General Information
Beginner's House Building Guide
House Building Concepts
Complete listing and description of objects
Complete listing and description of room backgrounds
Complete list of replaceable objects
Glider PRO is a game for the Macintosh, developed by John Calhoun and published by Casady & Greene in 1994. In it, you fly a paper airplane (or a "Glider") through a House (or a "level"), collecting powerups, bonuses, and Magic Stars, and avoiding balloons, furniture, the floor, and various other obstacles. Altogether, a simple, fun, puzzle/arcade game.
The feature that has kept the game popular over the years is the built-in House Editor. It allows you to completely design a House of your own: Laying out the Rooms however you want, placing powerups and enemies, and even inserting custom art and sound.
If you are new to building Glider PRO Houses, you should read the Beginner's House Building Guide, which covers basic information about using the House editor. If you've played around with the editor and understand how it works, but still want more information before you really start building a House, the Intermediate House Building Guide might be of interest to you. If you have a good understanding of the editor and House building, and you have a partially built House, refer to the Advanced House Building Guide for information on fine-tuning your House.
If you have a finished House, and you want make it publicly available, I would be more than happy to include it on my website. Simply compress the House with StuffIt and send it to me in an e-mail message in which you request that I put it up. If you're sending a House to me for another reason (such as for testing), and you don't want me to make it available, just say so in your message, and I won't put it up without your permission. If it somehow happens that I put up a House you didn't want to be made available, please let me know right away, and I will immediately remove it from my website. I respect your right to choose if and where you want your Houses to be available, but because of the difficulty of contacting certain House authors, many of the Houses available on my website have been made available without permission from the author.
The art of House building has seen a good bit of evolution over the years. When the first Glider game came out, there was only one House, and no way to create your own.
Later came Glider 4.0, which introduced an external utility that allowed players to create their own Houses. The game itself was somewhat clunky, only supported Black and White or 16-color mode, and the editor was fairly limited, so in that version, House building didn't really catch on. It was also before the Internet was really around, so even if people created their own Houses, there was no good way to share them with everyone.
Then came Glider PRO, with its beautiful graphics, tight game mechanics, powerful House editor, 2-player mode, custom graphics and sound, 3 wonderful Houses made by John Calhoun and others, and other various features. It was as much of an improvement over 4.0 as 4.0 was over the original. In the many years since then, hundreds (thousands?) of great Houses have been built and distributed. The popularity has died down a good bit, but the game still has a cult following.
The creators of the game haven't entirely lost interest, either. Recently, Casady & Greene released a new version of Glider PRO, which supports Mac OS X. There were even rumors at one point of John Calhoun making a new Glider game. Let's keep our fingers crossed...