OHR Icons: Bob the Hamster
A Feature by James Paige

When I was (if I remember correctly) in Jr. High, I was working a summer job in Julian, California, passing out coupons for $1 off apple pie. On a rainy day when I was taking a break in the back room of the pie shop, I doodled this on the back of a mis-printed pie coupon:



It was just a doodle, but I like it, and when classes started, and I got bored, I would doodle it again, and again. I named him "Dirt the Hamster"

Whenever I visited my cousin Brian, we would program games together. He knew QuickBasic, and I learned some pixel-art.

One day, when visiting Brian, he produced a church bulletin with notes and sketches scribbled all over it. They were plans for a game like Dig-Dug, but with a hamster named Bob as the main character. His sketch of Bob was very similar to my own. I don't remember if he based his hamster on my hamster or not. I think it is very likely that he came up with the design independently of me, which is not surprising, since we both owned pet hamsters, and had previously founded the breakaway nation of the "Hamster Republic".

I agreed that Bob was a much better name than Dirt for a hamster, and so it was settled.

The game we produced (I say we, but Brian did 99% of the work) was Bob the Hamster EGA. It played pretty nicely, although for some dumb reason we added a story-line to it in which Bob was trying to dig through the White House lawn to get close enough to take incriminating photos of President Bill Clinton (this was actually before the Monica Lewinsky scandal) although neither of us was old enough to vote, my Dad and Brian's parents all voted republican, so ipso-facto I believed that Bill Clinton was Evil Incarnate. Both Brian and I are terribly embarrassed about this, and our political views have matured since then, so we were not too terribly heartbroken when we lost the source code some years later.

But long before we lost the original game code, we had upgraded it. With a bit more programming experience under his belt, and some new Assembly Language skills, Brian wrote a Mode-X graphics library and a keyboard handling library, and set to work porting Bob the Hamster EGA to Bob the Hamster VGA.



The upgrade added better graphics, sound effects, more levels, Vlad the Hamster mode, and dropped the old storyline (although looking at it again the storyline we added for Vlad is really abusive towards "Turks". If hope any modern citizens of Turkey forgive us this, understanding that it was a reference to the behavior and attitudes of Vlad the Impaler, who was at war with the Ottoman Empire almost his entire life).

I was also learning to program myself, and between the two of us, we created quite a few games featuring Bob the Hamster.

* Bob the Hamster EGA (source lost)
* Demigods (source lost)
* Bob's Casino
* Sidewalk Fighter II
* Cowbobs
* Bob the Hamster VGA
* BobQuest
* EGA RPG
* DireSPAM (unfinished)
* Cow Wrangler
* Spitwar
* Trundle
* Bob Sidescroller (unfinished)





Bob's world was not entirely in games. My doodles in the margins of my school papers had continued, and eventually I tried my hand at making a comic. It would have been a webcomic, except that at the time, "web" meant AOL-over-dialup, and my parents couldn't afford it (nor would it have worked with my DOS 486 with no modem and no disk space for Windows 3.1)

I used *gigantic* sheets of paper, and inked a comic called "Robert Hood", in which Bob the Hamster played the part of the altruistic thief. It went on for a good seven or 8 mega-pages before I stopped working on it. The art was a bit clumsy, and I don't know now wheter I would cringe or not at the humor if I saw it again, but my Mother still occasionally asks me to finish it. I wouldn't be surprised if she has it in a box in her basement still :)

Meanwhile, with a collection of 16-bit games under our belt, Brian and I decided it was time to go professional. We had set up the Hamster Republic website by this time, and Brian got an e-mail from a representative of a now-defunct Canadian game publisher called Magicom Multimedia. They offered to distribute a collection of our games on CD. Somehow we managed to find a Lawyer who looked over the contract for us for free, and he told us it was "ok", not great. and we signed it.

The result was the Games of the Hamster Republic CD featuring five of our games (Bob the Hamster VGA among them)



The CD ended up being carried in a few Canadian Radio Shacks, and we sold enough units at... I think it was something like $0.12 cents royalty per unit to earn a total of... I thin it was somewhere under $200 dollars. Eventually we figured out that (A) our profit margin was like 10 times better if we burned the CD ourselves and sold it directly, and (B) our contract with Magicom didn't forbid (A). Over the years that netted us about another $150 (I think) but it was kinda more bother than it was worth, so I breathed a sigh of relief when we uploaded zip files of all the games to HamsterRepublic.com and started giving them away for free.

About this time I started on Wandering Hamster and the OHRRPGCE.

Originally I was worried about people editing Wandering Hamster, and making him do things that I wouldn't approve of him doing, but as I got drawn into the world of Open Source software, I started learning more about copyright, trademark, fair use, parody, and related issues, and I stopped stressing about it. As Bob slowly gathered fans on the internet, I started seeing other people send me their own depictions of Bob, and instead of being dismayed as I expected myself to feel, I was delighted. Creating a character who is the target of Fan-art feels pretty darn good. (Although, regarding rule 34; just don't send it to me. I don't want to know!)

It seems that a lot of talented artists have depicted Bob the Hamster (His many appearances on the cover of HamsterSpeak being an obvious notable example) and a lot of talented game makers have inserted Bob the Hamster into their worlds (Fenrir Lunaris's Vikings of Midgard and RedMaverickZero's OHR House Heroes jump to mind)

A few years back, I decided to take another stab at Bob the Hamster comics. The result was 10 episodes of the Bob the Hamster Graphic Novel, most of which I am still proud of. Have two more of these inked but un-scanned. The amount of work was getting overwhelming, and my real-life spare-time was shrinking, and hasn't un-shrunken yet.

A small part of me secretly wishes that I would lose my legs in a terrible go-cart accident, and would have an excuse to spend the rest of my life in a hospital room with a drawing-pad and a laptop working on more comics, but all things considered, I guess it is better if that doesn't happen. Maybe when I retire at 65 I can take up graphic novels full time. So yes, expect new episodes no later than the year 2043 :)