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Richard Moss | @MossRC@social.mossrc.me

Author of *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet* and *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, as well as two upcoming books — one on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires and the other about the history of football (soccer) games.

Writer/director on TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, an upcoming 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.

Richard Moss MossRC

@vga256 I learnt very early in my career that if you want to survive as a creative professional, you have to be ready to adapt to what the market demands — and quickly. Sometimes there's a way back to getting paid for your passion, sometimes not.

Richard Moss MossRC

@vga256 They still show flashes of their old form, but I'm not sure it'd be financially viable for Ars now to be like it was in its peak years.

Richard Moss MossRC

@earthshaking And it's still one of the better rates I've been offered, too. Most of my work for Ars ended up being nearer to 30 cents a word, which made them one of my higher-paying clients. No idea what they pay now, but it's horrifying to think about the steady drop in typical freelance rates in the past 25 years.

Richard Moss MossRC
Fifteen years ago today, I got my first paid freelance writing assignment. I had responded to a callout for "evergreen" feature pitches at my (then-)favourite website, Ars Technica, and was shocked that they actually wanted me to write something for them.

I worked hard at a draft for a ~2.5k word history of adventure games, then based on the quality and breadth of my writing was asked to make it way longer (for an increased fee) and to add more detail about the actual experience of playing the games.

Here is that article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/history-of-graphic-adventures/
Thu 2/12/2010 10:09 AM Richard We're interested in your two ideas about the history of sim games and the history of graphic adventure games. You still up for doing it? We would need a draft of both in hand by December 29, and we're looking for something around 2,500+ words for each, along with plenty of illustrative screenshots. We could offer US$1000 for each (so $2,000 total). Let me know if interested in one or both (I know the time is short), and we can talk about how the articles might take shape. Nate Anderson Senior Editor, Ars Technica

Ron's Computer Videos🖥️📼 RonsCompVids@bitbang.social

An amazing conversation with @MossRC - author and Macintosh gaming expert!
https://youtu.be/3q4Lgoreb74

Bitmap Books bitmapbooks@mastodon.social

The Colony - Featured in our book - The Secret History of Mac Gaming: Expanded Edition

Discover the forgotten legacy of video gaming on the Apple Mac. This beautifully designed 480-page book reveals the vital role the Mac played in the growth and advancement of the nascent gaming industry. 

We’re celebrating 40 years of the Mac and have knocked £5.00 off: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/the-secret-history-of-mac-gaming-expanded-edition

Richard Moss MossRC

Here's a fun bit of obscure games history I just stumbled across: the founder of XOR Corporation (NFL Challenge, Basketball Challenge) made repeated (failed) attempts to get the CIA to endorse — and consult on — a counter-intelligence simulation game. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/feb/06/cia-nfl-challenge/

Games That Weren't gamesthatwerent@mastodon.world

Mobocracy was a gritty side-scroller set in a post-apocalyptic world. Ambitious but unfinished, only fragments remain - enough to imagine how it could have been. More details at:

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2025/07/mobocracy/

Monochrome screenshot of Mobocracy, showing the female lead character outside a bar called "Magnet Bar" and with a car on stilts outside. There is a small panel at the bottom with weapons area and then items such as gold and bullets. There is a Fatigue and Endurance set of bars in the bottom right corner.

Bitmap Books bitmapbooks@mastodon.social

📣 Special offer 📣

We are offering £5.00 off our book - A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games (Captain's Edition): https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/a-tale-of-two-halves-captains-edition

@MossRC

Richard Moss MossRC

This huge bundle of books about video games includes the text-only ebook version of The Secret History of Mac Gaming as well as my experimental 'Football Manager, one day at a time' project, along with dozens of books I didn't write. https://storybundle.com/games

(If anyone wants to get the lovely illustrated hardback version of The Secret History of Mac Gaming, that remains on sale from Bitmap Books: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/the-secret-history-of-mac-gaming-expanded-edition .)

Bitmap Books bitmapbooks@mastodon.social

Soccer - Featured in our book - A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games.

Explores the evolution of football games across four decades, featuring 400 titles spanning 2D classics and cutting-edge 3D simulations.

