Revisiting Lego Drome Racing Challenge

Drome Racing Challenge

The Lego Drome Racing Challenge was an online multiplayer game from my childhood that combined my younger self's interest in cars, Lego, and video games. It is a super nostalgic part of my life and finding small pieces of that game help return me to that era in a way. Six years ago I compiled some information. You can view that here: https://www.snathanieladams.com/2018/06/lego-drome-racing-challenge.html

A redditor replied to an old comment of mine discussing the game and mentioned that he had found a number of the game's files and sent a few screenshots. This brought back all the enthusiasm for the game and I reached out to him but after a few days I hadn't heard back and got antsy. So I went looking, again, for any trace of the game and realized it had been right in front of me the whole time.

I was familiar with the BioMedia Project which has a large repository of old Lego games and focuses on documenting the Bionicle line from the same era. What I didn't notice the first time was that there was a folder called Broken.zip which contained a number of games that were not playable. That is accessible via this Web Archive directory if you search for the word "broken".

The Archive

The first file is the loading page but you'll notice the images are missing. I am not sure how this repository was gathered but there are enough core pieces missing to prevent this from being a complete game.

Further in are the incomplete files that form the game. I was aware the game was built on Macromedia Flash but I did not know that it was built within a program called Macromedia Director. After Macromedia was purchased by Adobe, they continued to update the software until 2017 but it has since been abandoned with Flash's discontinuation.

I found a version of Director which was released just before this game was released and I assumed that would be the version that would be most compatible with the game. Also I'm not sure how to get an Adobe Director license nor do I want to pay for it. Archive.org had a copy of Macromedia Director with a serial number that I installed and tried to open some of the files. Unfortunately, these files are locked with some sort of protection that required the use of another program to bypass. Projector Rays is a free Shockwave decompiler which I was able to use to decompile the .cct and .dcr files into their editable versions (.cst and .dir). Now I can finally take a look at what is in here.

Content

Having never used Director, it looks like we have some sounds, sprite sheets, scripts, and some incomplete "director" files which appear to coordinate how everything works together. So its part of a game and missing a lot of what really makes it work. In order to run the existing director files with missing assets, I selected random existing assets so some of the sprites don't make total sense.

This is part of the garage tutorial

This was a compiled version of 'raceengine.dir' which is missing some assets (and has others that I substituted) which I recorded and believe to be the only gameplay from the game that has survived.