• Rooms: 80 (p) 303 (a)
• A good house, with illusions like disappearing helium and shrinking houses

Lumberland

• Author: Matthew Hershberger
• Rooms: 71 (a)
• Like Christmas in Lumberland above, a log house

Metropolis

• Author: John Calhoun and Paul Finn
• Rooms: 127 (a)
• A skyscraper at night. 11 floors tall

Mighty Morphin' Power Glider

• Author: GliderZero
• Rooms:26 (a)
• A short house that includes an "incredible shrinking glider".

Nemo's Market

• Author: Ward Hartenstein
• Rooms: 23 (p)
• A fun house with lots of custom graphics, but if you miss a star in the "shopping sprees", it is all over.

Slumberland

• Author: John Calhoun, Paul Finn, Steve Sullivan, and Ward Hartenstein
• Rooms: 403(a)
• A long house, the one that ships with the game.

External links

• [John Calhoun's Glider page] - has for download Glider PRO and 4.0 and a few house packs, and links to fan sites
• An interview with John Calhoun: [Part one], [Part two]
• [A Glider PRO Yahoo! Group]
• [Glider PRO files at Sacred Software] - hundreds of downloadable houses
• [Slumberland, a fan site]
• [WolfeGPRO, a fan site]
• [Glider Pro Online, another fan site]
• [Another glider pro group on yahoo]

 

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