Office Building

Released in 1999 by Gib Foltz under the Epic Banana shareware label, Office Building is a top-down Klik & Play action-adventure for Classic Mac OS that follows Tom, the protagonist of the earlier A Day At Work, on his first office internship. As an intern Tom is supposed to assist the staff, but the player is free to abandon the assignment and misbehave instead, the same satirical fork that defined Epic Banana's other titles.

Setting and theme

The game is set inside a single office building rendered as a top-down maze of cubicles, hallways, and break areas. Tom moves between desks completing or sabotaging tasks for coworkers. The premise leans on the same low-stakes workplace satire and dark humor as Epic Banana's earlier Yogurt Commercial and A Day At Work, with which it shares a protagonist and visual style.

Gameplay

Action plays out from a top-down perspective with simple keyboard movement and contextual interactions on objects and NPCs. As in its predecessor, the player can choose a straight-and-narrow path of helpful errands or a destructive one of mischief and worse. The world is small and self-contained, sized for a short comic playthrough rather than a long campaign.

Engine and technical changes

Office Building was authored in Clickteam's Klik & Play, the drag-and-drop game-creation tool that powered most Epic Banana releases. The Mac build targets System 7.0 through 7.6 and Mac OS 9 on 68k or PowerPC, and on modern hardware it is typically run via the SheepShaver emulator. Macintosh Garden lists it with a 4-out-of-5 rating.

Development and release

Epic Banana was Gib Foltz's late-1990s outlet for Klik & Play satire games, and Office Building shipped in 1999 as a direct follow-up to A Day At Work (also 1999). Distribution was the usual Mac shareware mix: download from the Epic Banana site, shareware CD compilations, and later preservation on Macintosh Garden.

Reception and legacy

Office Building was a small shareware curio rather than a commercial release, and reception lived in the Mac freeware/shareware enthusiast community rather than the gaming press. Within that scene, the Tom games and Epic Banana's broader catalog became cult favorites, and Macintosh Garden's continued hosting and high user rating reflect their staying power among Classic Mac OS hobbyists.