My turn to find a weird Hulabee game

Keep in mind that I'm not as good at researching as SomeRandomHEFan and I'm also sleepy, so this will be a little barebones. Sorry!

While looking through a pack of Big Fish Games... games I found, I decided to search for .pan files. And lo, I found a game called Four Houses. ...Well, what the heck is that?





I'm not really sure how to play this game, so I probably angered all Four Houses fans...

Interestingly, this game is credited to Beep Games rather than Hulabee. (It was published by Oberon like many of Hulabee's later games.) The engine is also listed internally as being developed by Grumpy Games in this iteration. (Hmm doesn't that sound familiar?)

This and 3 other games are listed on Ron Gilbert's Wikipedia page as games he worked on at Beep. The others are Flying Leo, Zodiac, and Realms of Gold. They also worked on a game called Word Spiral around this time. These could be more Sauce engine games. Brad P. Taylor (a name you should all know) is also credited on Flying Leo and Zodiac. Also notice Rhonda Conley, Clayton Kauzlaric, and Pat Hoynes in the high score list. They probably worked on the game, they're credited on some of the other Beep games, and are all former employees of HE and Cavedog.

Well, I guess the question is, how did Beep Games end up with the Sauce engine? Also, I haven't found the other games yet.

Nice find. This is where I come in.

I found all five of Beep's casual games from the 2000s. (I could only confirm Ron Gilbert's involvement with Word Spiral's later iOS port, but I'd assume he worked on the original as well.) They're all mentioned on their old website.

Both Four Houses and Zodiac are still being sold by Big Fish Games (yes, they somehow still exist) to this day, it seems. The way they handle distribution is a bit annoying because you can only download their games through their client. But I was able to download Four Houses this way, so I'd assume Zodiac also works. I've purchased games from this site in the past. It works, but naturally involves DRM, as always with casual game portals from the 2000s.

I don't know if any place still sells them, but I was able to find archived installers for Flying Leo, Word Spiral and Realms of Gold from Gamehouse.

Now the bad news: I found no signs that the other four games use Sauce as well. Two of them put their data in ZIP files with a DAT extension, while the others use a format I don't recognize with the GG extension.

I can only theorize that after Ron Gilbert departed from Hulabee Games when everything went to hell at that company in 2003, he got the license to continue using the Sauce engine at Beep Games, but that only ended up happening once. Perhaps Flying Leo and Zodiac already entered development before he joined and therefore didn't use the same engine. Given the fact that their subsequent games wouldn't use the engine either, I'd assume it either proved to be a poor fit for their games or maybe they just didn't want to or couldn't retain the license.

At any rate, I currently don't have a setup that lets me run the extraction scripts (and after the huge nightmare I went through setting it up the last time, I don't feel like giving it another shot). If you can run them, feel free to take a look.

But I guess this means Sauce powers a single game that still isn't abandonware. Maybe I should check it out.

My mistake. I didn't realize Four Houses was only released in 2006. At that point, Ron Gilbert should have already been working there for a while. So why develop a game in Sauce then of all times? This is certainly strange. Hulabee should have been all but dead at that point, with Shelley Day being in jail.

The only theory I can come up with is that maybe Beep Games (or rather Beep Industries, as they were still called back then) used Hulabee's liquidation as an opportunity to purchase the Sauce engine. Perhaps Ron Gilbert wanted to be reunited with it, but after making one game in it, the developers were forced to conclude it wasn't what they were looking for after all. This is basically just blind speculation at this point, but it's the only explanation I can come up with. One of the developers would have to shed light on this for us to know why this one specific game uses Sauce.

I spoke too soon again. An examination of the executables revealed that Word Spiral and Realms of Gold also have various references to Sauce. It seems that the developers merely decided to change the data archive format after Four Houses' release. So we have uncovered three new games that at least use technology that made its debut at Hulabee Entertainment.

However, I couldn't find any references to Sauce in Flying Leo and Zodiac. So I suspect those ran on a different engine that was then ditched in favor of Sauce.

SomeRandomHEFan wrote:I spoke too soon again. An examination of the executables revealed that Word Spiral and Realms of Gold also have various references to Sauce. It seems that the developers merely decided to change the data archive format after Four Houses' release. So we have uncovered three new games that at least use technology that made its debut at Hulabee Entertainment.

However, I couldn't find any references to Sauce in Flying Leo and Zodiac. So I suspect those ran on a different engine that was then ditched in favor of Sauce.

I asked Brad P. Taylor on Mastodon and he said Flying Leo and Zodiac used the LSD engine. https://corteximplant.com/@lardratboy/110877943418539662

Great name.

Yeah, I took a glance at your Mastodon profile a bit ago and saw that myself.

Interestingly enough, if Mobygames is right, Ron Gilbert is not mentioned in the credits for these two games. Do we actually have any confirmation that he already worked at Beep Industries at that point? If that company embraced the Sauce engine at the same time he joined, that would make a lot of sense.

But we know Ron Gilbert already left Hulabee in 2003, presumably during the disaster that apparently left the company unable to pay its employees for almost six months before being forced to let them all go. So if he didn't immediately join Beep Industries after that, where did he go instead? Considering he's a pretty notable figure in the history of video games, parts of his career have surprisingly sparse documentation.

Quick update. Realms of Gold can still be purchased from Shockwave.com. So Word Spiral is the only one of Beep's Sauce games that's probably abandonware.

Also, a brief test seems to imply that the executables for Word Spiral and Realms of Gold are interchangable, as long as you also copy a DLL they need. Seems that much like Hulabee, Beep's programmers didn't realize that they should lock down their builds to one specific game when DRM-protected free trials are involved.