1980s nostalgia in OpenGL

Mercenary Reloaded

The 1980s offered many great video games, but the memory of only a handful continue to have an impact into my adulthood. This handful includes Elite, some early Infocom text adventures, and a game called Mercenary. Mercenary was like the terrestrial version of Elite. As one of the original open world games, it starts when you crash your spaceship onto a planet drawn entirely from simple vectors. Between the green of the ground and the blue of the sky are buildings scattered across a vast city. With very few instructions, your first tentative steps have you walk towards a cuboid that could possibly be a vehicle to see whether pressing b will let you board it. It does, and from that point you're free to do whatever you choose as you walk, drive, and fly around the city trying to find a way to escape the planet's gravity. Your adventure takes you deep underground, high up to an orbiting station, past countless unique vector buildings, and under the Palyar Commander's Brother-In-Law. It's an utterly unique and immersive game, only improved by its filled-vector, 16-bit sequel, Damocles.

Sadly, the programmer behind Mercenary and Damocles, Paul Woakes, died in the summer of 2017, but Mercenary Reloaded by Jolly (Andreas Eversberg) is a worthy tribute. Not only does it cleverly reverse-engineer Paul's ingenious games engines, it hijacks their rendering processes and sends them to OpenGL, freeing all those glorious vectors from their 1980s/1990s 320x200-resolution constraints. The results are fabulous. Damocles' burning sun is no longer stepped. The tail of the comet is crisp. The shadows falling across your bus route is faultless. You even have the potential to run the game in VR, something never imagined in the 1980s. Thank you, Jolly, for this wonderful project. And thank you Paul Woakes.

Project Website

http://mercenary.eversberg.eu/

One of the best things about Mercenary and Damocles, apart from the revolutionary open-ended gameplay, was the several ways to complete both games.