After 35 Years, Classic Shareware Game 'Cap'n Magneto' Finally Fully Resurrected

A newspaper in Austin, Texas shares the story behind a cult-classic videogame, the 1985 Macintosh shareware game 'Cap'n Magneto.'

It was the work of Al Evans, who'd 'decided to live life to the fullest after suffering severe burn injuries in 1963' at the age of 17.

Beneath the surface, 'Cap'n Magneto' is a product of its creator's own quest to overcome adversity after a terrible car crash — an amalgamation of hard-earned lessons on the value of relationships, being an active participant in shaping the world and knowing how to move on... 'Whether I was going to survive at all was very iffy,' Evans said. 'The chance of me living to the age of 28 or 30 was below 30% or something like that.' Regardless of how much time he had left, Evans said he refused to let his injuries hold him back from living his life to the fullest. He would live his life with honesty, he decided, and do his best to always communicate with others truthfully. 'I wasn't going to spend the next two years of my life dorking around different hospitals. So I said what's the alternative?' Evans said...

To float his many hobbies and interests, however, Evans knew he had to make money. In addition to doing work as a graphic designer and a translator, he picked up computer programming, which opened his eyes to a digital frontier that allowed for the creation of new worlds with the stroke of a keyboard. When he realized the technical capabilities of the Macintosh — the first personal computer that had a graphics-driven user interface and a built-in mouse function — Evans said he set out to build a world that could marry storytelling and graphics. With the help of his wife Cea, Evans created his one and only computer game: 'Cap'n Magneto.'

'I really wanted to write a good game, and I definitely think it was that,' Evans said...

Australia-based gaming historian, author and journalist Richard Moss says, 'What really marked it as different, though, was that the alien speech, once ungarbled by a tricorder item that players had to find, would be spoken aloud through the Mac's built-in speech synthesizer and written on-screen in comic-style speech bubbles,' Moss said. 'And unlike most role playing games of the time, every character you'd meet in the game could be friendly and helpful or cold and dismissive or aggressive and hostile — depending on a mix of random chance and player choice....'

With 'Cap'n Magneto,' Evans said he wanted to make sure that players could befriend the non-playable alien characters that the hero encounters. Though the game is beatable without their help, it is significantly easier with the help of allies. A reality in which everyone was an enemy, to Evans, was simply dishonest.

'That doesn't reflect the game of life, you know? Some people, well, most people actually, are probably pretty friendly,' he said.

35 years after its release, Evans — now 75 years old — received a message on Facebook informing him that the game was still being played — but no one could finish it because the built-in 'nagware' required payments that couldn't be completed.

That problem has finally been fixed, and long-time Slashdot reader shanen now shares the web site where the full game can finally be downloaded.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.