[Update January 28, 2005]: Welcome, BoingBoing readers! I'd love to show you Virtual Bubble Wrap online, but I've since taken the page on which it lived down and put it somewhere yet. It will have a home soon, promise!

Windows users can download a standalone version from this entry.


Once a year, just to keep this lovely piece of absolutely useless software alive in the collective mind of the 'Net, I point everyone to Virtual Bubble Wrap.

Yes, there are many other versions of Virtual Bubble Wrap, but the version created by Mackerel Interactive Multimedia way back in 1993 is still the best (the original version was part of a floppy disk-based presentation). I like to think that my Shockwave adaptation, coded up during a severe hangover the day after my birthday party in 1995, is a close second.

One reason I was inspired to post this particular entry is that Brendyn Alexander's trying his hand as developing multimedia apps in Director. Good on ya, Brendyn, and welcome to the club!

Recommended Reading

Burying the Fish. A Cory Doctorow piece about Mackerel that was commisioned for but never made it into WIred. I think it's the very first time he'd acted as my unofficial press agent -- here's the relevant snippet:
The next-generation Mackerelites are a mixed bag. There isn't a one of them that isn't hip and downtown as all get-out -- walking into the old Mackerel office was like stepping into some weird Hollywood vision of sexy young geeks in great clothes, firing Nerf darts at each other and disappearing into the overflowing kitchen for company-sponsored Shiatsu massage from a geek therapist who logged in regularily to the company BBS.

They came from all walks of life. Joey DeVilla, the only production grunt with a background in computer science, was seven years into a four-year CS degree at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, was DJing one night at a campus bar, and running a hunk of video wallpaper that included screen captures from the Mackerel Stack, recently downloaded from a BBS. One of the dancers caught him in the DJ booth and mentioned that he knew the guys in Toronto who built the thing. The next morning, Joey packed his things and hopped a train to Toronto, and demanded that Ollie hire him.