Stunt Island

When this was released, it was highly ambitious. The core game allows you to perform stunts as if you were making a movie. Each stunt is presented as a mission with win/fail conditions, and you need to do things like fly through a barn or land a parachute correctly. It's pretty tricky and requires some practice. At the end, you see your performance presented as a dynamic film sequence. At the heart of the game is a flight simulator, and you have a large amount of craft to fly about with. Each respond differently, and a joystick will allow you to get the most out of it. However, the real depth of the game comes when you try to make your own stunts and films. The world is pretty much your oyster here if you take the time to learn the complex systems. You can set up cameras and program objects to move however you like. It's not simple, but I managed to work it all out when I was 10 years old so I'm sure you can too! I remember clearly recreating scenes from The Fugitive (I got a man to jump off a school bus as a train crashed into it) and Terminator 2 (the aqueduct bike/truck chase). You have a large assortment of vehicles and objects available to create scenes. The graphics were a little dated even at the time of release, but still colourful and fun. If you really want to delve into this stuff, this isn't a casual experience. There's no physics system to speak of and you have to program collision detection and movement in yourself. I have so many fond memories of this, and the 200+ page manual is a glorious beast.

I asked for this title and here it is! Before I could become an actual filmmaker, I made little movies in Disney's Stunt Island. I spent hundreds of hours creating movies that had stories and characters and stunts just from the little stick figures and low-poly, texture-less vehicles available. Trains, planes, boats, autos, trucks...recreating that crop duster scene from North by Northwest. Endless replay-ability. I wish there could be a new game just like this one, but as another reviewer pointed out: no one gambles on titles like this anymore. What a shame, indeed. But, that's why GOG is here! Great job! Downloading this one tonight.

Nobody is going to be impressed by Stunt Island today. But at the time, good lord, it was like handing kids the keys to Hollywood as far as its impact on those few fortunate enough to fully invest themselves in it. I realize this is, technically, a flight simulator game with a feature to re-watch your aeronautical marvels, but I do not know a single person who used it in that fashion, and the only thing that mattered on some weekends in 1993 was showing everyone the newest short film you whipped up using a dozen different sets with maxed-out prop counts and countless camera angles. It was probably the single best piece of creative software I have ever used, and it was not even marketed that way; what a weird title this was, truly. The saddest thing to me personally about Stunt Island nostalgia is that seemingly every single person in the entire world besides me was playing an inferior version of the game--my Pro Audio Spectrum 16 music clips were fully digital/sampled tracks that would hardly have been out of place in a B-movie of the era, whereas somehow literally every single video I have seen of Stunt Island online has an awful MIDI soundtrack I only ever previously heard when my friend with an AdLib card played the game. No clue if the Soundblaster music was bugged or if the Pro Audio Spectrum had a genuinely unique set of audio tracks that are now lost to time or what, but it is a tragedy regardless.

This game was an amazing creative tool when I first played it in middle school. It simultaneously helped develop my interests in both game design and filmmaking. A real shame nobody takes gambles on titles like this anymore.