Classic: Glider PRO

By: Derek Yu

On: June 9th, 2009

I’ll end Classics Week with John Calhoun’s Glider PRO (1991), seemingly one of the few early Macintosh games that has enjoyed both a strong community and lasting presence. In it you play a paper airplane that flies in and around a house or set of houses. You can move left and right but have to depend on air drafts (usually provided by vents in the floor) to lift into the air. The goal is to collect all the stars in each house, and avoid hitting obstacles.

I hadn’t played Glider PRO before tonight, but now that I have I can safely say that it is a wonderful game. Slumberland, the only official level (or “house”) packed with Glider PRO, is challenging and also rewarding to play – getting to a new part of the house is a lot of fun due to all the mundane-yet-exciting things you can encounter as you fly from room-to-room. As much as I do enjoy the bombast of modern games, there’s something timeless about the way some of these older games can conjure thrills from, say, getting a box of rubber bands to fling from your Glider. No cutscenes, no tutorials every time there’s a new thing… just a paper airplane and a house to explore. And for a game with such simple basic mechanics (only the arrow keys are used) there really is a lot that you can see and do, and many surprises in store.

The Mac OS9 version of the game comes with a house editor, which was unfortunately not ported to the OSX version. If you have an Intel Mac, you’re out of luck. But there are a handful of downloadable levels available from the official website and the fan sites linked on it.

Windows users can try out the archaic black and white version of the game, called Glider 4.0 (also obtained from the official site linked above).

Note: According to Ted Martens, the original Glider PRO only let you see one room at a time (on OSX you can see as much as the screen allows). He recommends lowering your resolution to play it as it was meant to be played.

TIGdb: Entry for Glider PRO