really happy to have discovered something hiding in plain sight for several years: robyn & rand miller's original Myst pitch document from 1991.
it's a succinct work of art in itself. i'm surprised at how much of the world design was already on paper.
as all of the copies found elsewhere online are heavily compressed webp/jpeg, i've uploaded the robyn's original PNGs to IA here:
https://archive.org/details/myst_proposal
originally from robyn's site:
http://www.robynmiller.net/video-games-films
#digiPres #softwarePreservation #archival #gamedev #myst #cyan
as far as i know, i found a software preservation zebra this week: this bit of extremely obscure archival work blends together HyperCard, Sierra On-Line and edutainment.
back in the early 90s, a company named EarthQuest started publishing educational reference titles for kids using HyperCard. the early titles were nice hypercard stacks probably drawn in macpaint. this one doesn't depart much from that format, except with nicer art and more creative page layouts
now, here's where things get weird. when saw it on ebay, only one pic buried at the bottom captured my attention: a weird stamped label on the bottom of the box that read Property OF SIERRA with the Half Dome logo. i bought it out of curiosity, and it arrived today.
back in the 90s, the larger game companies routinely maintained their own on-site libraries of competitors' games. Origin Systems in Austin had one. EA Burnaby, when it was known as Distinctive Software, had one. These were kept so marketing folks and developers could get an idea of what other studios were doing.
thing is, i've never seen mention of a library at Sierra On-Line in Oakhurst. the On-Line part of the logo is critical: Time Treks was published in 1992, and this is the year before Sierra moved its corporate offices from Oakhurst, California to Bellevue, Washington.
i have no doubt that there are other games from the Sierra On-Line corporate library somewhere out there, but i've never come across one even once in 30+ years. feel free to share this post with your fellow Sierra collectors :) it would be great if we could figure out where/when the Sierra library existed.
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/time-treks
#hypercard #macintosh #vintageApple #sierraOnline #adventureGames #retrogaming
I keep asking, where are the works? Where is the software that does ten or twenty or a hundred times more? Where is the human needs that are ten or twenty or a hundred times better met?
Instead, we have the mandated code generators feeding uncomprehended text into integration pipelines hit testing for textual correctness without meaning, purpose or intent.
This is a machine that turns strings into waste heat. That's nearly all it is.
It is money on fire.
@oscherler @vga256 Ugh, what a cop out. If they're doing news properly, you'd get all the "20 seconds summary" information from the headline, subhead, and first paragraph anyway.
Here are four screenshots of early dev builds for Age of Empires 1. The graphics, UI, and gameplay all went through huge amounts of iteration over 2+ years of development, and my new book recounts the journey: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabedurham/age-of-empires-how-ensemble-studios-made-history/
My new book includes a chapter on how Microsoft and Ensemble put together the packaging (including predictable MS in-fighting over branding) and how they marketed the game. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabedurham/age-of-empires-how-ensemble-studios-made-history/
At one point the Age of Empires developers considered adding natural disasters to the game. But it wasn't consistent with their presentation of an inviting, sunshine-drenched world or their player-centric design philosophies.
(On a related note, there's an anecdote in my book from Bruce Shelley about Bill Gates trying the game and asking if it's meant to be educational -- it wasn't, and Shelley had a great explanation for why.)
The Age of Empires tech tree from October 1995, two years before the game came out, was already much simpler than Rick Goodman's earliest attempts to distill ancient history into a research + upgrades progression system, but still way more complex than the final version—which was rooted in the idea of "ages" in history.
A render of the chariot unit from Age of Empires that was included with the E3/June 1997 press kit for the game. (The game was in beta at the time.)
@DestructoDisk We just have to keep building and running our own intentional spaces and enforcing the cultural values we want within them. Fedi networks, self/independently-hosted blogs/newsletters and forums, small web, and so on. Be the change we want to see, carve out our own island oases, and pray that it's enough.