Microsoft Hover!

» see hover.ie as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

microsoft hover! was a 3d bumper-car capture-the-flag game microsoft bundled with the windows 95 cd-rom edition in august 1995. it shipped specifically on the cd version because microsoft needed something visual on the disc to justify the new format over floppies. you played a red hovercraft inside three maze worlds. the job was to collect blue flags from around the level while blocking opponents from grabbing your red ones. the gameplay was simple. the point was the cd-rom drive.

the original was technically impressive for 1995 consumer hardware. real-time 3d on a 486dx or low-end pentium, with a cd-audio soundtrack composed by stan lepard that streamed off the disc while you played. controls were arrow keys plus a space-bar smoke screen and a spring trap on q. the ai opponents got more aggressive on later levels but the difficulty curve stayed gentle, because the game was a sales tool for the cd format rather than a piece of competitive game design.

most people who remember hover! remember the soundtrack first and the gameplay second. the medieval castle level had a melodic theme that lives in the same memory space as the windows 95 startup chime. microsoft brought hover! back on august 1 2013 as a webgl browser game on a special anniversary domain, with updated graphics, websocket multiplayer for up to eight players, plus touch controls for ipads. the soundtrack from 1995 stayed in. the revival picked up surprising press coverage that summer because nostalgic windows-95 content was its own minor genre by then. the official hover.ie site went dark in april 2019 without an announcement.

i was eleven in 1995, on an aging 486 at home that did not have a cd-rom drive yet. the floppy edition of windows 95 reached our house first because the cd-rom drives were still an expensive add-on in turkish electronics shops at that point. by the time the family pc got a cd drive in 1997, hover! was not on any disc i had access to. i played it for the first time in 2013 in the browser version, which felt strange because the game was already eighteen years old at that point and i was experiencing it the way you experience a museum exhibit, knowing the original moment had already happened without me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what made it a demo ~

microsoft needed something on the windows 95 cd-rom that floppies could not deliver. hover! used directx for graphics acceleration before directx was widely deployed and shipped with cd-audio music rather than midi files. nothing about the design suggested it was meant to compete with doom or descent in the same year. it was a tech demonstration with a game wrapped around it. microsoft never made a hover! 2.

~ the 2013 revival ~

microsoft brought the game back as a webgl browser title in august 2013 to show what internet explorer 11 could do on the same anniversary that brought the start menu back to windows. they kept the original mazes and music, added touch controls for ipad use, plus a multiplayer mode for eight players over websocket. the revival was good. then the maintenance budget ran out and the official hover.ie url went dark in april 2019 without any notice. the version that was specifically built to celebrate hover!'s past has now become a past of its own.

~ what survived ~

the original windows 95 install files. you can still run hover.exe on a virtual machine or under wine, and the cd-audio soundtrack is on youtube uploaded by multiple people. the 2013 web version source assets were preserved by enthusiasts on github after the official site went down. composer stan lepard later wrote orchestral cues for halo and gears of war, so the person responsible for the castle theme also ended up doing the xbox era music a decade later.

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