Flying Guts
Release type: Freeware
Release date: March 20, 1995
Levels: 3
Author: Marty Valenti
Related games: none
Game-Maker was popular during the same period as Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong Country, and CD-ROM multimedia games like Night Trap and The 7th Guest. In that brief period before everyone fell in love with the polygon, the mass media and industry consensus was that schlocky digitization and sex and gore were the future of the medium. Thus we have the ESRB that we know and ignore today.
This was also the era of Doom. Whereas today we remember it for its meticulous design and the template it provided for the whole FPS genre, its original touchstones were its ultraviolence and its contribution to “virtual reality” — which somehow the media stirred in with the digitization and multimedia nonsense.
So, riding the zeitgeist, Marty Valenti decided to digitize himself and enter a world comprised of Doom samples and textures. He put some real mettle into his plunder; he unwound the Doom .WAD file, found all the best imagery and sound effects, then meticulously converted it all to a format and resolution comprehensible to Game-Maker. Valenti then got someone to take dozens of photographs of him in various stages of walking, running, and dying. He cleaned up all the photos, downsampled and adjusted them again, and animated a character sprite out of them.
The character does animate pretty well. It also moves about as well as any platformer character in a Game-Maker game. Jumping mechanics aren’t the easiest thing to get right, and Valenti gets them spot-on. Even the control scheme is sensible, spreading the game’s five weapons across a series of two-key bindings: Z and X, A and S, Q and W, and so on.
For all Valenti’s effort, it's unclear how much art there is to Flying Guts. He did a great job with the item sprites, but when you pick them up you get digitized quotes from Bill & Ted. The levels are designed pretty well, but thanks to his effort in purloining and exhibiting id’s textures there’s almost no variety from level to level. And frankly the game’s gore component gets old within about ten seconds. Still -- consider that this game would be at least as good (and probably better) with wholly original sounds and visuals, and then marvel at the determination involved.
Perhaps most interesting is the protagonist. As far as Game-Maker goes, there are only scant known instances of a fully digitized player character: the Muybridge lady of Sheldon Chase’s games, the rather disturbing Time After Time and Reptalia, and Marty Valenti’s efforts. Of those three, Valenti’s are the best-executed (so to speak), and probably the most inspirational. Based on his efforts here, it would probably be feasible to design a whole Game-Maker game out of original photographed material. Whether the payoff would be worth the effort is unclear, but it could turn out pretty well.
Contents
Instructions
Press F1 at any time to get this instruction page.
Key controls
Use left and right arrow keys to walk right or left.
Use the up arrow to jump straight up.
Use the up-right or up-left arrow keys to jump left or right.
Shooting
first weapon:
- X: shoots right
- Z: shoots left
second weapon:
- S: shoots right
- A: shoots left
third weapon:
- W: shoots right
- Q: shoots left
fourth weapon:
- V: shoots right
- C: shoots left
fifth weapon:
- F: shoots right
- D: shoots left
To pick up a new weapon press Enter
To drop a weapon press backspace
Credits
Backgrounds..........Marty Valenti Enemies..............Marty Valenti Weapons..............Marty Valenti Character............Marty Valenti Sounds...............Marty Valenti Title Screen.........Marty Valenti This Space Available.Your Name Here
Availability
This game is known to have been distributed on local bulletin boards, contemporary to its development. Any other distribution is unknown.
Archive History
In the late 1990s, Flying Guts was discovered on an early Web archive of DOS software. It was located and identified largely through recognizing the standard Game-Maker file extensions. The game has since been retained as part of the Archive.
Links
Interviews / Articles
Listings
Misc. Links
Downloads
- Flying Guts (517.2 kB)
- Level 1 map (126.5 kB)
- Level 2 map (158.8 kB)
- Level 3 map (70.5 kB)
