The First IndiZone Contest

The first contest was announced in February of 1993. Entry cards were due in by April 2, 1993, and final code was due by June 18, 1993. There were 123 contestants who submitted entry cards in the first contest; only 23 of them submitted final code.

The categories were:

Single user games
Multiple user games
Tools
Educational demos

The winners of the first contest were:

Single user games: reversi, by Adrian Barnett, England.
Multiple user games: pods, by Drew Olbrich, Pacific Data Images.
Tools: xsurfer, by Kevin Casey Simon.
Educational demos: Faxmgr, by Peter White, SGI.

Each category winner went home with a development-class Indy workstation. The winners, and the finalists, were then put on CD. There were three different versions of the first IndiZone CD:

This was the first release of IndiZone, aimed at the 5.1 OS market. This is the easiest of the CDs to identify, as it came in a cardboard-like container. Another identifying feature is the star around Pinhead's head on the CD itself.

This was the second release of IndiZone. As the right corner notes, it was targeted for the 4.0.5F OS release. Identifying features on the CD itself are Pinhead's black glasses, and the circle around his head instead of a star.

This was the third, and final, release of IndiZone. The corner note states that it was targeted for our 5.2 OS audience.

The IndiZone CDs were shipped with new Indigo2 Extreme and XZ systems and Indy systems starting in September of 1993. They were also given to those people who collected, filled out, and returned postcards that were handed out at SIGGRAPH 1993 in Anaheim, CA. and at the SGI Developer's Forum held in August 1993 at Stanford.

Credits were missing from the original 5.1 CD. The crew who worked on it were too busy trying to make sure everyone else's credits were correct to notice that they themselves didn't get any! The folks who helped with the CD were: Dave Ligon, who was in charge of the project; Michelle Boyd, who spearheaded the first portion of the contest; Gretchen Helms, who became project lead halfway through the contest; Cynthia Miles, who was vitally imporant as our Systems Goddess in charge of the machines; Mark Box, Ricky Cheng, Dave Ciemiwicz, Adele Maurer, Christine McGavran, and Alex Tang, all of whom helped wrestle the bugs into submission; Craig Marvin, who supplied all of the wonderful artwork; and Dave Bagshaw, Juli Banfe, and Scott Bonham for being project mentors.