Klik and Play
Too funny game #9
Type of Game
“Instant” game creator. Ha! Subject to two or three conditions and a thousand approximations
Release date on our machines
1994, when you could still create video games on the spot. Or not.
Developer
I… um, well, I'm not really sure. It doesn't really say. There is the Maxis logo on the U.S. box, so let's just say it's them—it looks classy, right?
Publisher
Europress Software Ltd. Who are they? Major software developers and distributors in the ’80s and ’90s. Software, mind you. Not games.
Availability: Well, officially, it's absolutely nowhere to be found—which shouldn't surprise anyone. That said, it's still easy to find as abandonware.
When my stepdad’s computer became part of the family, I really, really played a lot of games on it. Am I talking about that machine as if it were a full-fledged member of the family? Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me—in fact, I preferred that computer to many of my relatives, especially my stepdad. That’s still true today, but let’s move on. I also spent quite a bit of time on software. So-ft-ware… I feel like that word has disappeared these days. I feel like the biggest boomer in my area just writing this (and it’s boomerish to write “boomer in my area” too), even if it’s just to talk about a program from 1994. Do people still say “program”? Whatever. It’s all kind of funny, isn’t it? No, come on, let’s get to it. All right, then. Klik & Play is one of those “programs” I really loved, just like Techno Maker, Fine Artist, or, um… Studio Impression The Lion King. The basic concept blew my mind, and it must have blown the minds of a lot of young gamers back then. The ability to create your own video games (well, yeah, but…)? Without having to code to whip up a crazy video game hit (on that point…)? All in just a few clicks (come on, enough with the lies already)? No need to give too much away—I quickly gave up when I saw the amount of work I’d have to put in, even just to get a foam pyramid and a hard-boiled egg to interact properly.
Click and… forget about it
Hey, don't judge my game design ideas—they're what led me to work in rail freight, thank you very much. Still, I believed in it at first. Plus, there were tons of little games included on the CD-ROM to convince us that the claims on the box were legit. So, did I give up too quickly, thereby depriving myself of a glorious career as a game designer? Even if the answer is yes, it would hurt too much to admit it. But I’m willing to pretend for five minutes.
Triptych and Play
First things first: forget about that cringeworthy video advertising the game that plays during the tutorial. It’s some old guy who drones on the whole time, mixing actual explanations with patronizing talk and shameless promotion. Hahahaha, the magic of the ’90s, huh! Alright, the first real thing to do: start a new project. You’re then faced with a blank page and a toolbar. Right away, it feels like you’re in something serious—like a more complicated version of Photoshop or PowerPoint—full of stuff I’d never seen before. So it’s more like Fine Artist, the only drawing program I’d ever seen running up to that point. Except that Kilk & Play, in addition to offering a few basic graphics functions, lets you view its library of available sprites. Characters, spaceships, creatures, backgrounds… Just scrolling through those menus and dragging the images onto my blank page just to look at them up close kept me entertained for the next half hour—or even longer than that.
Some of them played back with pretty smooth animation, especially an explosion effect that I always rushed to place right in the middle of my “project” so I could watch it on loop. What was it going to be good for? No idea, but I just had to put it somewhere. The thing was called “Kaboom”—pretty cool, right? Then, once I’d added what I liked, I’d press a big play button that “launched” the scene. And then, a whole bunch of warning messages would pop up. “That tank plowed right into that poor golfer—what do we do?” “This dancer stepped out of the screen—do we kill her or let her live her own life?” Of course, it was limited to displaying “object X collides with object Y,” but I enjoyed exaggerating a bit. Some warnings were easy to handle with a simple action like bouncing or disappearing with a sound effect; others were much harder.
Depending on the ideas I had, or the options available to me, I wanted to try more complex things, but that just opened up new dialog boxes that were increasingly incomprehensible. Until the worst one of all—the one that asked me to write LINES OF CODE! WHAT? NO WAY, BECAUSE WE WERE TOLD FROM THE START THAT… Oh boy, my hopes quickly crumbled. I didn’t give up right away, though. I tinkered a bit with the basic commands, trying to figure out how I could make a certain enemy behave a certain way based on a specific player action, but I never managed to make anything work. I was too scared to take the plunge, especially because, among the few ideas I had, I always imagined things that were way too complicated. I wanted to jump right into designing a super-deep game, even though I didn’t even know a tenth of the software’s features.
I could already picture myself recreating my own SimCity, or a version ten times more in-depth than my little baby, Warriors of the Eternal Sun. So, instead of trying to make progress step by step, I’d just sit there staring at the sprites without doing anything. I imagined bringing these images to life in a fabulous virtual world, but it all stayed in my head. Well, look at that—nothing’s changed today. That lovely, deeply depressing realization I just had—what a blast! One day, I showed Klik & Play to my best friend, Randall Geyser. Without too much trouble, I managed to convince him that together, the two of us would be able to transcend the limits of our imagination. We managed to motivate ourselves to go a little further than just looking at still images. We were going to create our own game—at least the beginning of it! Let’s do this! We jumped right in, without the slightest idea of what we were going to make. Which basically means it was all doomed from the start.
