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By Shatner's Bassoon!!!

Shatneroids is BACK after being offline for almost 30 years. The game which was tangentially mentioned in one of William Shatner's autobiographies has returned in a new form!
Tapping the fire button will shoot a small projectile, while holding it will build up a plasma ball. Firing and moving creates heat. If your engines get too hot, you'll have to wait for them to cool before you can fire again!
Sometimes there's a planet exerting gravity.. Don't get pulled into the planet!!

The Original Game

The original game, Shatneroids was a Java Applet written for the very new "HotJava" browser in its Alpha 0.1 state on Sun Sparqs at Edinburgh University in around 1996. The original implementation of Java had a few bugs, and I was just learning object-oriented coding, so the original code was messy with hacks and workarounds.

It was released onto the student-run Tardis server and resulted in the page being temporarily disabled due to the traffic. It lived on Tardis for a few years, briefly seeing a little resurgence in interest after Mr. Shatner's book came out, but then was lost when someone accidentally wiped a bunch of folders on the Tardis server.

The loss of the original source code

The source code was stored on Tardis and thus believed to be lost. Many years later, when I was unpacking a load of things which had been in storage, I found a box of disks from my Uni years. On one of them was a very early attempt to clean up the classes and to add some more features. I compiled it up on a Windows '98 VM and it mostly ran!

The discontinuation of Java

Unfortunately since then, Java Applets have been discontinued by most browsers, so the game won't run any more. I'm not sure why, the JVM has been made to be safe for other things, so I'm not sure why everyone bailed on Applets, they were cool fore-runners to Android Apps. But, bail they did, so if I wanted to re-release the game onto the internet, I had to rewrite it.

The only available replacement for Applets is HTML5 using Javascript. Luckily Java and Javascript are quite similar, so it was relatively straightforward to port over, excepting that Javascript's attitude towards objects is.... not brilliant.

I then cleaned up the code, rolled back the stuff I was doing to add more features, and found some new sound files to replace the ones that were lost.

The original game was meant to have a sound track, but I never got round to making one, so I've grabbed a freeware background track and added it.

William Shatner's 90th Birthday

I wanted to re-release Shatneroids now in time for Mr. Shatner's 90th birthday. I've been a long-time fan, e.g. my home Wifi is called "Shatner". I always meant to make a longer series of Shatner-related games, but life took over and I never got the chance. Maybe now, with many years behind me and I can see how rubbish my early coding attempts were, I can go about making a proper Shatneroids :)

I hope you enjoy this little visit to 1996 as much as I've had rescuing it from the ashes!

Nick (DBM)