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How Acrophobia was
Revived |
It's been a long journey to the point we're at today... so how did it all happen? Well, sit down, and get ready for a story... cause it's a long one.
It all started sometime in 2021... where I was first introduced to the Bezerk games through the WebTV version of YDKJ the netshow. Yep, that's right. Now, the funny thing about that is that I had barely even heard of You Don't Know Jack at this point. Seriously. I mean, I DID know about Jackbox Games, of course, but not about their history. Wow... I think I'm the only person who can say they got into YDKJ because of the netshow that wasn't around for it's original run. Anyway, I tried to get it working, but obviously, it didn't work... so I just moved on with whatever else I was doing that day, and forgot about it (For a while, at least).
Moving on to some point in 2022, I was messing around with the After Dark 4 Deluxe disc in a virtual machine. That disc has installers for the netshow and Acrophobia, so I installed them, of course. And since I actually had copies of the games, and remembered about the whole WebTV thing, I tried to get them working in some form. That didn't go very well for me, but unlike last time, I actually did try looking up more information on those two games. Sadly, I didn't find much at that time. Why not? I dunno. And... that's when I lost interest again! Hooray. How boring... luckily the next part of this story is where things actually get interesting (In case you haven't stopped reading this by now).
Another fast-forward: It's now the 10th December, 2022. By some miracle, I randomly came across C WT's original gameplay videos and installation tutorial for YDKJ the netshow 1.0. At first, I just thought: "Oh hey, that's cool"... but then, I realised. THIS WAS THAT NETSHOW GAME! I immediately scrambled trying to finally get the game to work, and after some trouble, it did! After having some fun playing the game, I re-watched the video and noticed how he said that 1.5 wasn't working for him. So, just for fun, I tried getting that version working myself too. I mean, I can't revive anything, right? It's not gonna work at all... right!?
On the 13th December, 2022... I actually made progress. WOAH. I knew I had something big here, so I immediately joined C WT's Discord server, and sent a message telling of my progress so far. Things then went REALLY fast, as by the end of the day, everything worked! I posted a tutorial on how to get 1.5 working properly, all was well, and I was about to wrap up this little project of mine. But then... I remembered something. Acrophobia. Oh yeah, we're getting there now...
I reinstalled Acrophobia, and tried my Netshow tricks with it... nope. Nothing. After some trial and error, though, I discovered that the Web Archive had saved some Acrophobia-related files from it's original servers! Thank you, oh great Internet Archive... thanks to that, I was able to get to the login screen for Acrophobia. However, of course, I couldn't login. Yeah... this was going to be a lot tougher than I thought. After some MORE trial and error, I found, shall we say, the lost gold. There was the needed login response AND the all the commands that the game expects from the server inside the EXE itself! Talk about luck! Finally, I was able to get past the login screen and get my first look at the Gameplay Options screen. At this point, with how quick things were progressing, I knew I had to go all in with this revival! Everything I potentially needed was right there... how hard could it possibly be?
Oh, late 2022 SecondSight... you poor, naive soul. Let's just say that this game likes to torture me specifically. Figuring out what exactly the game wanted from me with all of those commands drove me insane. Every step of the way, something got in the way. Although, it all worked out in the end... thanks to the discovery of a DEBUG EXE accidentally left in one of the game's installers, and some help from C WT, we managed to pull it off. A fully working version of Acrophobia... after 18 years. Wow. I never thought I'd ever get this far, considering I don't have any reverse engineering experience (And that's kind of needed for most revival projects like this).
But, after about two years of work in total, I can now say that it is possible to revive an old 90's online word game. What a ride...
Bezerk Revived is not associated or affiliated with Sierra.