Score a copy: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/a-tale-of-two-halves

@MossRC

Richard Moss MossRC
The feature-length first episode of TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming is now free to watch on YouTube. Dozens of interviews digging into the history and evolution of horror in games, written and directed by me. And if you like it, you can buy the whole series from terrorbytesdoc.com. https://youtu.be/TA2aZVn9FvE

Richard Moss MossRC
@tj OSnews has too many ads, but it's hardly a spam site. I thought their post did well to pull out the essence from a long and meandering story, and it provided all the context necessary for my comment. But I agree with your sentiment that people should read the original blog to learn the full story.

Richard Moss MossRC
I remember when a Google Australia engineer came to speak to my computer science class in 2009 or 2010. He sold us an impossible vision of a Utopian workplace, and we bought it. Nobody thought of the devil's bargain; we all dreamed of working there post-graduation.
https://www.osnews.com/story/142532/dystopian-tales-of-that-time-when-i-sold-out-to-google/
If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go. "Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don't think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them." « Elilla Even back then, Google knew full well that what they were doing and working towards was deeply problematic and ethically dubious, at best, and reading about how young, impressionable Google engineers at the time figured that out by themselves is kind of heartbreaking. In those days, Google tried really hard to cultivate an image of being different than Apple or Microsoft, a place...

Richard Moss MossRC

I'm honoured to see TerrorBytes given a glowing review in legendary horror publication Rue Morgue. My favourite line: "This is a documentary for superfans as well as folks who just haven’t been 'that into' horror video games." https://rue-morgue.com/documentary-review-terrorbytes-celebrates-the-history-of-scary-video-games/

Richard Moss MossRC

@loadhigh I can claim responsibility for it being such an engaging read; I worked with Chaim as editor to shrink an overlong manuscript (with 30 or 40k words of footnotes!), focus the story, and make the writing more accessible/palatable to a general audience.

CONFIG.SYS: LOADHIGH loadhigh@bitbang.social

Been reading my newest SimCity-related book acquisition, "Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine" by Chaim Gingold, who worked with Will Wright on Spore and The Sims Online.

While the book is academic in nature (the citations span over 100 of the 486 pages), it's not a dry read at all.

Before treating SimCity itself, it goes into the background of simulating cities (pre-computer) for different goals, and the origin of simulations in the 20th century.

It has me totally fascinated.

Cover of the book: "Building SimCity: Putting the World in a Machine" by Chaim Gingold. The title's letters are stylized as 3D objects across an isometric grid (like SimCity 2000) Page 57 of the book. It talks about simulations as analogies, and the importance of making abstract concepts tangible (in some cases literally, by making it possible to physically manipulate them) to aid the understanding of them by different people. Pages 206 and 207 of the book. On the left is a photo of the Maxis team at the time of SimCity's release in 1989. They are holding up an enlarged version of the original SimCity box art (the cover was later changed to remove Godzilla because of a copyright claim) The photo shows from left to right: Jeff Braun, Daniel Goldman, Will Wright, Michael Bremer, Michael Paterson, David Caggiano, and Tim Johnson. Two of the pages of the book that lists the sprites used in the original SimCity: roads, power lines, railroads and some of the buildings.

Bitmap Books bitmapbooks@mastodon.social

Premier Manager - Featured in our book - A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games.

Takes you on a fascinating journey from the very first football video games right up to the genre’s 2000s heyday.

We are currently offering £5.00 off - Standard Hardback: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/a-tale-of-two-halves

Captain’s Edition: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/a-tale-of-two-halves-captains-edition

@MossRC

Glenda Adams Gmatom@mastodon.social

After a year of working on and off on my MacPaint geisha cross-stitch, it’s done!
32,475 stitches. Nearly 1,000 feet of black thread. The final art is about 19” x 12”- 22 stitches per inch is as small as I can work 🙂

Classic MacPaint marketing artwork of a Japanese geisha in 1 bit art, recreated in counted cross stitch. Black stitches on white cloth. Classic MacPaint marketing artwork of a Japanese geisha in 1 bit art, recreated in counted cross stitch. Black stitches on white cloth. Closeup of MacPaint marketing artwork of a Japanese geisha in 1 bit art, recreated in counted cross stitch. Black stitches on white cloth.

Colin McMillen colin_mcmillen@piaille.fr

I am happy to announce the official release of Glider for Apple II ! https://www.colino.net/wordpress/en/glider-for-apple-ii/

People who like technical details may like the development log I wrote at https://www.colino.net/wordpress/en/archives/2025/03/22/glider-for-apple-ii-development-log/

Have a nice week-end!

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