"Peter, which is better: Antz or A Bug's Life?"
"Doesn't matter, Uncle Ben; Bugdom's better than both!"

If Nanosaur was the standard-bearer for Apple's rescue, then this 1999 pack-in pint-size platformer was their marketplace mascot. Pangea Software had delivered them one impressive playable demo, and it stood to reason they'd ask for another. But this go-around would be different for the developer, with lead coder and designer Brian Greenstone had a choice to make. As Cadensia mentioned in her write-up, either he'd keep his current job helping Apple's QuickDraw 3D team, or he and his contractor co-developers would make a successor to their '98 game as bundled shareware for the next generation iMac. He chose the latter, for the better it turns out. (Considering he'd just about bailed on Mac software publishing entirely prior to Nanosaur, all because of Apple's managerial incompetence and imminent failure, this amount of caution makes sense.) Rollie McFly's quest to save the titular 'dom from King Thorax's red ants and accomplices became another windfall for Apple and Pangea, the kind of game even a picky Steve Jobs could feel proud of. Still, I felt a bit of fatigue and disappointment after finishing my playthrough, wishing it had been more of a leap in polish and consistency.

Today it's a solid romp, more ambitious than its predecessor; it also hits higher highs and lower lows. Playing it now's pretty easy thanks Iliyas Jorio's modern PC/Mac port, too. Compared to Nanosaur's 20-minute single stage, Bugdom puts you through 10 untimed ones, with three of them mainly focusing on boss fights. To account for the longer playthrough, players get three save slots, plus the usual assortment of tweaks and control settings found in other Pangea works. Our goals aren't all that different from those games, either: collect rescue the trapped ladybugs, dodge or destroy the realm's disgruntled inhabitants, and use items like keys or power-ups to reach each level's end. But I think Greenstone's able to recontextualize these fundamental elements appropriately, keeping his earlier games' arcade-style antics while opening up the world you explore through both layout and mechanics.

Players start under a blue sky amidst grasses, fungi, and a healthy forest of dirt and foliage. Bugdom manages to cycle through several types of environments, so it's apt that we learn the controls, game loop, and objects of note in a friendly setting. Rollie's most useful technique, beyond just a basic jump and kick, is his Sonic-like ball roll (pun intended), a move that lets the plucky pill-bug dash across most areas in a flash. Careening into enemies damages them, and I had a lot of fun just zooming off of hills and cliffs to clear gaps or leave clumps of baddies in the dust. It's overly sensitive to analog controls on my gamepad, however, making a case for manipulating him and the camera with keyboard & mouse. Unlike Greenstone & Harper's earlier designs, this game does a much better job of using said peripherals, which now included Apple's infamous Y2K USB mice. Both configurations having such pros and cons is an improvement for sure, as the keys-only approach in Mighty Mike and company was less comfortable. I didn't feel a lot of jank or awkwardness moving Rollie around these environments compared to the raptor or knock-off G.I. Joe in those precursors.

However, it's when you reach the water taxi and dragonfly levels that Bugdom shows off its less than pleasant side, starting with hit-or-miss collision detection. The opening two rounds only required that players get through doors and light sections of water or trenches, with little precision platforming needed. Moving into the mosquito swamp complicates things, as fish leap into the air and can easily one-hit-kill you with all their aquatic speed. Getting a token and riding the silt strider's quite fun, but also noticeably chaotic due to a large hitbox and, sure enough, misleading level geometry you can get caught on. Thankfully it goes both ways, as no enemy's gonna knock you off this ride easily. Same goes for the next map, a twilight flight in a garden where humans trample and caterpillars crawl through bramble. Greenstone wisely gives players an invert toggle for the dragonfly section, which is a nice change of pace from dodging huge feet and kicking spear-toting, rock-throwing ants in the kisser.

Collision issues also crop up with combat and the momentum rolling, which isn't too much of an issue until later in-game. See, many of Bugdom's foes take multiple hits to defeat, a given since Rollie's more about agility than pure offense. Continuing the circle of life in this violent manner often leads to tense close-quarters combat, whether it's dodging flies with boxing gloves amidst a maze of deadly Pikmin-esque slugs, or eventually manipulating Thorax's fire-breathing soldiers into detonating cherry bombs around them. The player could try and just kick the whole time, as reliable as that is, but there's extra risk & reward from headbutting the baddies in ball mode, which even lets you sink them into deadly water, honey, or magma. Hell, the final non-boss level punishes players for not punting troops into the fiery goop, as killing them on land just lets their ghost come back to haunt you! Learning how to deal with aggressors while platforming and exploring each maze keeps the pace up, only devolving into molasses towards the end.

