Mugen along with Don Miguel translations of RPG Maker and 2d fighter maker 95 is how I got into programming. I'm guessing 99% of web developers today probably wanted to be game developers.
All I wanted to do was make Dragon Ball Z games. At the time 1998/1999 there were only Japanese versions of DBZ games as illegal roms. I created a few DBZ characters for Mugen, 2d Fighter maker 2nd and made an RPG maker game.
I used to collaborate with other creators over AIM making characters and other things. Some people would rip sprites and edit them and I would code them. The thought of remote work being a thing now is funny as I was doing remote work when I was 12 - 17 years old
I remember liking Mugen over Fighter Maker at the time because a character could be backed up to a floppy disk where as I had to use my dads zip drive to back up a Fighter Maker character.
> The thought of remote work being a thing now is funny as I was doing remote work when I was 12 - 17 years old
+1. Companies were surprised that remote work "works". But many of us were basically doing remote work as hobbies during the 90s (or earlier). Not to mention the countless amazing open source projects done entirely remotely.
I feel like the same logic could apply to doing work without meetings. Somehow open source and hobby projects produce amazing work without constant pointless meetings, and yet managers think work would grind to a halt without them.
I discovered it in a game magazine and immediately downloaded it and it was a whole new world. It had its own weird GUI that was rendered in full screen, and there are almost NO youtube videos of some of the impressive demos like the 3D FPS Yeti game and others.
My early teen years were filled daydreaming of games I could make on it and thinking it was easy because well, Basic, I ended up spending most summers just running other peoples code, creating levels that never saw any use.
edit: nope I was wrong! found this old footage, brings me back memories
Oh yea DarkBasic. Good times. Do you remember the jetski game it came with. I never really made anything with it. Just got bits and pieces of stuff. I bought a license for Blitz Max and Blitz Basic also.
I went whole hog down the Blitz route: basic, plus, 3D, max, and finally monkey. I'm actually back to using BlitzMax for a project right now! Weird nostalgia plus re-learning.
wow, I had never heard of this, this looks like it would certainly have been captivating at the time to a certain kind of budding coder. (I was a very anti-Windows Mac guy at the time, and also 28, so that probably explains why I never heard of it)
> Don Miguel translations of RPG Maker (…) is how I got into programming.
Same here, but I never finished any game. I spent most of my time dissecting other people’s projects and engines. With some creativity you could do impressive stuff despite the limitations.
We probably crossed paths back then - I had made a few characters myself and collated a few packs of neo-geo characters that weren’t in KOF. Even ran a community website briefly.
It was also for me about the same time I was getting into development in a big way.
I miss those days of the web. Looking back on it now, I expect a lot of people that were around before the September that never ended were saying the same of the rest of us in 98/99, but those to me really were the glory days.
I’m relieved that Reddit still exists, as it’s about the closest thing to a collection of those early niche communities that we have left.
Do you by any chance remember a 2D bootleg dragonball game called "Vegetas Wrath"? It was a one player side scrolling beat 'em up, and I think it used sprites pulled from SNES games like Hyper Dimension and Butoden.
I remember playing it some time in the early 2000s when DBZ was big here in NZ (a few years behind the states, as normal).
Ha, an RPG Maker forum was the first online community I really became a part of, I want to say I was 10ish? I never really made anything of note, but it introduced me to programming, web & graphic design, and introduced me to people from all over the world.
I still remember my very first introduction to programming was setting a variable to flag if a chest had been opened or not.
Oh man Don Miguel's RPG Maker translation, I remember including on CD's I burn with friends who didn't have internet access along with music and a few 100MB divx movies
Yes most of all the Nes, Snes, Gameboy and Sega Genesis ones. I remember the one on Genesis was sprite ripped quite a bit and edited. One of my favorite games to just play was Dragonball Z legends on Sega Saturn. Although it was hard to get to work when I was first getting into it.
This is a continuous stream of CPU vs CPU matches from a massive collection of fan-made MUGEN characters, some of which are deeply weird (Col. Sanders, anyone?) You can pay them for some fake internet points to gamble on the outcome of the matches, but I've found that watching all the strangeness that folks came up with is entertaining enough on its own.
