The Linux Game Tome was
started by Tessa Lau in 1995 when the phrase
"Linux game" meant either
sasteroids or
xtetris. She
culled the best games from
sunsite's Linux
games directories, scoured the net for classic X11 games,
and put together a compendium of amusing ways to waste time. After two years of regular updates, the Tome started
to sprout cobwebs as its creator lost interest in downloading the latest and greatest in Linux entertainment.
Bob Zimbinski felt the absence of the resource, so
in 1998 he contacted Ms. Lau and created
a new Linux Game Tome
around the original data. The new Linux Game Tome
went online with just over 100 games in its catalog. At this writing (December 2002),
the database contains just under 1000 games and game-related items. The Linux Game Tome has also grown to
include a user rating system, active discussion forums,
and an IRC channel.
The Internet Wayback Machine has some (incomplete) snapshots of the Linux
Game Tome from various moments in the past:
Please send email to
staff [at] happypenguin (dot) org
to contact us.
Want to use HappyPenguin.org's news feed to serve your own nefarious ends? Get it here:
http://happypenguin.org/html/news.rdf. This file is updated
once per hour, and people who fetch it more frequently than that make bobz cranky. When he gets cranky,
sometimes bobz puts the IP addresses of excessive fetchers into his webserver's Deny list. Don't make bobz
cranky.
Show your fans what the Game Tome community thinks of your work by putting a nifty HappyPenguin Rate-O-Matic ™
button on your homepage. The button image will automatically change to reflect the current rating of your game
at happypenguin.org. Put the following HTML on your page to display the HappyPenguin Rate-O-Matic ™:
<a href="http://happypenguin.org/show?your+game">
<img src="http://happypenguin.org/rateomatic?your+game">
</a>
Replace both occurences of "your+game" with the URL-encoded title of your game as it appears in the Game Tome's
database. The easiest way to get this is to look up your game in the Tome and grab the title string from the
URL of the game's record. The HappyPenguin Rate-O-Matic ™ will display one of the following images based
on the rating your game holds in the Game Tome database. Clicking the button will bring users to your game's
page in the Game Tome so they can rate the game themselves.
Even if you don't plan to use the Happypenguin Rate-O-Matic ™, feel free to use any of the graphics on this
page to link to happypenguin.org.
There is a Return To Castle Wolfenstein server using the name
Happy Penguin that is not affiliated with happypenguin.org in any way.
We had never heard of them until disgruntled players began mistakenly
complaining to us. We wish they wouldn't use the name "Happy Penguin",
which has been associated with the Linux Game Tome since 1998, but we
also think this would be a silly thing to start a big fight over, so
we'll just sit here quietly and think badly of them.
The Linux Game Tome is whole bunch of really badly written
Perl scripts that talk to a
MySQL database. We use
phpBB for the forums.
The server is running
Fedora Linux. The server hardware and bandwidth are donated by
Linux Game Publishing, who are too cool for words
because of their willingness to help this site continue.
