Pleroma

Pleroma

Richard Moss | @MossRC@social.mossrc.me

Author of *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet*, *A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games*, and a soon-to-be-published book on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires, plus various other books in progress.

Writer/director on TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a critically-acclaimed five-part docuseries about horror games. Producer/co-writer on FPSDOC, a 4.5-hour documentary film celebrating the first-person shooter genre (with an emphasis on the 90s/early-2000s golden age) that's guided by the developers themselves.

Creates The Life & Times of Video Games and Ludiphilia podcasts.

He/him.

rich@mossrc.me
@MossRC on Twitter and @mossrc.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Posts mainly about #gamedev and #indiegames histories and stories, #retrogaming/#retrogames, #retrocomputing, #classicmac, #shareware, #tombraider, and #videogamehistory.

Glenn Fleishman glennf@zeppelin.flights

I am nearly 95% funded for my new book, Flong Time, No See, a collection of what (I think) are charming and quirky essays that weave together the history of obscure printing practices and working people’s lives. The campaign ends Tuesday! kickstarter.com/projects/glenn

Antti Peltola ⁂ anttipeltola@mastodon.world

😂

"To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI."

"It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."

theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_

Richard Moss MossRC

This in-development C64 fan conversion of The Secret of Monkey Island looks incredible. https://pixeldust.se/monkey-island-project

Mike Piontek robotspacer@xoxo.zone

Transfer Point is a point-and-click adventure game for Macintosh. It was made in World Builder and MacPaint, and it fits on an 800K floppy disk. It also has an egret. Coming soon for most web browsers, or as a download to play on your classic Mac. robotspacer.software/transfer-

Richard Moss MossRC
@voxel @MichaelKlamerus @cyningstan Thanks guys. I'm adding these to my list and will give them all a go.

Richard Moss MossRC
I already asked this on r/dosgamng, but eager for more responses: what are your favourite *modern* DOS games? Not DOS-inspired or DOS-style, but rather actual new games made for DOS systems in the past decade or so.

diana 🏳️‍⚧️🦋🌱 dianea@lgbtqia.space

And now an Escher cat

orange cats arranged in impossible shapes

Tomb Raider Chronicles tombraiderchronicles@tombraidersocial.com

In celebration of International Women's Day, the team behind Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis has highlighted the enduring influence of Lara Croft by inviting women involved in the project to share what the iconic adventurer means to them.

tombraiderchronicles.com/headl

Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis, Crystal Dynamics, Flying Wild Hog, Amazon Game Studios

John Passfield johnpassfield@mastodon.gamedev.place

My mate Pete and I have a new game coming out that we made with Godot. It's called Super Robot Survivors and is a bullet hell/roguelite inspired by the robots we grew up with as kids.

Wishlist it on now Steam!
store.steampowered.com/app/435

Richard Moss MossRC
@kalleboo @vga256 InputSprockets was user-facing, but there were others for networking, graphics, and sound. This old MacTech article offered a good summary of them and how they made gamedev easier: https://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.02/GameSprocketIntro/index.html

Richard Moss MossRC
Bitmap published a fun and interesting interview with one of the LMA Manager programmers, which nicely augments the Simon Prytherch (series co-creator) interview in my football games history book. https://www.bitmapbooks.com/blogs/news/codie-s-coder-richard-smith-and-the-lma-manager-story

Richard Moss MossRC
@vga256 We kind of did briefly have an Apple equivalent to DirectX: the GameSprockets libraries. It's just that they went the other way — they squeezed the resources afforded to the team and eventually shut it down (in a moment colourfully documented in my book with lead dev Chris DeLeon swearing at Avie Tevanian).

LucasArts Places lucasarts_places@mastodon.social

Loom (DOS EGA)

Room 004: Loom Island - Forest and Cemetery

Richard Moss MossRC
Found my first book at the University of Melbourne (my alma mater) library.
A photo of some videogame books on a library shelf. The yellow cover is my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming.

Richard Moss MossRC
@bink Playing old games on period hardware really elevates the experience, I find. Doubly so when it's something as beautiful as a G3 iBook. The convenience trade-off gets harder the further you go back, though, as I'm sure you know, given your C64 photo.

Richard Moss MossRC
@gordoooo_z It's got a couple of cracks, the battery is as good as dead, and one of the keycaps is missing. But otherwise the iBook in great working order, and absolutely delightful to use.

Richard Moss MossRC
@matt_diamond @grumpygamer Totally agree. I was super impressed by the outstanding quality of the design (and art and writing) on Pajama Sam 1 when I played it recently. Great, meaningful, logical puzzles and interactions.

One of the big motivators for me with my SCUMM history project is to bring the brilliance of the Humongous games to light and to show they were so much more than mere "kids games".

Richard Moss MossRC
My four year old just informed me that a monster is eating the Infernet and the infernet is getting smaller as a result.

Keith Kaisershot blitter@mastodon.social

@MossRC @vga256 Yes and no. Iliyas Jorio's modern source ports were open-sourced, but the original source code remains inaccessible. Shame, too, because the original Power Pete runs great on Pippin hardware, while the "modern" Mighty Mike eschews the optimizations that make that possible. Would be cool to see the differences.

Richard Moss MossRC
@resistor @vga256 The publisher (MacPlay) insisted on the name change because they worried about Mighty Mike being similar to Mighty Mouse. Pangea changed it back to the original name immediately after they got the IP rights back in 2001.

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