Gibbage: an arena deathmatch for Windows

The framing on the page this archive holds is a deathmatch played for laughs rather than for tension: twenty-seven distinct arenas including zombie-infested hospitals, the roof of a moving train and the inside of an alien creature. Power-ups, special moves and a weapon set are all advertised, along with team play, which places it firmly in the tradition of arena games built for a room rather than for a ranking.

What that combination tells you about the period is worth drawing out. In 2007 an independent studio making an arena deathmatch had a choice: build for the internet and take on the cost of servers, matchmaking and anti-cheat, or build for two people in one room and ship. The second route produced games that were cheaper to finish and much harder to sell, because a reviewer alone at a desk cannot evaluate them properly and a browser alone at a keyboard will not buy them.

The arena count is doing sales work as much as design work. Twenty-seven maps is a statement about value in a market where the alternative was somebody else's free demo, and almost every page in this archive leads with a number of that kind for the same reason.

The commercial arrangement was the ordinary one — a Windows demo with a registration purchase — and it left the usual residue, which is to say none. No publisher was credited on either the listing or the review, and no current source was found.

The price is the most revealing line on the whole page, and it is not a round number. Where almost every other listing in this archive asks nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents, this one asks roughly six pounds or ten dollars — and the record carries the approximation openly rather than a fixed figure. An informal price is a signature: it belongs to an operation small enough that the person who wrote the game also decided what it cost, without a currency table or a reseller setting the terms. The advertised feature list reads in the same register, promising power-ups, special moves, weapons, team statistics and, in its own words, unnecessary levels of gore.

Established here: the genre, the arena count, the single and two-player modes, the advertised feature set, and the fact of both a listing and a full review. Left open: who published it, who wrote it, when it shipped, and whether a copy can still be had. The record is generous about what the game contained and silent about everyone who made it.