It all started with ShadowThief.

Ah, the good ole days when a black-and-white (black-and-green?) Palm III was hi-tech! 1-bit graphics! A retro throwback to classics like Dark Castle on the original Macintosh! Fun times. Awards. Simple pleasures.

DeepReader emerged from a frustration that no one on these now-deeper-bit-depth-enabled devices was using anti-aliasing on their type! (Way before the retina screen days, mind you.) I was apparently the only one who found reading on these devices unbearable. (Okay, clearly I wasn’t the only one, since DeepReader was brilliantly popular and spawned a host of copy-cats soon after. Many swore for a long time after that mine was still the best. That always made me smile.)

Then things got fancy. Powerful devices emerged. Graphics got real. “Hi-res” devices like the Sony Clie and the Tapwave Zodiac started looking like a precursor to the iPhones of today. I got interested again. I found some programming partners because I didn’t have time to design the game, build the world, do all the graphics AND write all the code.

Then they bailed on me.

So I wrote the code too. It took more than a year. It was not a profitable enterprise. And it came out pretty much less than a year before Palm went away. But it still won awards, was “acclaimed,” had a huge following, and might well have been the best game on the PalmOS. (Or so some claimed.)

The one Palm game in development that never got released emerged as a tech demo/proof of concept at one year’s PalmSource conference. It got many oohs and ahhs, and I must admit, if we’d had time to finish it, it would have been quite cool. It was essentially like Myst for the Palm, but a bit more interactive. Today you have real games like this for the much more powerful iPhone, but in it’s day, this little demo was pretty cool.