Step On It!
ACTION ARCADE GAME FOR THE MACINTOSH PLATFORM
MACWORLD 1997 GAME HALL OF FAME
Programming and Graphics by Tim Hunt, Music by Anthony (Tony) De Ritis
Step On It! is a game that was released in 1996 for the Apple Macintosh and 2002 for Mac OS X. Published by Casady & Greene, Step On It! is a puzzle game, with various challenges that are all family friendly. The player takes control of a robotic little man named Ted, trapped in a zany world that looks like a toy set gone wacko! Quick! Help Ted use his magical powers to create building blocks out of thin air, and climb the blocks to the enchanted key. Charge through the doorway into the rainbow passage, and you’re onto the next level of mayhem! Watch out for the smiley faces, hippos, cannons and more along way. But don’t forget to grab the coins, gold bars, clocks and other goodies to buy extra lives and time.
David Van Brink was the author of Apple Computer’s QuickTime Music Architecture (QTMA), which was introduced in May 1995. When composing the music for Step On It! there was no easy way to use a commercially available software sequencer to compose for QuickTime Musical Instruments, so De Ritis built is own sequencer using early versions of the Max object oriented programming environment (pre “MSP”) in order to compose the music for this game. De Ritis’s software sequencer was based on the “MIDI Timbral Player” (MTP) designed by one of De Ritis’s mentors, David Wessel, the Director of U.C. Berkeley’s CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies). De Ritis composed the music for Step On It! while he was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, earning his Ph.D. in music composition with an emphasis in computer applications. Tim Hunt, who brilliantly conceived of and programmed Step On It! was an undergraduate classmate (and fraternity brother) of De Ritis at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA.
1997 MACWORLD GAME HALL OF FAME
In the tradition of Lode Runner and Lemmings, Step On It! is a multiple-level game that combines puzzle skills and manual dexterity—and will drive you to the madhouse until you master it. You are Ted, rather sparsely armed with an arrow and a magic ball—insufficient material to wipe out the various nasties (ant, piggy, ostrich, hippo, and the dreaded Beenie) that kill on contact. A more important aid are blocks you can evoke out of thin air: you use them to climb, thwart the nasties, and uncover treasures.
Your main tool is your wit, which determines how you negotiate your way through perilous scaffolding, infuriating obstacles, and annoyingly colorful foes to accumulate goodies and get to the door that moves you to the next level. Oh yes, there are more than 100 levels, and some of them, I swear, don’t have solutions. At least I haven’t figured them out.
All this is classic stuff for this genre, but the Game Hall of Fame welcomes fascinating variations on the tried and true. Step On It not only provides an addictive single-player experience but allows for multiple-player action, both in cooperative and–best of all–a messup-your-neighbor mode.
— Levy, Steven. “1997 Macintosh Game Hall of Fame.” Macworld
Role
Composer; Music Programmer
Date
1995
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