After the game's first half concludes with an initially confusing but thrilling dogfight against bees as you shoot down their hive, Pangea starts to seriously challenge anyone who's hoped for a gauntlet. The hive's insides, now wrecked and abuzz with angry apidae, present a series of tunnels, molten honey caves, and dead ends where you must jump on conveniently placed plungers to bomb your way open. This had some irritating, less than clear moments—namely how landing in the sweet stuff ends your life, but grabbing an invincibility drop lets you wade through for a time—but otherwise I consider this Bugdom's finest 15 minutes. The difficulty's just right, and Greenstone wrings a lot of blood from the level's concept, with hordes of drones kamikaze-ing you in vain while you snoop out both hostages and lucky clovers for extra points.

By this point I'd gotten a couple hours in and could really appreciate the audiovisual splendor, at least for the hardware Pangea had to work with. 2nd-gen iMac desktops and laptops weren't a huge leap in power or functionality over the previous year's models, but Bugdom was built to push ATI's newer Rage Pro and Rage 2 GPUs, as well as increased color depth on these displays. Sure, the vibrant hues and more rounded modeling wasn't all that unexpected from a high-end N64 platformer like those this one measures against, but who am I to complain? Kids saw these memorable critters and a decently realized world at a higher resolution without compromises, stripped from the fuzzy TV signal defining console peers. I can even forgive the short draw distance here, as it's improved over Nanosaur and extends far enough to facilitate fast rolling without bumping into everything. Mostly. There's also generally better music and sound design, from jaunty jigs and polkas at the beginning to moodier marches and electronica as one reaches deeper into the evil king's dominion. I vaguely remember fiddling around with a store demo version back when my old man brought to the local Apple store, immediately taken with how much it resembled and evoked the Dreamcast games I was enjoying.

Sadly this level of quality doesn't quite last through to the adventure's conclusion. I can appreciate the increased steps to completing every threatening area across Thorax's ant hills, with so many bombs to explode and dodge while evading those intimidating cockroaches and Floormasters fireflies. But it's here where Bugdom turns rather mean, not providing enough 1-ups and other pickups to compensate for abrupt first encounters with these puzzles. Nor are there a lot of checkpoints to prevent needless runbacks, something I rarely had a problem with earlier. It feels like Pangea fell into that classic game dev trap of testing earlier content with less experienced players, camouflaging the more unfriendly bits later on as testers had practiced so much they'd fly past said tough spots. Perhaps they went a bit too far in demonstrating Thorax's power, with such recalcitrance manifesting as overstuffed rooms with a few too many things going on.

The penultimate stage really goes off the rails, though. It starts off fine, introducing firefighting puzzles where you must locate and turn valves to quench the deadly embers. But then come the Tarzan leaps over lava, beset by unclear jumping angles and timing. I only had to restart any level once before this after biffing it right at the last anthill above-ground, but I had to end this last stretch early rather than suffer several loops of deaths I felt were unwarranted. Moreover, the player's actually punished for using the level's gimmick without prior experience, since new water pools can prevent you from breaking open nuts lying on the floor and thus getting extra score and power-up items. Having to route the best, least risky path through these miniature Moria is just asking too much on a first run. At least the final boss fight's much better, as Rollie just has to get Thorax all soggy via the broken garden pipes and then headbutt him for victory. Contrast that with level 7, the Queen Bee duel, which quickly becomes an unintuitive slog as you try to spin into her abdomen while staying out of honey globs which slow you down. Bleh…what a messy climax to a once spick-and-span undertaking.

Ending Bugdom on such a sour note means I can't rate it as high as I'd hoped, but I'm hardly at a loss for praise elsewhere. Adapting the appealing parts of Mighty Mike and Nanosaur into a mascot platformer took Greenstone & co. much longer than previous projects, eight months vs. a few at best. And I think these efforts pay off in a sometimes frustrating, but generally satisfying small-sized sojourn. It soon graced the raster fade-in of monitors in bedrooms, computer labs, and trend-chasing venues like museums across North America, sustaining plenty of attention. Pangea made so much profit and mindshare from this classic of Mac gaming that Greenstone could effectively run it full-time, no longer having to make his shareware titles when free time or contracting allowed. The new millennium saw not just Bugdom 2 for Apple's long-awaited modern operating system, but Pangea's next take on the action-platformer adventure with Otto Matic, among other early Mac OS X notables.

In a way, Bugdom was Mac OS' most accessible swan song—far from the esoterica of modding scenes for Marathon and Escape Velocity, the literary depths of Riven and Obsidian, or the now aging but ever present HyperCard scene that early-to-mid-'90s Mac owners subsisted on. Whereas Pangea's earlier dino romp dovetailed with an unexpected revival of the Apple brand, Rollie's handsome have-at-you with the king's unending formicae presents the Cult of Mac's commercially coherent legend, with Jobs returning hope to a land ransacked by corporate hatchet-men and the PC world invading and overriding this ecosystem. I'd like to think of Rollie less as Jobs, though, more so Greenstone taking on the visage of mascot platformer classics to stretch and refine a winning formula. I only wish that he hadn't feel this obligation to remake the same game so much, even if something as "out there" as Xenocide on Apple IIGS could only have worked all those years back, before genre codification mattered to more players.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023

     ‘He was alone in the centre of the clearing, alone except for a little group of larvae huddled beneath a dandelion leaf, the last survivors of all his kin. He knew he had to save them, or all was finished.’
     – Robin Hawdon, A Rustle in the Grass, 1984.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Mar. 7 – Mar. 13, 2023).

