Picture the great DOS-platform-pantheon of the early ’90s: at the summit perch the immaculate Commander Keen episodes, Apogee’s brash Duke Nukem barreling through soda-spill keyboards, and Epic’s neon-loud Jazz Jackrabbit limbering up for 256-color footraces. Way down on a creaky, half-forgotten step of that temple sits Gateworld: The Home Planet, a side-scrolling shareware curiosity in which Captain Buzz Klondike, yes, an interstellar prospector named like an ice-cream flavor, hops across asteroid caverns collecting stars, canisters, and the occasional lethal pogo-bot while an A.I. starship named Stella heckles him through level introductions. Bizarre or classical? (Both: it’s an Ed Wood sci-fi script stapled onto a meticulous Apogee design doc.) Underrated or overrated? Ask nostalgia YouTubers and you’ll hear “hidden gem”; ask anyone who actually finished Episode One’s boss run and you’ll hear a sigh, an eye-roll, and maybe a fond shrug. Fundamental or disposable? Think of Gateworld as the lost footnote that proves how crowded, and how weirdly experimental, the shareware scene became after id Software yanked the market’s attention with Wolfenstein 3-D. My chosen absurd through-line for this review: the game’s unkillable boss monsters, giant sprite behemoths that patrolling back-and-forth like disgruntled Roombas, embodying everything Gateworld gets right (cheeky danger) and everything it gets wrong (design cul-de-sacs you must dodge, never defeat).
Historical Context
Gateworld’s development history reads like a teleporter malfunction. Early 1991: the fledgling team at Homebrew Software pitches a Keen-style platformer to Apogee Software. Apogee green-lights a prototype, imagining it as a spiritual sibling to Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure. Twelve months later Scott Miller cancels the project, labeling the build “below Apogee quality,” then redirects internal art assets toward what will become Major Stryker. Homebrew, undeterred, salvages code, rewires the sprite engine, commissions new soundtrack tracks from Prosonus, and self-publishes under the shareware model in 1993, Episode One free, Episodes Two and Three purchasable by phone order or BBS registration key.
The ’93 PC landscape is careening toward SVGA spectacle: Doom will drop at year’s end, Myst is busy polishing CD-ROM vistas, and Epic’s Epic Pinball is teaching Sound Blasters to shred. Into that retinal arms race stumbles Gateworld, clinging to 16-color EGA compatibility yet boasting parallax starfields that refuse to scroll smoothly on a 386 without tweaking DOS memory managers. I discovered the shareware demo in a nest of 3½-inch disks at the local library, labeled “Platform Games (misc.)” in Sharpie, wedged between Secret Agent and a pirated copy of Commander Keen 6. My teenage criteria were simple: if it ran in an afternoon before dinner and looked at least 60 percent as cute as Keen’s Dopefish, it passed. Gateworld squeaked by, but just barely: its alien sprites looked like someone photocopied Metroid enemies and traced them with fluorescent gel pens.
Yet the broader shareware market still had room. Epic Megagames, Apogee, Softdisk, and dozens of garage studios flooded BBS nodes with platformers chasing the Keen dream. Homebrew’s differentiator? Narrative framing. The manual, a plain-text README with ANSI art, outlines a pulpy premise: Buzz Klondike’s starship Stella sensors an asteroid rich in NovaMinerals, precious fuel for the wobbling Atarian economy. Landing goes sideways, Buzz plummets into networked gate chambers, and an ominous planet named Gateworld begins teleporting war machines toward Earth. Buzz must scavenge keys, advance through gates, disable machines, and eventually confront G.O.R.G., an acronym without an official expansion but plenty of ominous capital letters. In playground terms: Keen‐meets‐Stargate five months before Roland Emmerich bought his first reel of desert footage.
Homebrew shipped Gateworld via regional distributors, Precision Software Publishing in the U.S., B&N Companies in the U.K., and even teased a Windows 95 port for 2001 that never materialised. By then, most DOS aficionados had moved on to Half-Life mods, and Gateworld’s parallax dreams faded into abandonware directories waiting for modern DOSBox archaeologists.
Mechanics
Gateworld spreads its content across three episodes, each subdivided into three acts, each act containing three exploratory levels followed by an indestructible boss stage. Finite math fans will note that’s 36 scrolling gauntlets plus three giant sprite arenas where you can’t actually shoot the boss, just dodge until you nuke a background machine to unlock the next teleporter. If that reminds you of Commander Keen 5’s mangling machine gimmick, you’re not imagining things.
Controls are pure Apogee muscle memory: Ctrl to fire, Alt to jump, Space to toggle inventory. Buzz’s default blaster fires straight; angle upward or downward while jumping to shoot diagonals, a boon when crab-machines cling to ceiling outcroppings. Ammo comes in “gun” pickups: red for standard shots, blue for boomerangs that arc like cheap carnival prizes, green for spreadfire three-ways that echo Contra dreams but dissipate on collision. Enemies include pink mud-slimes (harmless but obstructive), armored hover-drones (two hits), and chirping proto-Metroids that magnetise to your head like sci-fi toupees. Level layouts eclectically mix horizontal corridors with vertical shafts demanding pixel-perfect pogo leaps onto conveyer belts.
