What Is Heroes, the Open-Source Tron-Style Game, and How Do You Play It?

Updated

Heroes is a free, open-source arcade game in the style of the classic "Tron" and "Nibbles" games. You steer a small vehicle around a world, collecting powerups while avoiding obstacles, your opponents' trails, and even your own trail. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, and the project's stated goal is a clean, portable base for the version 1.0 release. The latest release noted on the project site is Heroes 0.21, dated 2002-03-30, so expect a small, older codebase rather than an actively expanding game.

What you actually do in the game

The core loop is the same across all modes: move your vehicle, grab powerups, and stay alive. The danger comes from three directions — fixed obstacles, the trails your opponents leave behind, and the trail you leave yourself. Cutting yourself off is as fatal as hitting someone else.

The project describes five game modes:

Mode Objective
Quest The classical Nibbles-style mode
Death Match You start with very long tails and must kill your opponents
Kill'em All Run over lemmings moving on the ground
Time Cash Collect money
Color Collect pyramids of color

If you have played Nibbles or a light-cycle game before, Quest will feel immediately familiar. Death Match changes the starting condition rather than the rules — long tails mean less room to maneuver from the first second.

What content ships with it

  • 94 levels spread across 10 different tile sets, so the visual setting changes as you progress.
  • 12 original sound tracks.
  • A level editor, so you can build your own levels rather than only playing the shipped ones.

That is a substantial amount of built-in content for a game of this size, and the level editor is the main reason to look at it if you are interested in making rather than just playing.

How to get it and run it

The project page links to four things you will need: Screenshots, Manual, Download (source code or binaries), and Mailing lists. Navigation links sit at the top of each page.

A practical sequence:

  1. Look at the screenshots to confirm the visual style suits you.
  2. Open the Download page and choose a binary for your system if one exists, otherwise the source code.
  3. Read the Manual before playing — it covers the modes and controls.
  4. If you build from source or hit a problem, the mailing lists are the support channel; the project also accepts bug reports at [email protected].

The game has been ported with portability as an explicit priority. The site lists Unix, Linux, Windows (MinGW32), Solaris, SunOS, FreeBSD, and IRIX among its target platforms. Because the code descends from an MS-DOS original that was heavily modified, the original MS-DOS version still circulates online but is unmaintained and should be treated as obsolete — use the current source or binaries instead.

What to expect from the project's status

Two things are worth knowing before you invest time:

  • Development focus is on code cleanup and porting, not new gameplay. The stated aim is version 1.0 as a clean, portable base that would later allow significant additions such as network support or programmable vehicles. Those features are described as future possibilities, not current ones.
  • The release is old. Version 0.21 dates to March 2002, and the page itself carries a December 2002 timestamp. Building on a modern system may take more effort than the portability claims suggest, and the mailing lists are the place to check for current build experience.

Heroes is a reasonable choice if you want a compact, GPL-licensed Nibbles variant with a level editor and a lot of shipped levels, or if you are interested in a small portable C/C++ codebase to study or extend. If you need active development, networking, or a large community, this is not that project.