Shortly after the release of Nanosaur (1998), Brian Greenstone, having been prevented by his immediate superior from working on a new project in order to focus on OpenGL, decided to resign from his position at Apple to create a game that would offer a glimpse of the next generation of video games. More ambitious than Nanosaur, Bugdom was intended to be not just a technical showcase, but a complete platformer experience, with different mechanics and a real sense of progression. Bundled with the iMac DV 2000 and the first iBooks, the title was a huge commercial success, introducing video games to many families.

     What ambitions for a 3D computer platformer?

The player assumes the role of Rollie after the king of the red ants, Thorax, has kidnapped all the Ladybugs, leaving the hero to embark on an adventure to rescue his friends and defeat the enemy king. The adventure is divided into ten levels, which either require reaching the end-level log or defeating a boss: Rollie starts in a relatively peaceful meadow and progresses through increasingly hostile environments, be it a garden lawn with oblivious humans, a hive of aggressive bees or a pseudo-volcano. Rollie can jump, roll and punch, but is still a relatively weak creature compared to the other insects, and must tread carefully.

After a brief introduction, the player can start experimenting with the controls, and Bugdom manages to be particularly intuitive in the way it works, but its ambition soon suffers from the technical limitations of the time. Although the game is vibrant and features decent 3D, the comparison with previous platformers is rather harsh. Brian Greenstone is certainly right when he mentions Bugdom's colourful look, which was quite unique for computer games at the time, but the same effect was achieved by Super Mario 64 (1996) – and to a lesser extent Banjo-Kazooie (1998) – with a much more subtle balance between a dynamic camera and a wide range of movement.

Bugdom remains particularly simplistic and is not bothered by its multiple collision problems or the relatively illegible nature of its levels, due to the repetition of graphic elements without any variation and the rather poor viewing distance. It is easy to miss a corridor in the camera's blind spot, as in Level 3. The emphasis is more on the other secondary elements of the game, which help to demonstrate the new potentialities of the computer games. Rollie's roll is particularly fast, allowing him to traverse entire sections in a fraction of a second, before bouncing off a wall and heading in the other direction at full speed. Similarly, the Water Taxi and Dragonfly segments are reminiscent of racing and flying games, but without any real consideration for level design: it is easy to get stuck in the scenery or be punished for going outside the boundaries of the level.

     Gameplay dissonance and tedious exploration

The charming and cute nature of the game soon disappears and is replaced by a more creepy and frightening atmosphere for children. The red ants have a violent stance and are difficult to kill, but the player will quickly learn to also watch out for bees and other flying insects, which can be particularly vicious. Bugdom does have an easy difficulty mode, which makes it more accessible to a lay audience, but the problem lies less in the damage that enemies can individually inflict than in their sheer numbers and the deadly platforming that the camera never facilitates. The game occasionally features creative ideas that were somewhat impressive for the time – such as dynamite that detonates when enemies shoot flames at it – but the execution is generally rather weak. The lack of a map and visual clues provides little incentive to explore beyond the bare minimum, lest one gets lost again or takes unnecessary risks, while the Level 7's boss battle is simply a design disaster.

Speed, which seems to be the hallmark of exploration in the early levels, is traded for extreme caution towards the end, rendering a whole section of Rollie's gameplay ineffective. In Level 8, Fireflies can force the player to restart an entire section, after having transported them backwards for several excessively long seconds. They can only be avoided by deliberate and careful exploration, as far as the controls allow. The platforming also suffers from this problem in Level 6, where a mistake can easily cost a life, one that the player does not necessarily have the leisure to lose at this stage. Exploring in Bugdom is not necessarily unpleasant, but it does suffer from the presence of aggressive enemies that put undue pressure on the player. While the crawling insects are generally harmless enough and never unduly disrupt the gameplay experience, the later enemies are particularly cruel and often unwelcome.

Nanosaur managed to charm with its rather benign nature and short adventure: the twenty minutes allotted to the player quickly become superfluous once they know the map. Bugdom, even if it remains quite concise, can be much more punishing than its predecessor. While it serves as a charming and unique first experience for anyone new to video games, its technical limitations and level design oversights prove frustrating and regrettable. The title remains an important entry in Mac video game history, but struggles to stand comparison with the console platformers that truly established new standards.