Pleroma

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 an upcoming book on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires and another upcoming book that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.

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.

GamesIndustry.biz GIbiz@mastodon.social

Game artist Brett Jones, known for his work on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, has died.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/goldeneye-and-perfect-dark-artist-brett-jones-has-died

Richard Moss MossRC
@vga256 I remember I saw you mention that one and thought "ooh, I should look at that when I get my Pocket 386 set up." It seems to have a lot of depth to it.

Richard Moss MossRC
@vga256 Happy reading! Hope you enjoy it. I've been meaning to get a few blog posts together on the book's website going into complementary materials and highlighting themes that weren't much explored (like there being only a handful of women in shareware or the wide world of shareware gamedev tools).

Richard Moss MossRC
@hipsterdoofus Milanote. It's a sort of digital whiteboard-ish thing that I find really good for visual and non-linear editing and planning. I use it for the first couple of drafts of all my documentary scripts.

Richard Moss MossRC
It's a big milestone for my/CREATORVC's TerrorBytes documentary series this month as we transition into post-production, starting with a segment on the development and underrated brilliance of super-hammy FMV horror game Night Trap. Here's a quick snap of my WIP script.
Screenshot of a digital whiteboard being used for the work-in-progress scripting of a documentary segment on Night Trap, showing various colour-coded chunks of text.

Benj Edwards benjedwards@mastodon.social

I recently discovered an odd first-person maze game called “Lair of Squid” built into my HP 200LX palmtop PC, released in 1994

Then I found the author. Here’s the story of how this quirky Doom-inspired title came to be: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/07/how-i-found-a-forgotten-squid-based-ode-to-doom-on-a-1994-palmtop-pc/

Lair of squid illustration Lair of squid screenshot

Richard Moss MossRC
Putting the Pocket 386 mini 386SX laptop through its paces with some classic adventuring.
King’s Quest 1 VGA running on a Pocket 386 laptop. The screen shows Graham outside a dilapidated cottage in a forest.

Richard Moss MossRC
@hipsterdoofus As for easily getting a copy of the game itself, though. *shrugs* I wish things were simpler.

Richard Moss MossRC
@hipsterdoofus I have a couple of old laptops I keep for this kind of thing, but it’d probably run well in a Win2k or XP VM, which aren’t exactly easy but aren’t hard either.

Richard Moss MossRC
Links LS 2000 got criticised for a lack of documentation of its finer intricacies. Turns out the manual is 100 pages long and about double the width of a paperback book.
Front of the player’s manual for Links LS 2000.

vga256 vga256@dialup.cafe

i've been posting a lot of my shareware research lately, because i've been working on a project for the past few months with a blend of Windows 3.1 & GeoWorks Ensemble used as inspiration.

Exigy is a tile-based game creation kit that lets you make windows 3.1/95-styled games, like spiderweb software's Exile or rick saada's Castle of the Winds. hell, you could remake the Microsoft Entertainment Pack if you wanted to :)

the editor is very intentionally built to work like MS Visual Basic: you can drag and drop any GUI element into the game editor window and script in your own actions with lua. it even comes with its own built-in sprite editor, so you can create your art while you work.

games are modified in real-time with no compiling. the entire thing is built in Love2D.

think of it as ZZT for windows 3.1 if that had ever existed. 😆

A game creation kit using the GeoWorks ensemble GUI skin for window frames, and the windows 3.1 grey icons for buttons. Windows, clockwise from top-left: Editor Tools: drag and drop these GUI elements into the Game Window. There is a Tile map tool, a Label tool, an NPC tool, a Button tool, a new Window tool, a cat-NPC tool, a mouse-NPC tool, an image tool and a grid tool. Tiles: A tile window showing the available tile brushes to create a map with. Terrain Editor: a tile map made using the tile brushes, with a little mouse on it. Message box: a pop-up box that reads "Welcome to the Terrain Editor!" Sprite Editor: A cat has been loaded into the sprite editor. Colors: A palette of 16 default Windows 3.1 colours Game Window: a sample game window, Visual Basic style, showing a clickable button, a text label, and an image loaded.

