Epic.exe on the desktop is an in-browser recreation of Epic's Memorial!, made in May 2001 by a POL forum member calling himself "Gamer(freak)". It is not a game so much as a grudge with a build button: a user called Epic had spent weeks insisting Pokemon Online was never coming out and that Konidias had invented the whole thing, posted a topic saying so on May 11, 2001 at 7:13 PM, and got himself banned. Gamer's response was to build him a monument.
It opens on a menu offering two things: "Memorial" and "Kill Epic". The memorial is an eleven-page eulogy you page through with Space — Backspace goes back, which the game never tells you — ending on "<>". Press Enter and you are looking at Epic's statue standing in a field, with sparkles quietly raining down on it forever. Press Enter again to go back to the text. Kill Epic is exactly what it sounds like: a small shooting gallery where Epic's statue is the target.
The Music menu offers the author's two tracks, "Fare Well Epic" and "We Knew You So Well". Neither is his: one is Voyetra's 1995 arrangement of Grieg's "Anitra's Dance", the other is "One Stop", a Microsoft demo track by David Yackley. He shipped both with the app and named them himself.
Three things are faithfully broken, because they were broken in 2001. The Controls screen states "Right Mouse Click: Shoot" — the right button does nothing whatsoever, and it is the LEFT button that fires. The Hi-Score counter under the play area is drawn on every frame and never once written to, so it sits at zero no matter how well you do. And the Controls screen itself is orphaned: nothing in the game links to it, and the only way to see it is the Main menu.
The window really is that small. The original runs in a 120x112 client area — smaller than a modern app icon is tall — and the statue scene is smaller still, a 70x70 frame sitting letterboxed in the middle of it. The recreation scales it up so you can read it, but the proportions are the originals'.
HOW IT WAS REBUILT
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It is a clean-room reimplementation, not an emulator:
• The data file (Epic.gam) uses the same undocumented Clickteam container as Pokemon Online Advanced, one generation older, so the decoder written for that game read it almost unchanged. Out came all 51 graphics, the five frames, three MIDIs and a sound effect.
• Every word on screen is the text stored in the file, transcribed exactly — "Many Poeple", "humilate" and all. Nothing is corrected and nothing is paraphrased.
• The Main and Music menus and the About box were read off the running program with the Windows menu API, so the wording and order are the original's.
• Each frame's object table gave the exact position and stacking order of everything, and the image bank's own reference counts pinned which drawing belongs to which object.
• The behaviour was then measured against screen captures of the real program: which button actually fires, where a shot has to pass to count, that the statue's black "hit box" is invisible, and where every line of text sits. Text lines in the recreation land on the same scanlines as the original's, to the pixel.
• The two MIDIs were rendered to audio; the sound effect is the game's own.
There is one thing in the file that never made it into the game: a deleted line of dialogue for the statue scene, reading only "Hey wake up". Its text is gone, but the editor left the name behind.
Original app at archive.orgOpen the recreation