[Coco] New Topic "sounds of the hounds"

[Boisy G. Pitre]

On Oct 23, 2005, at 11:32 AM, Glen VanDenBiggelaar wrote:
>
> Ok, to bring you all up to speed, Last spring, I got a stack of  
> floppies from ebay, and quickly tested them out and threw a bunch  
> on my online store. Last week, Brian e-mailed me about a Game  
> "Sounds of the hounds" so this morning I loaded it up to do a full  
> review on my website.
> It loads up a nice title screen and then goes into speech mode and  
> says (the hounds are...) but sounds like the nouns are... and  
> repeats over about 20 times, then I get a "?NE in line 720" error.
>
> I have done a Google search and have found 2 stories on the disk,  
> First saying it was an "April Fools" joke disk that makes it look  
> like it will crash your system, and the second saying that it is a  
> full game and playable, but you have to figure out how to run it.

Glen,

The former is true.  "Sounds of the Hounds" was a 1994 April Fools  
Joke played on the CoCo Community by Terry Simons, the founder and  
president of Mid Iowa and Country CoCo.   You can find a handful of  
messages about it at: http://groups.google.com/groups? 
ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=sound+of+the+hounds+group% 
3Abit.listserv.coco&qt_s=Search

If you follow that link and read the message from "Barry Peters"  
dated April 1, 1994 inquiring about the game, that is no  
coincidence.  Terry had someone in his club post that message,  
pretending to ask about the game.  In turn, Terry responded to the  
post as one "Mr. Caryn D. Whitehead", indicating how the game could  
be obtained.

As I recall, more than a few people were turned off by this prank,  
which was right in line with Terry's sense of humor.

> My question is does anyone remember this disk, and what is the  
> solution, I am trying to tinker with the disk, loading up some  
> other files on it, but nothing is working yet. I will just keep  
> plugging away - and pull this disk off the online store until I can  
> find some answer.
> -Glen

Don't bother to try to plug away at it.  It's a gag program.   
However, I thought that it was supposed to give some kind of "HAHA!"  
message at some point, indicating to the user that it was indeed an  
April Fools Joke.  It sounds like it's just crashing on you?

There's a certain irony to this.  It's been over 11 years since Terry  
made this hoax, and it is still getting folks.  If Terry were alive  
today, I'm sure he would get some satisfaction from that.

This probably deserves its own Wiki Page!
--
Boisy G. Pitre
boisy at boisypitre.com
"Monde, je suis pas venu ici pour vous faire de la peine."