vga256 vga256@dialup.cafe

twenty years ago steam made digital distribution for games ubiquitous. lost in the desire for convenience was a heterogeneous world of physical packaging.

even when we've documented physical packaging, the vast majority of archival has been devoted to big box games with the most impressive browsies and feelies.

almost totally neglected by archivists has been shareware packaging. these were the diskettes sold in little wire racks at grocery stores and pharmacy checkouts, usually for a few dollars.

a few years ago, someone local sold me their collection of shareware diskettes that he bought and played throughout the 80s and 90s.

at the time, shareware distributors all sold the same games published by companies like Apogee, Epic MegaGames, Sensible, etc.

i was struck by how unusual and unique the cover art and packaging was for each shareware distributor. some were in blister packs, others came in cheap paper sleeves, some just were raw diskettes with labels. some had screenshots, many did not.

here are a handful of disks that we loved by their previous owner. i'd like, at some point, to create a shareware packaging/art archive.

A photo of four shareware diskettes. Clockwise, from top left: Ultima Underworld Demo (Origin Systems) Pickle Wars (MVP Software) Crystal Caves (Apogee) and Aqua Man (Soleau) Cannon Fodder (Sensible Software)

Richard Moss MossRC
@keen456 It's a bit academic-y at times, but the writing is solid and it's really interesting. I loved learning about system dynamics and cellular automata and the idea of analogues — and lots of other things that relate to the creation of SimCity — while reading and editing the book.

Richard Moss MossRC
Happy publication day to Chaim Gingold, whose excellent first book, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, builds on his past work at Maxis and his PhD research into the original SimCity.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547482/building-simcity

I had a hand in getting the book done as an editor for Chaim, my role being to help to turn a promising — but meandering and unfocused — manuscript (with something like 40k words of footnotes!) into a well-polished and highly-thought-out probe into the many underlying facets of culture and practice that Will Wright drew upon, both knowingly and unknowingly, in the creation of SimCity.

Brendan Sinclair BrendanSinclair@mastodon.social

I've been laid off and need a new job. Maybe game journalism, maybe something else in games, maybe not games at all. Entertaining all possibilities at this point, so please reach out if you think I might be a good fit for you.

Marine Beaufils 🪡 moonovermarine@piaille.fr

So, my project about The Sentinel video game is finally completed!
If you wanna know more about it and discover the 14 artworks, follow the link:
https://www.marine.st/en/pages/sentinel

Image of several needlepoints from my embroidery art project representing several different scenes I chose from The Sentinel video game.

Peter Cohen flargh@mastodon.social

"McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue." - Ed Zitron

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Richard Moss MossRC
Only an introduction left to write now before I can compile a complete manuscript for my Age of Empires book. Image shows the current chapter listing; a couple of these may get split in two, but I had fun making sure every chapter title is in some way a reference to the game.
Chapter listing for the draft manuscript of my Age of Empires book.

Glenda Adams Gmatom@mastodon.social

After four and a half months and almost 34,000 stitches, I’ve finished my cross-stitch 1-bit version of Hokusai’s Great Wave. It’s big, 25”x 17” (pen in the first photo for scale). Thanks to @hypertalking for letting me use his wonderful original 1-bit art.

Richard Moss MossRC
I'm working on the bit in my Age of Empires making of book where they were in deep crunch mode. It's incredible that they all survived and the game turned out so well, given quotes like this from my interviews.
Screenshot of a portion of an interview transcript. Full text: [01:49:26] Mark Terrano I had some health damage to the point where my doctor said 'No game's worth dying over, Mark.' We were eating Boston Market and pizza and kind of not a great diet every night, working really long hours. We didn't know it at the time, but when we moved into the top suite of the building, the fans had actually been wired backwards. So the office was a lot of times 100 degrees. And I went out and bought a thermometer and said, if it goes over 101 I'm going home, I don't care.

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