There was a time where I bet everything I had against an anime character and ended up in the top 100 of richest players on the site. It's all fake, but the gambling rush I had once I had won that match felt real.
This is both fun and clever case on internet. So is this thing controlled by one guy and made him money 100% passively? Amazing work done, I am wondering how he can achieve this and if we can do same thing?
Used to play a fair bit of MUGEN growing up. I remember waiting years and years to see "the next part" of Kung Fu Man's story...
Also, I want to use this comment to shout out a creator I looked up to in those days: the late, great Reuben Kee. That guy had creative output that I still don't think anything I've done possibly ever holds a candle to. Not sure what the average character looks like these days but words can't describe how...different - polished - just plain old awesome Dragon Claw was. Even his Evil Ken/Evil Ryu made almost every other character you could download feel like an unfinished rough draft in comparison (save for those made by a few other people who really knew their stuff - Phantom.of.the.Server/PotS comes to front of mind as the premier example).
Someone else in this thread mentioned that 99% of web developers probably wanted to be game developers. Messing with MUGEN files to make the game "what I wanted" was one of the earlier experiences I had that taught me that software was not an impenetrable wall and I didn't have to be afraid to "touch anything" - just cautious where relevant.
Haven't thought about this game in years (probably since the height of SaltyBet's popularity). Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
This thread brought many memories. Like others here, Mugen was my first experience with something that looked/felt like programming. I think I was 11 years old or something.
I remember that I was obsessed with Mugen. I would spend hours downloading chars/stages/screen packs and making my own games combinations. Eventually I started messing around with the source code of the chars/stages etc and started to learn on my own. I never really learned how to build chars properly, but I was good with the screen packs and stages.
Something that I find amusing is that some of the screen packs that I ripped from NeoGeo games and adapted for Mugen 20+ years ago are still available and I guess some people still use them :-)
Two cool works I did was ripping the Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 [1] and KOF'96 [2] screen pack. I even found some videos on YouTube. One of those videos the person who uploaded the demo even gave me the credits after all these years. The second one there was no mention but I know for sure this is my version because of the quirks/bugs :-) I never knew how to properly align the numbers with the texts on the combo/hits sprite messages that are shown during combat haha
Hah. Went through hell and back with the MUGEN community back in the day :)
It's actually an interesting history in terms of copyright ethics and open source. Story time:
Around 2000, the general convention in the US and European MUGEN community was that you could very strictly only use another creator's stuff with their permission. If you were caught using someone else's code (i.e. statemachine descriptions), hitboxes, or anything else, you would most likely be banned from the community forever. This happened to a lot of people, some decided to just leave, around others it caused a huge amount of drama.
Now, the weird part is that MUGEN was a community built entirely around ripping sprites from proprietary fighting games, and using them to build characters. Sure there were original works, but that was a small amount by comparison. But the part about asking for permission also included not using sprites that other people ripped. Ripping sprites in different ways would sometimes cause recognizable patterns, e.g. the way that palettes of PNGs were ordered.
There was a lot of culture built around this "respecting creator's wishes" idea. In particular, if you couldn't get a hold of a creator to ask for permission, you just couldn't use their stuff. Which meant all the work of creators who had moved on from the community, and couldn't be reached, was impossible to built upon. If you wanted to create a character, you were expected to start by ripping the sprites from the game yourself, or get permission to use the sprites from someone who had done so. There were several stories of well-known creators who created amazing characters, but were shunned from the community when someone found out they had reused sprites that someone else had ripped without permission.
At the same time, the original creators of MUGEN - Elecbyte as featured here - had vanished for many years. The latest official version of MUGEN they had left was Linux only, and a version before that for Windows 98. Noone used the Linux version, and it had some slight incompatibilities due to new features, so the community was stuck on the Windows 98 version. When Windows XP became popular, this caused a lot of problems because the Windows 98 version just wouldn't reliably run and DOSBOX hadn't yet been around.
However - Elecbyte had sent a Windows-Build of the newer MUGEN version (that was officially only released on Linux) to a few folks who had donated to them, before they vanished. This version not only worked under Windows XP, but also brought improvements with it, particularly a capability to use higher resolution sprites. But the whole culture of respecting creator's wishes obviously and especially also applied to Elecbyte, and they had specifically asked not to pass the Windows version around.