The absurd constant: keys and gates. Each exploratory level hides a single teleporter key, a shimmering cube the color of a Mountain Dew can left under blacklight. Grab the key, trek to the gate portal, and warp out. Keys often dangle over spike pits or behind false walls flagged by one-pixel cracks. (Raise your hand if you spent fifteen minutes pogo-jumping every leftmost wall.) The boss arenas flip the script: the key sits visible from spawn, the boss, a screen-straddling cyber serpent, pursues you, and you must blast a destructible gizmo on the far wall while bunny-hopping lasers. Because the boss sprites are invulnerable, early players assumed the shareware episode was buggy. Homebrew eventually added README clarifications: “Bosses are indestructible, attack the MACHINE.” When your design requires README footnotes, you might be courting communication trouble.
Gateworld sprinkles power-up stars like confetti, some grant temp invulnerability or rapid-fire; others camouflage as “harmful stars” exploding after a countdown. It’s comedic Russian roulette: do you hoard stars hoping for shield time before a death-maze, or risk a fake star detonating in your face? Meanwhile canisters restore health, fuel cells raise point totals (Stella politely thanks you in off-screen text), and lives accrue at 100,000 points, an Apogee standard. Sound effects clang with GUS-compatible FM twangs; Prosonus’s soundtrack loops four-channel MODs that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Future Crew demo, catchy for the first half-hour, then destined for the mute key.
Mini-rant: enemy placement occasionally borders on sadistic. Episode One, Act Three features conveyor belts dumping you onto spiked floors while a turret above pings diagonal plasma exactly where you need to stand to time a jump. Keen punished sloppy navigation; Gateworld sometimes punishes breathing. Yet the game offsets cruelty with generosity: no timer, unlimited retries per checkpoint, and a save/load anywhere feature absent from many shareware peers. I recall saving mid-air during a frantic rocket-pack descent, reloading into my own doom loop, and learning the hard way that impulsive F2 taps can backfire.
Graphically, Gateworld leans into dark palettes, blues, violets, gunmetal, perhaps to mask EGA limits yet still suggest alien hostility. Background parallax adds depth but chugs on a 386SX; toggling detail down (F9) smooths gameplay at the cost of losing star-layer illusions. Boss sprites, by contrast, flaunt bright oranges and teals, eye candy you can’t shoot. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of a donut behind bulletproof glass: delicious, maddening, slightly cruel.
Legacy and Influence
Gateworld never cracked PC Gamer’s shareware charts. Reviews tucked between VGA golf sims praised its sprite art but panned repetitive level geometry. Yet among DOS hobbyists it achieved cult-sleeper status, partly due to its aborted Apogee lineage. Had Miller not pulled the plug, we might remember Gateworld as Major Stryker’s cousin rather than an abandonware orphan. Community trivia threads still debate which Apogee artists ghost-drew early tilesets before Homebrew’s Edge Creations and SoftScene repainted them.
Influence, while subtle, lingers. The invulnerable boss-mechanic, defeat the environment, not the monster, shows up in mid-’90s indie platformers and even Metroid Dread’s Emmy sequences. Gateworld’s diagonal gunplay predates Jazz Jackrabbit’s eight-way shooter mechanics by a hair, though Epic’s implementation felt smoother. And that star roulette? Modern roguelikes love risk-reward pickups that occasionally explode; Gateworld planted a twinkling seed.
Homebrew Software kept a skeletal website through the 2000s promising a Windows port “soon,” but by the time Windows XP killed easy DOS sound, the domain mostly served as a résumé for coder Ken Rogoway, who transitioned into 3D visualization for theme parks (true story; check his LinkedIn). Community preservationists host the shareware episode on Archive.org, complete with .EXE stubs configured for DOSBox, ensuring a new generation can suffer conveyor-belt indignities without battling EMS memory.
Speed-runner intrigue rekindled interest circa 2020 when the Random DOS Game Show YouTube channel clocked a 24-minute Episode One clear. Records hinge on zipline glitches: jumping as a screen transitions lets Buzz teleport upward, skipping half the map. Homebrew’s code never anticipated frame-perfect DOSBox cycles. One man’s oversight becomes another speed-runner’s dopamine drip.
Why did Gateworld remain niche? Timing and polish. Released months before Doom detonated shareware expectations, Gateworld’s slower scroll and EGA palette felt yesterday. The name “Homebrew Software” lacked Apogee’s marketing megaphone; BBS file_id descriptions often misspelled “Gate World,” scattering its recognition across directories. And truth be told, Episode One’s difficulty spikes scared casual players long before they reached the mail-order screen. Shareware’s razor-edge economics demanded the free slice delight, not demoralise. Gateworld sometimes whacked newcomers with a spiked ceiling before they found its goofy charm.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Boot Gateworld today via DOSBox and you’ll hear crunchy FM chords, see vulture robots waddling on parallax plateaus, and possibly mutter “Wow, Keen’s cousin dropped out of art school.” Give it a full episode, though, and patterns emerge: generous save-anywhere design, bullet-hell boss arenas that require environment awareness, and a Kirby-pink slime enemy whose only attack is mild inconvenience. Is it bizarre or classical? Both, an earnest Apogee homage filtered through an indie garage lens. Underrated or overrated? With the bar set by Jazz and Nukem, Gateworld overshot ambition, undershot polish, so “underrated” in vision, “overlooked” in libraries. Fundamental or disposable? Disposable if you crave modern velocity; invaluable if you study shareware’s evolutionary cul-de-sacs. My final verdict: 6.9 / 10, a wobbly asteroid orbiting the platform-star system, worth a visit for retro astronauts willing to dodge indestructible bosses and bask in VGA midnight suns.