the_game

The_game is the kind of oddity that surfaces in game archives once in a blue moon: a promotional trifle handed out on floppy disks by the antivirus company Norman Data Defense Systems at the CeBIT trade fair in Hannover in 1994. Its author, a programmer at the company, never signed his work; the intro screen merely explains the game was written mostly for fun, but with a serious thought behind it.

That serious thought is virus awareness, dressed up as an arcade chase. Five office computers line the top of the screen, the rest is taken up by a sprawling blue maze, and coloured floppy disks keep crawling in. Every one of them is potentially infected and slowly worms its way towards one of the machines. You steer a tiny green figure and have to catch and scan the floppies before they reach a PC. Miss one and the machine is infected; once all five are down, the game is over — just as in real life, as the intro dryly points out.

It plays exactly the way it sounds: you watch where the disks appear, plot a route through the tangle of corridors and race the clock. A status panel tracks your score, level, infected disk count and remaining points, so there is something to improve on, but this one mechanic is all the game has, and the difficulty rises simply by throwing more floppies at you.

As a game it is a ten-minute, single-purpose diversion. As an artefact it is far more interesting: a snapshot of how IT companies marketed themselves in the mid-nineties, when instead of banner ads you got a floppy with a hand-coded game on it. Collectors of promotional games will find a nice early specimen here, complete with an antivirus theme that fits the sponsor perfectly.

You can try this rarity on oldgame.cz right in your browser, no trade-fair floppy required.