Glider PRO

John Calhoun's 1994 finale to the Glider series, published by Casady & Greene for Mac, asks the player to pilot a paper airplane room by room through a suburban house — riding updrafts from candles, dodging bouncing basketballs, popping toast, and dripping faucets. PRO finally adds outdoor levels, a built-in house editor, and a two-player mode that needed neither modem nor network.

Setting and story

The frame is summer vacation, the house is empty, and a single sheet of folded paper has been left to drift through it. The campaign houses are a mix of period suburban interiors — kitchens, bedrooms, attics, basements — connected by open doors and ventilation grilles, with later levels venturing outside into yards, tree canopies, and the occasional stranger setting. Each house is a self-contained puzzle of rooms to be solved end-to-end on a single life pool.

Gameplay

The glider is permanently descending; updrafts from candles, vents, and pilot lights are the only way back up. Hazards include burning candles (touch the flame and you crash), bouncing balls, springing toast, dripping water, electric outlets, and switch-controlled vents. Bonus items include rubber bands for shooting down enemy paper planes, papers for extra lives, batteries for speed, clocks for points, and PRO-exclusive aluminum foil for collision shielding and helium tanks for lift.

Engine and technical changes

PRO is a top-to-bottom rewrite of the older Glider engines: scrolling between rooms is now seamless rather than screen-by-screen, sprites support color, and the room model is general enough that the bundled house editor is the same tool Calhoun used to author the campaign houses. The engine runs natively on 68k and PowerPC Macs, and was later open-sourced and ported to OS X and iOS.

Development and release

Calhoun wrote Glider 1.0 as freeware in 1988, expanded it through Glider 4.0 in 1991 (Casady & Greene's first commercial release), and shipped Glider PRO in 1994 as the definitive version with outdoor scenes, the editor, and two-player split-screen. He continued at Casady & Greene through the late 1990s and later joined Apple's iOS Game Center team.

Reception and legacy

Reviewers consistently praised the game's gentle, non-violent tone and the surprising depth the editor unlocked — a healthy library of user houses circulated on AOL, eWorld, and BBSes through the mid-1990s. Glider PRO is one of the iconic Mac-exclusive titles of the era, sitting alongside Marathon, Crystal Quest, and Spectre in the list of games people remember when they remember owning a Performa.