From r/lostmedia • LostInTheLoom
[Fully Lost] Stonehouse 3D
Stonehouse 3D is a game that was developed by a single user known as Chainworm, CW6 or P1NKAC1D back in 2005. It was a school project and made in a pretty short time.
It was made with the Pie in the Sky game engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_in_the_Sky_(game_engine)
The title of the game was quite controversial as it's based on the name Robert Steinhäuser (Steinhaus is German for Stonehouse), a school shooter responsible for a massacre that occurred on 26 April 2002 at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium, a secondary school in Erfurt, Germany.
As far as I remember the title was chosen to be provocative while video games were often subject of (very) false media coverage and blamed for events like school shootings (the "Killerspiel-Debatte" in Germany).
It is a short FPS using graphics and sounds from DOOM and other games.
All what's left is a gameplay video, uploaded 13 years ago: https://youtu.be/plIddySNJSk
What did I try to find it?
I owned the game back in the day and had it burned on a CD with a printed cover that was provided with the download.*
The author is still active and made several mods for DOOM. His homepage is still online: chainworm.de
The funny thing is, that I was in contact with him for a while. He doesn't own a copy of it anymore and seems not to be too interested in making big efforts to find it. But he would still be happy to see it again.
I found the original download link on a German forum. Forum post (by the author): https://www.blood-is-red.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=129385#p129385 Download link: http://www.chainworm.de/forum/sh3d.exe (dead)
Unfortunately, the domain is excluded from archive.org, so I couldn't try to download it there.
Also, I tried to contact some people from the forum by looking at their profile's contact information. A few responded, a few did not. Obviously, nobody had a copy of the game.
I remember the game being also uploaded to the now defunct Postal Network Forums back then: www.postalnetwork.org/forums (dead)
Possibly the PN forums also just contained the download link provided earlier.
* There was another download link with a downloadable artwork to print, meant for DVD cases. Most likely it was also hosted at chainworm.de and is fully lost.
What now?
The game was shared a lot in the community and I remember sending it to a few friends from back in the day. I don't have contact to any of them by now and I guess they wouldn't keep it until today. But I think the game was shared among a decent amount of people and it is possible that someone actually did archive it. Lots of old-school/retro gamers are meticulous archivists.
So maybe, anyone is able to deliver some lead or knows someone, who knows...
Thanks for reading, thanks for all help in advance!