[buserror]

In 88 (I was 19) I was a 'professional mac developer' and wrote a stack in hypercard to convert huge list of points to polygons, and split them with other polygons.

The project was to split the parcels of land from Lille to Paris with the track of the TGV (high speed train) to calculate the expropriation the state was doing to the poor guys who'd end up getting their huge field cut in two, and would have to drive 20 miles to go from one side to the other :-)

Seriously. Hypercard was pretty cool to throw together something quickly, with a UI and more importantly it gave the client the impression they could go an tinker with it afterward.

It was also excellent to mockup UIs and 'processes' and other bits of Mac apps before committing to making them, so even internally at apple, Hypercard (and Supercard) were used a lot for mockups.

There was a huge ecosystem around hypercard, and it lasted for a very long time.

Oh, and Atkinson is still my hero!

[coldcode]

I used Hypercard a lot for prototyping UI back then. Of course the UIs were not in color but it was a great tool. Supercard came from Silicon Beach which added more functionality to the basic Hypercard.

[gm-conspiracy]

...and Myst.

[djsumdog]

Wait, was Myst in hypercard? I remember watching videos where they talked about how everything was only in 256 colors with adaptive pallets, plus they had Windows, 3DO and Plyastation ports.

[marssaxman]

It definitely was written in HyperCard, using a couple of custom 'XCMD' extensions for the color images and QuickTime animations, which HyperCard itself did not support at the time.

One of my early contract jobs involved reverse-engineering the entire game and reconstructing it as a screen-saver, with a little AI that would generate plausible game-play activity while you watched. The startup that hired me got sued out of existence approximately ten seconds after shipping the product, despite our scrupulous attention to copyright (everything we used was loaded off the CD at runtime), and that was a valuable lesson about the true nature of the legal system. Even still, the experience of immersing myself in that game world deeply enough to recreate its structure remains a fond memory.

[sjm-lbm]

The Mac version was in Hypercard, all of the other versions were different engines written from scratch for Myst.

They actually had to use the same color palette for each age to ensure there wasn't any strangeness as they flipped between cards to move around in the game.

[codezero]

I thought it used Macromedia (Shockwave or precursor?)

edit: I guess not, neat!

[Angostura]

I know the original You Don't Know Jack was also prototyped in Hypercard