It isn’t all doom and gloom over here, sometimes one of my projects actually comes to something worthwhile, even if I’m the only one that will ever see value out of it.
Out of nowhere the other day I remembered a game from my mispent youth; Creatures 3. This was back from the compact disc days. I literally owned a cardboard box with the little booklet and a jewel case containing a little compact disc with the words Creatures 3 printed on it. It had a CD key! It was one of my first experiences with modding a game!
This was before the Sims, one of the earliest games to introduce artificial life. It was really sophisticated in the way it handled genetics and artificial intelligence in your creatures that they could evolve and change over generations. It’s kind of a tragedy of the market, because the developer was really innovative for their time. They released a follow up called Docking Station which allowed you to play with your friends online. It just never got a big enough community.
It was sort of the same situation that Myst got into with Uru. Launching a live service game for a niche product for nerds wasn’t going to generate enough to keeep that kind of staff around.
Anyway, same as Myst, fans have kept it alive. Creatures 3 and Docking Station collectively called Creatures Exodus still exist as a product that can be played in 2025 by some miracle.
I thought I was going on a much longer journey that was going to involve some heavy duty hardware emulation. At the moment all I have live is my Windows 11 Machine. First I got it from GOG, but I couldn’t get that version running after a few days of trying. Then I discovered it on Steam and with very little coaxing I got it running.
Better still, after some surfing I discovered that many of the mods (the add ons are called agents mostly) still had active downloads online, and some had been uploaded in the last five years, amazing!
So after three days of work, I had what I had been searching for; a slice of my late childhood, Creatures and Docking Station running on my main computer.
Chances are high I’ll get to share it with my children, and that’s pretty amazing.
It takes a lot of the sting out of the recent frustrations. Our A/C doesn’t work right now, and there are plenty of other frustrations, but at least I can still hunt down a forgotten favorite out of my past. I might hunt down Black and White, a game EA killed awhile back and is currently very difficult to find, just for the heck of it.