• games a - z
• apps
• guides
• forum
• irc
• about

This page is a wiki. Please login or create an account to begin editing.

Squish

Guide Squish, the titular rubber ball, through 100 puzzles. Version 2.6.8 with Squish Guidance book included.

One of my earliest memories of Henry is that by the time he was in high school he was already earning royalties from a Mac shareware game he'd made. It was called Squish, and its premise was inspired by the game Lemmings. But it was another favourite childhood game that showed Henry the value of truly committing to his projects: TaskMaker.

"It was a black + white adventure fantasy, top-down, square tiles, fight monsters and so on," says Henry. "I really liked this game and I figured out that its file system was pretty simple, because when you win the game, you get a special power where you can change the world and you can change the individual squares on the map to be whatever you want... It gave me the idea to make a map editor for the game, so I could make my own maps and walk around them."

Then only about 12 years old, Henry reached out for help to finish things off—first from his father and then from the game's author. Impressed that Henry was hacking his game "for good instead of evil," the author sent along a free colour copy of the game. "That was the first time I got paid in some way for something I'd built," says Henry. "I think that solidified in my mind that I could do something with this, and I could actually make games for a living and I would enjoy it."

So he set about making Squish, a puzzle adventure game. At first, Henry didn't intend to sell it. But when his family relocated to Ottawa and he started learning the programming language C++ at Glebe Collegiate Institute (GCI), he quickly cobbled together enough knowledge to make a version of Squish that ran as a native Mac application, and posted a free demo on bulletin boards, websites and FTP servers.

Fans of the game promptly mailed in their $10 to order the full version. But the best part wasn't the money. "I would get these personal letters from people who wrote, 'I love your game! My six-year-old and I have been playing it. Here's a picture he drew of Squish,'" says Henry. "It was awesome."

Squish also attracted older players. Mac publisher Fantasoft Games got in touch and offered to take over publishing Squish. That meant no more handwritten letters in the mail, but it also enabled a wider audience and credit card transactions. "At its peak, I was making about $500 per month, which is an amazing amount of money for someone in high school," says Henry.

  — Kickass Canadians' profile of Henry Smith

Compatibility
Architecture: 68k

System Requirements

• 68030 processor or higher
• 640 x 480, 8-bit color screen
• 4 megabytes of RAM

☃Disclaimer: Macintosh Garden does not claim rights to any software on the site. To the best of our knowledge, these titles have been discontinued by their publishers. If you know otherwise, please contact us and we will remove them accordingly. Thank you for your attention.