In order to write a great adventure game, Appleton felt he needed to write a great authoring tool with which to build it. Nobody had done anything of the sort except for two Japanese games released around this time - Wingman for NEC PC-8801 and Planet Mephius for FM-7.

One that would make use of its mouse and graphical menu-driven interface and its relatively high-resolution graphics - 512 by 384 pixels, versus the 320 by 200 pixels offered by IBM PCs and Commodore 64s of the time. He bought a Mac shortly after its January launch that year and taught himself to write code for it, with help from technical manual Inside Macintosh and Apple software evangelist Alain Rossmann - who gave Appleton a copy of the Macintosh assembler.Īppleton wanted to write a great adventure game on the Mac. World Builder was written in 1984 by a graduate economics student called Bill Appleton. What, for the unaware, is World Builder? Who's this Ray Dunakin guy? And what made his games special? Sultan's Palaceīut let's come back to that later. But a few months ago he finished it, and now Khadpe has reimplemented Ray's third game, A Mess O' Trouble, in this new engine - complete with a fresh lick of paint (though it's still black and white) and a more newbie-friendly interface. Apple likes to overhaul the innards of its operating system every few years, which has forced Khadpe to rewrite chunks of his new World Builder engine as he's developed it. And he's spent the past decade, on and off, rewriting the World Builder engine for OS X.

He's been the proprietor of the Ray's Maze Page since he created it in 1996. But fate conspired to force the games into oblivion as Apple moved the Mac into OS X and then over to Intel processors. His 1990 world-hopping adventure title Ray's Maze puzzled and delighted Mac gamers the world over, despite it having been made with an early black-and-white Mac program called World Builder, and his later games Another Fine Mess, A Mess O' Trouble, and Twisted! only added to his reputation. In the heady days of Macintosh shareware gaming, Ray Dunakin was a star.

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