Hello all, this is Chris's dad, the creator of Quest of the Great Jewels and Zorphwar. To answer a few questions, the name for Zorph Enterprises was from a story by Stan Dryer called "Zorphwar" in an old issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I think this story can be found online if you google "zorphwar". His story inspired the game and I got permission from him to use the title in my game. Zorphwar was a pretty simplistic pbm game where you had a bunch of starships moving on a rectangular grid with integral coordinates that wrapped around in a toroidal shape. You fired weapons by inputting an X and Y velocity vector and tried to hit enemy ships before they got you. It was sort of like Battleship except the ships were moving and could accelerate and decelerate. It ran for only a couple of years and then died a well-deserved death.
QJ was designed in 1983 when I was working at a small company in Pittsburgh and had a lot of time on my hands - it was originally written in FORTRAN on a VAX computer, then when I wanted to run it from home, I rewrote it in C for my Northstar (64K ram, 5-1/4" floppy disc). IT was indeed inspired by Starweb - I thought it would be more interesting instead of having just one artifact do strange things (the Black Box in Starweb) the game would have LOTS of artifacts that did interesting things. QJ ran for several years and even won a best PBM game award once. I sold it to Rich van Ollefen - don't remember the exact date, but it was sometime in the mid 90's. I do remember the PBM convention in 1996 where a bunch of us played it live. I still have the T-shirt from that convention (which is the only reason I can remember the year).
Welcome to the site! It's great to have you aboard, for a variety of different reasons. I hope that you will find time or make time at various intervals to share your thoughts and memories about your experiences in and with the play by mail genre of gaming. If a PBM related topic that you want to discuss doesn't exist, then feel free to create a new discussion thread at your convenience.
I never played either Zorphwar or Quest of the Great Jewels. I did have a friend, however, named Bob Dickenson from New York that played Quest of the Great Jewels. I don't recall whether he played Quest of the Great Jewels when it was run by yourself or Rich Van Ollefen.
I have a few issues of a newsletter relating to QJ that I sent out to players at infrequent intervals. I could post them here if anyone is interested. I wonder what happened to a lot of the old players (I guess that probably are old now). There were quite a few characters in that bunch.
This thread was the main reason I registered. Thought I was the only one who cared about this game for the longest time.
Really don't know who actually owns the game now, or what they are doing with the property.
Over the last several years I have been getting updates on the game from Mr Jeffery McKee. Since no one seems to be able to get ahold of Mr Jeffery McKee now, including me, and as mentioned here in this thread, the ownership has changed, I'll post some of correspondence.
(5 April 2005
The code is done! But it is buggy, so we are busy in our spare time trying
to get it to work right. Cannot get a game to start yet or build a map but
we are close...
Will keep you posted.)
(16 July 2008
I have had to give up on producing QJ on the web. Someday I may find the
funds and time to do but I am done with local programmers.
QJ is not dead though, it has changed. I have been working on a board game
version of QJ. Believe it or not it is really working out. I have had to
simplify the game but it has a lot of the spirit. I am really suprised how
well it is testing out. I will have a beta version to test locally by the
end of the month. I plan on testing it for most of this year and hope to
have an official version by new years. I will keep you posted on its
progress.
Thank you
Jeffrey McKee)
(7 February 2009
I actually finished the board game. Imagine QJ but with just 4-5 players,
smaller map, using miniatures and custom cards. The funny thing is that I
showed it to a few friends and they liked it. Since then I have found an
investor, a new programmer and we are in the process of signing a contract
to resurrect QJ to the web. We have a 16 weeks programming window to get to
beta. It is very exciting, I was going to email you and tell you but I did
not want to get your hopes up until I have seen more progress. I will keep
you posted but just think, in about 20 weeks, we still need some time to
organize, we could be in beta.
talk to you soon,
Jeffrey)
- I would be interested in that board game. Wished he did something with it, since it was completed.
- For the next correspondence, the domain had been up for a bit, basically just a placeholder letting you know that the game was in the works. I was checking the site weekly to see if it had been updated, and got lucky to catch the game details up on it. It was neat to see the rules and description of the game. Wished I had scanned the site, because it didn't stay on the site very long at all. The following was the explanation for that.
(5 June 2009
Yes I took off the details just for corpyright protection. My partner got
nervous so until we beta test it will be a little vanilla.)
- Following is the remainder of the correspondence:
(18 August 2009
No timetable yet, but we are about a month from testing. I do not want
anything up until legal gives the ok
Jeffrey)
(16 March 2010
You are correct. Our programmer did a great job on infrastructure but failed in
game mechanics. Back to the drawing board.
Jeffrey)
- That is the last of what I received from Mr Jeffrey McKee. Sad that things didn't work out for him, and I guess for us too.
So has anyone else heard anything. Do we know if the new owners are doing anything with it? Is there someone to contact so we can let them know there is a fan base of sorts that is interested in the game?
Do we know who actually owns the game now? Is it Bob McLain or Jeffrey McKee.
Two years ago Jeffrey McKee was actively working on Quest of the Great Jewels, with a supposed prototype board game and the failed web attempt. Don't know if Bob McLain was before Jeffrey McKee, or he came in after.
It's not me. I sold the game to McKee years ago. I haven't heard from him since. I still have the original source code and documentation, but it's on an old SyQuest drive. If someone can explain how to access such a dinosaur on a Windows 7 PC/laptop, I'd be glad to share.
-- Bob McLain
(12-23-2012, 04:14 AM)Starkadder Wrote: Do we know who actually owns the game now? Is it Bob McLain or Jeffrey McKee.
Two years ago Jeffrey McKee was actively working on Quest of the Great Jewels, with a supposed prototype board game and the failed web attempt. Don't know if Bob McLain was before Jeffrey McKee, or he came in after.
(01-07-2013, 03:45 AM)BobMcLain Wrote: It's not me. I sold the game to McKee years ago. I haven't heard from him since. I still have the original source code and documentation, but it's on an old SyQuest drive. If someone can explain how to access such a dinosaur on a Windows 7 PC/laptop, I'd be glad to share.
-- Bob McLain
(12-23-2012, 04:14 AM)Starkadder Wrote: Do we know who actually owns the game now? Is it Bob McLain or Jeffrey McKee.
Two years ago Jeffrey McKee was actively working on Quest of the Great Jewels, with a supposed prototype board game and the failed web attempt. Don't know if Bob McLain was before Jeffrey McKee, or he came in after.
Kinda sad we lost contact with Jeffrey McKee.
Seems SyQuest has drivers for WIN 7, but I guess your problem is the actual hardware connections. Sounds like you would need some sort of PC that allowed a serial or IDE connection, but had USB ability. Or some sort of adapter. Sorry I can't be of help.