Two hours later, we’d just managed to get a warrior from Golden Axe (or a marine from Aliens—I can’t remember which) to run in place and slide around using the arrow keys. If he came into contact with a ball bouncing randomly across the screen… he’d start spewing green plants in every direction, making horribly shrill sounds, and keep doing it forever. Oh, and he couldn’t move anymore after that. I think he fired in front of him by pressing the Space bar, but it had no effect—mainly because we hadn’t actually implemented that hypothetical effect yet. All that in two hours? And, um… yeah, well, that’s not bad! Right? For several minutes, we tried to convince ourselves that we’d still come up with something potentially respectable and usable. Our warrior kept running without moving, spewing dozens of screaming ferns all over the screen.
Then we burst out laughing at how terrible it was. We never touched it again after that, but the memory of the plant-ejecting warrior kept us laughing for many years. Only Adibou 2 and its interactive skit minigame gave me the same creative thrill—and had me laughing so hard my stomach hurt. You could do almost nothing, but at least it ran on its own, with virtually no personal effort required. Exactly what I was looking for in life. So, um, Klik & Play also offered ready-made video games to entertain users without them having to go through the creation process. I obviously tried most of them—some for just a few seconds, since their gameplay, graphics, or controls were so painful to watch. But hey, Randall and I had a good laugh over those, too. A few stood out a bit, but I’d be hard-pressed to name just one.
Several more or less playable shooters, but nothing to worry about for the R-Type franchise. Same goes for the brick-breaker games, which didn’t add anything new to what already existed in Arkanoid or Pop Corn. A downhill slope that wouldn’t faze Ski Free in the slightest, and a variety of things ranging from the super boring—like card games or very basic casino games—to the utterly terrifying, like that memory game where a clown would invade the screen if you won. Forget Pennywise, Art from Terrifier, or Twisty from American Horror Story—that clown would tear them all apart in a heartbeat. There was one game, though, that I liked just a tiny bit more than the others: Romeo. Or Romeo vs. the Pie Devil. Just a guy who has to save his girlfriend from a mouse-headed demon… who tries to stop him by throwing cream pies at him. Yeah, I don’t know. But it gave me Black Lamp vibes, though it was way less stylish. That was enough to keep me entertained for a few minutes.
Between Forgetfulness and Addiction
Can software actually have a soundtrack? Well, um… during the sandbox creation phase, no—there’s nothing there. At the same time, they would’ve had to come up with one or more loops capable of keeping us focused for hours without getting on our nerves. A feat the developers clearly didn’t even try to achieve. On the other hand, in the list of video games included on the CD-ROM, there are some tracks that’ll really blow your eardrums away. Creations by a certain Darren Ithell, if I’m not mistaken. And some of them aren’t just there for show. Take Astro Force, for example, whose theme music easily outshines the gameplay in terms of quality. Some of the sound effects transport us right back to that era when everything seemed thrown together, but with insane charm. Take Passport to Peril or Kiyeko and the Lost Night—gems like that. And now listen to the sound of hedgehogs in the Hungry Hedgehogs mini-game. Yeah, simply wonderful. Except… I don’t remember any of this. I just didn’t spend enough time with them to get those sweet melodies stuck in my head. But it doesn’t stop there, because there was one track I had no choice but to hear—even if I wasn’t actually listening to it: the intro. That one played at least twenty times on that old Pentium 75. That’s right—I’d say Klik & Play was launched about twenty times before I let it gather dust. That’s both far too few and already a lot, depending on your point of view. I think this intro is incredible. In barely a minute, it manages to make us believe in everything Klik & Play promises. Awesome games that are easy to create, international success, overnight fame, millions squandered on drugs and alcohol, a downward spiral with no turning back… uh. I actually wanted to emphasize that it conveys a positive, creative, and exciting energy, helped along by the images of the computer mouse imploding as it discovers a bunch of characters ready to bring fantastic video game concepts to life! AHAHA! And honestly, this intro gives me some serious nostalgia vibes. I love it almost as much as our salad-throwing warrior.
Forget it… and play
If I had to name a piece of software related to video game development that I regret not learning, I’d probably mention Virtools or Unity. These were programs we were introduced to during our Game Design training, and I never tried to master them, even though I had plenty of opportunities to do so. I left that task to the friends who were working on the same projects as me, both in school and afterward, naively thinking we’d accomplish great things together (spoiler: we never released anything, and we all hate each other now). Come on, even RPG Maker—which I only used for an hour in my entire life—would have deserved more attention than that misleading “Klik & Play.” But none of those programs made me laugh as much as that famous session with the plant-spitting warrior—plants we called “salads,” for some reason. And I got it for free, since it magically appeared on my stepdad’s desk all by itself. I wonder what its sequel, Games Factory, is like. Yeah, that thing had a sequel—two even, I think. It seems so absurd to me today, but after all, Techno Maker got one too, so why not? And besides, the ClickTeam logo is clearly visible on those boxes—apparently the real developers. But wait… that same logo also appears… on the main menu screen of Klik & Play!!
Oh, there it iiiiiiis! Why didn't they put it on the box? No idea. It seems this company still exists today, which seems even more absurd than anything I've said in this article. Still, I probably could’ve done better than this total dud of a project if I’d stuck with it a little longer. Some people managed to come up with some pretty cool stuff using that good old software, including a Sonic game, among other things (thanks to Joueur du Grenier for mentioning that in one of his videos—it really brought back the nostalgia like never before). But man, if I’d known, it might have sparked my calling as a game designer long before I turned twenty. I probably would’ve done a little better in the field, instead of failing so miserably. Boo-hoo-hoo! Give me back my childhood! Take me back to that day when I made a guy running spit out salad! I’ll try harder, I promise!
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