The Fool and his Money returns

Here's an interesting bit of game-historic preservation: someone has posted a browser-playable version of Cliff Johnson's epic (and epically-slow-to-release) 2012 puzzle game, The Fool and his Money. Here's the new web site: the-fool-and-his-money.com.

I dunno who did this. Cliff Johnson's original web site, web.archive.org/web/20231102015614/http://www.thefoolandhismoney.com, stopped working a couple of years ago. I have no leads on what happpened to the man himself. I hope he's okay.

That's the announcement. I'm about to go into one of my rambles through game history, but I figured you'd want the hot link up front.

So, rambling. Way back in my college years, I played a Mac game called The Fool's Errand. It was awesome. Changed my life. (As you know if you played System's Twilight.)

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Long after that -- but still a long time ago -- Cliff Johnson announced the sequel, to be titled The Fool and his Money. I immediately pre-ordered it. That was December 2002. After Shade but before The Dreamhold, as S. Morgenstern might have put it.

The game went through, let's say, a few delays. (And I gave it some guff on my blog for that.) But it shipped in 2012 and it was pretty darn good. I said that on my blog. My blog review is cited on Wikipedia, which I guess tells you how big a splash the game didn't make.

Sadly, playing The Fool and his Money has become its own sort of puzzle. The original Fool's Errand was a Mac puzzle game, which means it was released as Mac floppy disks. The Internet Archive is great at Mac floppy disks. You can play it right now! (Also play 3 in Three!)

The Fool and his Money, in contrast, was written in Adobe Director / Shockwave. (A different tech than Flash, despite Flash's "SWF" file suffix.) The "modern" Mac and Windows binaries were essentially launchers for an embedded Shockwave player and DCR media file.

This did not turn out to be a long-term solution. Director was end-of-lifed in 2013; Shockwave didn't last a lot longer. Mac dropped the hammer on Intel 32-bit apps in…