Glider

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A trilogy of Macintosh arcade games by John Calhoun. Players navigate a paper airplane past an assortment of lethal household objects, using the ubiquitous hot air vents to stay aloft.

Glider (versions 1 through 3) was a simple shareware game for the original black and white Mac. The house was only 15 rooms, ending in a showdown with a cat (the only living being who intentionally tried to harm you in the series).

Glider 4.0 added (optional) color, a level editor, and a multi-story house with many new items. This was a commercial release from Casady & Greene, who later published an expansion pack.

Glider PRO was designed to be "Glider 4.0 times ten. Everything would be up a notch or two." Players could now leave the house and check out the neighborhood, and modders could craft total conversions. No detail was left unimproved, from the TV sets (which played animations) to the clocks (which showed the correct time). Like Glider 4.0 it featured a room editor.

As with the Marathon trilogy, the second game was ported to Windows and largely ignored, so the third and most moddable remained Mac-exclusive. Glider 4.0 was also released as an NES cartridge... in 2008. No, really.

Casady & Greene Inc., the publisher of the Glider games went bankrupt, the rights to the game Glider have since reverted to John Calhoun. Glider PRO and Glider 4.0 are now free. They can be downloaded from HERE. This also has the Windows version of Glider 4.0. An online version of Glider PRO can be found HERE (and yes, it plays on Windows.)

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Tropes used in Glider include:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer
• Air Vent Passageway (Ducts)
• Attract Mode
• Benevolent Architecture (Floor vents)
• Better Than It Sounds
• Big Labyrinthine Building
• Blackout Basement
• Cats Are Mean (Bad Cat)
• Collision Damage
• Controllable Helplessness - Spiderwebs. But you're not entirely helpless if you have battery power (or bands).
• Control Room Puzzle (The SpacePods house)
• Cool Gate (Mailboxes)
• Depth Perplexion
• Early Installment Weirdness
• Ear Worm (The Glider PRO theme)
• Everything's Better with Sparkles
• Expansion Pack (More Glider)
• Final Boss (Only in the original)
• Game Mod
• Gotta Catch Them All - Magic stars
• Improbable Weapon User - Rubber bands
• Instant Armor - Aluminum foil
• Invisible Wall - some houses.
• Level Editor
• Macro Zone
• Marathon Level (Slumberland's sewers)
• Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode
• Mutually Exclusive Powerups (Batteries and helium)
• Nintendo Hard
• Nitro Boost (Batteries)
• Notice This (Sparkles)
• Not the Fall That Kills You (Touching the floor is always fatal.)
• Oddly-Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo (Glider PRO was a tongue-in-cheek dig at the trendy "Pro" suffix for software.)
• One Bullet At a Time
• One-Hit-Point Wonder - the paper plane. Averted when you grab aluminum foil.
• 1-Up (Paper)
• Path of Most Resistance
• Pinball Scoring - some houses have copious quantities of clocks.
• Projectile Toast
• Recoil Boost - shoot bands backwards to get a slight boost.
• Respawning Enemies
• Save Game Limits (Resumed games are ineligible for high scores.)
• Sequel Escalation
• Shout Out (The games have shout outs to The Lord of the Rings and the Oz books.)
• Sorry I Left the BGM On (You can silence it by turning off a stereo.)
• Spring Jump
• Star-Shaped Coupon (Magic stars)
• The Many Deaths of You
• Unwinnable By Mistake: It's possible to accidentally skip an entire section of Slumberland, and lose its star.
• Updated Rerelease
• Variable Mix (Glider PRO's music goes into a holding pattern if you stay in one room too long.)
• Vent Physics
• Video Game Flight (Helium)