So obviously, this led to a situation where slowly but surely everyone used the Windows MUGEN and it became the de facto version, but noone could admit to it or talk about it. The Windows version was passed around hush-hush, everyone holding up appearances that they certainly would never disrespect Elecbyte by using it against their wishes.
Crazy times :)
In 2007, things came to a head. Me and a couple other folks decided to completely turn mugenguild.com, then the largest MUGEN community (I don't know if it still is), on its head. We changed our policy to fully accept reusing other people's work, that we wouldn't police creator rights, saying that this was the only way the community could prosper. We also said that WinMugen was now accepted to use, because sticking to the DOS version was stupid and would be the death of the community sooner rather than later.
Some people flipped out over this. There were comics drawn of the involved people (including me) pissing on creators, a new community was created (RandomSelect) as the declared new bastion of creator rights. There were pages and pages and pages of a whole spectrum of reactions, some gloating about their new freedom, others lamenting the downfall of society as we know it.
It was the worst of times, it was the best of times :)
It is similar to how the Warez and online music piracy scene works. They steal from everyone with abandon but god forbid one person repacks, re-encodes or changes someone else's "work". Some communities thrive on drama.
Man, me and my younger sister used to play MUGEN all the time on gramps ancient computer (which he barely ever touched, as he still preferred his typewriter).
As another HN user has aptly put it: "Thanks for the trip down memory lane", indeed.
One of my friends worked on My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic, based on this engine. I seem to remember I had a go at reverse engineering the file format so we could script builds, rather than going through the UI? My memory might be wrong though. I didn't make much progress, if I remember correctly, and there seems to be more documentation now.
Wow, I thought it was just a game with a shit ton of characters someone made. Wasn't aware the reason is because it was an open source engine. Such good memories.
Mugen was so much fun to play, my friend’s brother had the Dragon Ball Z bundled with it. Spent many hours playing it with my friend, it was very easy to import new characters for hours of fun.
The DBZ chars were my favorites. I have some good memories of playing it for hours with my friends as well. We used to share the same keyboard to play. The first player would use the arrow keys + page up/down home/end etc and the second player would use YGHJ as the arrow keys + QWEASD as the main buttons to play.
I'm left-handed, so I would always take over the left side with WASD for movement - looking back my friends very kind that they let me reconfigure the controls each time.
I wonder why we call things "frameworks" in web design but "engines" in game design. Any ideas or am I totally missing the distinction between these terms?
Engines are significantly higher level than what we call frameworks in web dev, with a lot of stuff built-in and coding being a minor requirement. Traditionally they were even genre-specific: fighting game in case of Mugen, shooter in case of Quake and Source, etc. Also, in the case of Mugen, they are mostly data-centric rather than code-centric like a web framework.
Another interesting distinction is that engines can often written in one language but offer extensibility in another, like being written in C++ and having programmers write Lua or C#. Notable exceptions exist, however. In frameworks that's quite rare I guess.
In addition to the high vs low level comments, I think another helpful connotation of the "engine" term is that you're often dealing with things that happen per frame, with many frames a second. The concept of an "engine" pumping out all these frames can be helpful.
This isn't to say that you don't write code which runs at framerate with a web framework, but often this is abstracted behind layout and user interaction concepts.
It's the opposite. A game engine is a higher level piece of software, that often requires less coding (and in certain cases almost none) than what we call framework in other development areas. Modern engines also often come with complete tooling.
However, most game engines are highly extensible, which naturally means that people will build libraries targeting those engines, for doing very specific things.
All I wanted to do was make Dragon Ball Z games. At the time 1998/1999 there were only Japanese versions of DBZ games as illegal roms. I created a few DBZ characters for Mugen, 2d Fighter maker 2nd and made an RPG maker game.
I used to collaborate with other creators over AIM making characters and other things. Some people would rip sprites and edit them and I would code them. The thought of remote work being a thing now is funny as I was doing remote work when I was 12 - 17 years old
I remember liking Mugen over Fighter Maker at the time because a character could be backed up to a floppy disk where as I had to use my dads zip drive to back up a Fighter Maker character.