GM4 Games CD 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 GameMaker 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.