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The Dude Who Wrote Snood
usacoder writes "The Raleigh News and Observer Lifestyle section has a story on the guy who wrote Snood, Dave Dobson. It's nice to see that shareware can still make money for some developers." From the article: "He describes the evolution of Snood into a cult attraction as a series of random events, and refers to his fame as the game's creator as third-rate celebrity. 'But,' he adds, 'I milk it for all it's worth.'"
You are personally responsible for me skipping half of my classes in college. Hope you enjoy your stinkin' shareware fees.
I don't remember where I first learned about Snood, but I can attest to the cult mentality that surrounds it. It's the first shareware game where I grew up and paid the paltry sum instead of just finding a hack for it. And when I saw it was available on the gba I didn't hesitate to pick up a copy, glad to know that some guy just wrote a simple, fun little game and that it ended up on a cart.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
I had downloaded a beta version many years ago (1999?) and got a BSOD style error, to which I reported to him the full error message and what I had done ahead of that. He emailed me back a day or two later saying he fixed it, and to download an updated (but still beta) version. First (and I think it's still the only) time I ever saw a BSOD source get eliminated.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
A whole article, and yet not a single word about how Snood is a straight rip-off of Puzzle Bobble...
FWIW, it sounds awfully similar to Frozen Bubble --- was FB based on Snood?
Just goes to show that you can make a lot of money by copying someone else's work if you just market it with a few silly looking monsters (Sesame Street, Barnie, Teletubbies, John and Teresa Kerry... oops!).
Though the article makes it out to be, it isn't original. The author nowhere points out that he was at all influenced by Puzzle Bobble/Bust a Move, an arcade game by Taito that came out in '94 on the Neo Geo hardware, predating Snood by roughly 2 years. It had a cannon at the bottom and fired up colored balls at rows of said balls above, which eliminate when matched in 3s or more.
I think it's all well and good doing a clone game. I've played, loved, and respected many tetris clones over the years. I would say it's possible he came up with Snood without having every seen or played Puzzle Bobble, but I just don't buy it. There are too many similarities.
So does anyone know of any other articles posted elsewhere that confess that Snood is essentially clone?
Snood is just a shareware version of Bust-A-Move (a.k.a. Puzzle Bobble), which was released in 1994. And of course the two-player version of Bust-A-Move is TRULY addictive, exacting vengeance on your good friends via crazy multi-bubble drops. Still, I give the guy credit for making serious cash on a homebrew game.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Bub and Bob do make a cameo on Bust a Move, which is the snood-like game I think you are referring to.
Instead of rehashing the Snood clone discussion, just visit Slashdot's article two years ago about Snood:
;-).
Snood, the Simple Game
So just read the previous discussion over, find what you thought was your original comment, and link. Saves typing
-Ace
"Dave's got kids. They sure are neat. Register Snood so they can eat."
Sure, kid. Things was different back then, slower. Punch a card, feed it in to the reader, and the next day you got back a printout saying, "Sorry, you have died"... and we liked it that way.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Snood was the game that introduced me to spyware. "Gator? What's this?"
[o]_O
So he rips off Taito's title to the point where people think Puzzle Bobble is the imitator, makes a substandard clone that isn't even a realtime game AND becomes one of the first developers to begin installing Offer Manager/GATOR SPYWARE on computers?
Why should we respect this guy? He took thunder away from Taito and ruined countless computers. I hate that friggin' O symbol. I had to clean it every day back in high school in a room full of computers. These kids didn't know what the f. On top of that, the game was too easy. There was no pressure to act fast and the collision detection was piss poor. You could fit any piece down any narrow path you wanted. Programmer art was in it, too.
I hate Snood and I'm proud of it.
An article led readers to think
Something only believed after drink
That snood was original
But we know that's really bull
And taito's fans are pushed o'er the brink.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here are some responses to various comments, if anybody cares:
I've never represented that Snood was original, although I did write the first version way back in late 1995/early 1996, and it included a number of differences from other similar arcade games at the time. The skull snoods (i.e. Snoods that can't be matched and have to be dropped), the looser collision detection (which apparently some people hate, but which I thought made it a better game), the lack of time pressure, the danger bar management, the random layouts, mouse control rather than joystick. It is actually many of these features that people say they like most about the game, and many of them have been included in other similar games.
This still not great innovation, certainly, but you have to remember the following:
1) I wrote the thing primarily for my wife to play, since she never went to arcades. I never expected it to sell much at all; my previous game, Centaurian, was selling maybe 3-5 copies a week tops at the time, and I considered it a better game then.
2) I wrote it on a non-competing platform (i.e. Macintosh; PC came later in 1998 due to me getting probably 30-50 requests a day for it). Don't tell me the arcade video game industry was suddenly going to expand into the Mac shareware market.
3) The shareware community at the time (and still today) was rife with imitations of arcade games, including nearly every one of Ambrosia's early products (e.g. Maelstrom = Asteroids, Cyclone = Star Castle). There were probably 30 different popular shareware tetris-ish games then on Mac alone. There's nothing illegal or actionable in that if you're not using names, artwork, etc., and I was careful to stay far away from that. Just look at all the Monopoly clones out there - none of the localized ones are made by Parker Brothers.
4) The Gator thing - I'm not necessarily too proud of that, but (1) the version of the Gator software we installed was the e-wallet kind; it didn't send personal information other than anonymous browsing statistics to their servers, (2) there were clear warnings in the installer that it was being installed, an explanation of what it would do, and instructions for removing it, and (3) there was always a non-Gator version of Snood available. We terminated our deal with them after maybe a year, year and a half. Gator has gone in a different, more morally obscure direction since we were involved with them. Even three years after we quit with them, people are still shouting about spyware; I guess I'd warn other developers to be more careful than we were about both your partnerships and how they may be perceived, sine the perception is often quite different from the reality.
So, you can say I'm not original (I'm not! But go look at the console game section of your local Target sometime and tell me what percentage of the games there are unique archetypes uninfluenced by anything else). You can say we shouldn't have partnered with Gator (maybe not; it seemed like an OK and morally acceptable idea at the time, and we tried to be very careful and up-front about what our users were getting).
You can't say, though, that people don't like Snood; even if I'd never made any money off it, I can tell from my e-mails that people are having fun with it and playing it with their families and friends, and that's cool. People use it to teach special-ed kids about shapes and colors, in kids' cancer and burn wards, to stop smoking, to lose weight, and to rehab after strokes, which is even cooler. I don't know why it caught on as much as it did, and I consider myself very lucky.
My thanks to everybody who posted nice comments or constructive criticism.
Sincerely,
Dave