14 DAY TRIAL // Spelunky Classic enthusiasts can now enjoy playing the adventure platformer in two-player cooperative mode now, with Spelunky SD, a free mod.
Spelunky Classic is the game that started the cave exploration madness, made by indie dev Derek Yu back in 2008. Since then, due to the popularity of his initially freeware game, he released an updated version that greatly improved its pixelated visuals and integrated a lot of new stuff.
Players assume control of an unnamed adventured, a spelunker that explores a series of caves, collecting treasure, keeping on his toes to avoid the dangerous traps and denizens of the dark environments he so daringly ventures into, and saving some damsels along the way.
The source code of the old version from 2008 was released for free on December 25, 2009, under a noncommercial distribution and modification license, and since then, many members of the indie community have created various mods of the original game, available on developer Mossmouth's website.
The new mod is available free of charge from developer Yellowafterlife, and it also includes a number of fixes and improvements to the original game, in addition to the introduction of the cooperative gameplay mode.
"Of course, there are still more things that I would like to add to this. It would be nice to allow the game to support more than two players. It would be nice to have a PVP mode (akin to Spelunky HD). It would be pretty great to get level editor and sharing back in, as well as some other forms of extensibility (to let the fun last even longer)," the developer says.
You can show your support for the developer's work on Yellowafterlife's Patreon page, where he also talks about the other things he's currently up to.
Returning to the Spelunky mod, the intrepid dev reveals that he worked on it for three months, before releasing it to the public last week. He says that making it was hard, but pretty cool, and it stemmed from his fiddling around and experimenting with small online multi-player games.
"Although right now a semi-distant dream, it would be great to have this work on Mac and Linux too (and maybe something else as well). And endless count of smaller things that matter," he concludes his statement.
The game was universally praised for its engaging gameplay, the constant sense of discovery, and the difficulty of its 2D platforming ways, and the inclusion of multiplayer, albeit in the classical edition of the game and not the HD one, still opens up the game to a whole new kind of experience.