This chap's maintained an Apple game for 32 years – from Mac to iOS

In an era where new games are sometimes considered "dated" 12 months after their debut, one man has spent 32 years keeping a single title active. Michael Casteel has been building and maintaining his version of Klondike longer than many of his fellow App Store developers have been alive. The Mac version of the card game traces …

[RyokuMas]

Go for it...

... but not on iOS unless you have a huge discovery/UA budget...

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Go for it...

I checked out your link. I take one quote from it : "it can give you big success if you manage to tick a lot of boxes and get a little bit lucky.”

Seems to me that that is par for the course in any domain. If big successes were commonplace, the notion of "big" would just be pushed higher.

Now, far be it from me to say that mobile is no more difficult than any other area. It seems indeed that success on the mobile platform is tied to Apple itself heavily promoting you, and good luck getting that far.

But to consider that not having many "giant successes" as a yardstick for difficulty seems a bit naïve.

[Joe Drunk]

"It kind of rekindled things. I got to learn a new language, I got involved in Github, it was programmer heaven," he said. "I didn't have any schedules and I didn't have any bosses hammering on me."

It sounds like heaven to me too if you include significant disposable income.

[AndyS]

Um... He's retired. Presumably on a pension.

Taking up a hobby in retirement is pretty common, you know.

[Roland6]

Re: He's retired. Presumably on a pension.

Interesting, given the number of really good utilities and applications that have disappeared over the years, it is a little surprising that we haven't seen an online marketplace develop where the individual developers of such small projects can sell them onto someone else.

Whilst, taking on someone else's code isn't for the faint-hearted - as is taking on someone else's business, it does provide them with a potentially remunerative exit and someone with the incentive to continue product development and keeping the product in the various app stores etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparable length of time

There's actually a lot of old crap out there.

http://tinyurl.com/OldTrek

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Brilliant!

[BurnT'offering]

So when can we expect the return of

Kitten Shaver?

[Hud Dunlap]

the high scores are crazy

Ok I downloaded it. Something like 27000 points for winning. I took a look at the high score list and someone is over a billion.

[benderama]

Re: the high scores are crazy

People sniff their network traffic, figure out which packet(s) are for updating game center, submit better scores with packet modification. Because that's cool these days.

[45RPM]

This was one of the first games that I got on the Mac. It was diverting enough - until I got my first colour Mac and I was able to play Seahaven Towers instead. Seahaven never made it past PowerPC (68k & PPC Classic, and PPC OS X only) - but the original developers are working on an updated version right now.

More interestingly (for Mac Geeks) is that one later version of Klondike was delivered as a SuperFat Binary that worked on everything from 1985’s 512k ‘Fat’ Mac all the way up to 2003’s G5 with OS X. Clever stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

Zork

Initially Fortran, then C, now Java still working on my Mac.

[45RPM]

Re: Zork

…not by the original developer though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Zork

yes its is, the DEC version, converted to C then converted to java by me.

[Matt Bieneman]

Great article, but...

...Objective-C is hardly a 21st-Century language. It's more like late 1950s meets object-oriented programming. It was a huge setback for Apple developers when they were forced to go from nice clean & modern C++ code to incredibly ugly and cumbersome Objective-C.

Also, Klondike was a great game! I'm glad to know it's still available!

[gnasher729]

Re: Great article, but...

I'd say Objective-C is a language for people who want to get things done. C++ is for people who try to prove how smart they are. Give me Objective-C any day.

[Matt Bieneman]

Re: Great article, but...

Sorry if this sub-thread is getting off the article's main topic. I assumed that readers would know the two languages. C++ does everything that Objective-C does, but without all the extra square brackets and other clutter, and many developers had already been using it for several years when Apple made the switch. Its simpler syntax is the reason why, given a choice, most developers will choose it over Objective-C; also it is used by far more developers than Objective-C, so you will find far more help online if you have a problem. Apple has essentially admitted that Objective-C is lousy, by switching to Swift, which is a lot more like C++ than Objective-C. In addition, when Apple switched from C and C++ to Objective-C (and Objective-C++), it set developers back because they had to learn a niche language that essentially is only used for Apple products. Apple has fixed the problem of Objective-C being a lousy language by introducing Swift, but by making it difficult to use industry-standard languages, it is still difficult to support multi-platform products (Apple + others). Since Swift is actually a reasonably good language, this remaining problem may gradually fix itself. (Swift is now available for Linux!)

[maladmin]

Elite

Gotta plug Elite. Originally played in 1984, playing again now. Although it's not a one-person show, the original developer is still involved.

Mario is pretty much the only other game with a similar length pedigree I can think of.