Mission Thunderbolt
| Mission: Thunderbolt | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Dave Scheifler, John Calhoun |
| Publisher(s) | Casady & Greene |
| Distributor(s) | Casady & Greene |
| Designer(s) | Dave Scheifler |
| Series | Jaunt Trooper |
| Platform(s) | DEC, Mac OS, Windows |
| Release | 1992 |
| Genre(s) | Roguelike |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Mission: Thunderbolt is a roguelike computer game with a futuristic storyline. It was originally developed and released on DEC mainframes as Doomsday 2000, a four-part game, and later ported to both Mac OS and Windows. Mission: Thunderbolt is part 1 of the Jaunt Trooper series and was released on both Mac OS and Windows. Part 2, Mission: Firestorm, was only released for Mac OS. The game was one of the first commercially released roguelikes. It put a graphical front end and a full set of sounds in place of the ASCII text traditional to roguelikes. It was also unique in the sheer number of actions/interactions possible. Being closed source, many mysteries of the game were never fully resolved.
The creation of this game began in late 1986 as a means for the author to learn the C programming language while working for DEC. The game was developed under the VMS operating system on a DEC VAX mainframe computer; a VAX workstation was used in later years. The first version was released after nearly a year of development and testing to DEC employees worldwide over the Internet in 1987; the author kept a large world map on the wall of his office and had a pushpin placed where ever a DEC office was known to have employees playing the game (there were lots of pins). Although titled Doomsday 2000, within DEC the game was known simply as Doom.
Doomsday 2000 was modeled along the lines of other popular mainframe computer games at the time, such as Rogue, Hack, and Larn, but was specifically designed to have much greater depth of game play and greater freedom with regard to interacting with the game world presented; these are aspects that set the game apart from all other mainframe games of that era. For example, you could bash down walls to gain access to otherwise seemingly inaccessible regions. One trick that was often used by players was to blow a hole in the floor above a particularly troublesome foe lurking on a lower level, then lob grenades through that hole to destroy the critter from relative safety, though some foes were clever enough to clamber up after the player character.
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