About this Archive
The Game Maker 4 (GM4) Games CD was awarded as prizes to the winners of the first Game Maker Competition that was held from August to October 2001. The collection contains every game submitted to the competition, as well as many of the games submitted to Dr. Mark Overmars's original Game Maker website outside the competition. This archive was made, along with the raw copy of the CD uploaded onto the Internet Archive, in order to preserve these games from the early era of Game Maker history, in case my copy of the CD goes bad or becomes lost.
Many of the games on the CD were never published in the Games Showcase on the original Game Maker website; only those deemed "Excellent" were put up on the website for others to download and play. For the competition, games that were rated either "Excellent" or "Good" were published for download, while the rest received honourable mentions on the website.
The CD contains games in three different formats, all of which have been prepared so they can be played immediately on modern Windows PCs, without requiring a copy of Game Maker 4:
- Standalone (.gmr + .exe runner): These games required no further preparation in order to play.
- Game Data Only (.gmr): These files were each paired with their own runner in order to function.
- Editable Source (.gmd): Each of these were exported as a standalone using Game Maker 4.3c, the closest compatible version I have on hand. Unlike the standalones above (which were exported using Game Maker 4.0), these standalone combine game data and the runner in a single executable file (.exe). The original .gmd editable source files are also made available to download; they require Game Maker 4.0 or higher to open and edit.
Ratings
These are the rating categories the games were originally organized under:
A indicates that the game was a submission to the first Game Maker Competition.
Troubleshooting
I'm not sure of the exact technical details, but here I try to explain some technical issues you might encounter when play these old games.
The game freezes for several seconds on startup or when transitioning between rooms.
This is due to how modern Windows handles playing MIDI files, which most Game Maker games of this era use as background music. Many games attempt to start playing background music when the room starts, which causes this delay to happen when moving between rooms. I haven't found a fix or workaround for this yet, so the only solution is to wait it out.
The game is drawing opaque pixels on sprites and backgrounds where there should be transparent ones.
I believe this is tied to fullscreen games using "exclusive graphics mode". Alt-tabbing in and out of these games exposes some graphical glitches in these legacy DirectX systems. Closing the game and restarting it should fix the issue.