Ancient Linux Games: Xevil

I stumbled on this game while looking for interesting packages in a copy of Red Hat 6.1 that I was toying with on an ancient Intergraph workstation. Sorry for the downtime in the middle while I rebound the controls, I didn't realize until I was recording that the keybinds were all munged because I was playing it remotely through a Windows X server. The RPM description said basically nothing about it, something like "lode runner with violence" and that's kinda accurate. You play as one of several little dudes who run around a procedurally-generated (!) world trying to kill each other. There are a multitude of weapons like flamethrowers, grenades, and the soul-swapper (which puts you into someone else's body and vice-versa) and the goal is simply to kill, kill, kill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game is highly edgy, at least by the standards of the early 90s. Every time you start a new level you get one of thousands of quotes lifted from movies popular with trenchcoat programmer types in the era, e.g. Pulp Fiction, and the levels contain pretty weaksauce graffiti like "drop out of school," "take candy from strangers" and a couple suggestions of animal abuse. There's also a satanic altar you can sell your soul to for an extra life, or shoot to get turned into a frog. Oh, it's also class-based. You play as the "Hero" (e.g. action movie star), ninja (can climb on walls/ceilings,) chopper-boy (little built in helicopter backpack), walker (adorable little killer robot) and so on. Wildly ahead of its time. The most interesting thing about this to me is that it's clearly based on a proper "physics" engine; everything has inertia, you can stand on and get pushed around by other characters, etc. It makes gameplay considerably tougher than it could be, but it's a fascinating decision particularly for the era. This is what I call a "galapagos game," and it's basically the holy grail I'm searching for when I sort through 80s-90s software collections. This happens a lot on the platforms that hardly anyone takes the time to dig through, like the ZX Spectrum: you'll stumble across a game that was made by one guy, 40 years ago, that's completely unique. Like, it's not enough for a game to be part of a genre that doesn't exist anymore, like Jet Set Willy or Knight Lore; to modern eyes those games look like they're from Mars, but in the mid 80s they were as common as platform games would be on the NES, their respective genres just died out after the home computers faded from popularity. No, I'm talking about games that are *unlike anything else made before or since,* and it's weirdly common on the Spectrum in particular. I adore games like that, even if they aren't particularly fun; I'm just glad that someone came up with an original idea, something that is incredibly rare these days. With everyone having played ten thousand games including all the "classics," it's simply very hard not to be derivative of SOMETHING. But it's particularly fascinating to me to find something this original on Linux, a platform RIFE with cheap clones. Virtually every game in the entire FOSS software library at the time (and mostly still today) was an obvious copy (often stated as such in the docs) of a widely known game, usually some impossibly old arcade title. How many ways can you play Asteroids on linux? There have to be a hundred variants. So the fact that someone (in 1994, no less!) decided to make something COMPLETELY original, never-before-seen, that's also a high speed action game instead of something like a puzzle game that would be better suited to slow Unix machines with crappy mice, blows my mind. When I recorded this I believed pretty firmly that I was the only person who knew this game existed, since I found basically nothing on Google and hardly any mention on usenet other than the authors making update announcements. I didn't think to check Youtube - there's actually another video, longer and more detailed than this one, so check that out too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rh4nGcH064 Also, this has been ported to Windows, but the official website has clearly been compromised so I don't know that it's a great idea to download it from there. gl;hf