A couple of chaps in Sydney (one of whom worked on Good Game and Spawn Point, both now full-time post-production staff for The Wiggles) are trying to get a documentary series off the ground about Aussie games history, told by the people who were there, and they need your support. You can back the project on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/regionlocked-doco/region-locked
Are you enjoying the World Cup?🏆⚽️
Pro Evolution Soccer 6 - Featured in our book - A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games ⚽️
Featuring over 400 games!
Score a copy: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/a-tale-of-two-halves
#bitmapbooks #worldcup #football #soccer #gaming #bookstodon
Not "commissioning editor" but rather "referenced in recent publishing industry coverage as a commissioning editor". As thought they're not sure of their own job.
World Cup fever has gripped Bitmap HQ 🏆⚽️
Check out our book - Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games ⚽️
Featuring over 400 games!
Who do you think will win the tournament?
Score a copy: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/a-tale-of-two-halves
#bitmapbooks #worldcup #football #soccer #gaming #bookstodon
Someone was inspired by my Shareware Heroes book to archive their collection of mail-order 5.25" shareware floppies, circa 1990-94, most of which came from a catalogue called Reasonable Solutions. There's a great mix of stuff in here. https://archive.org/details/525disk
Read this. "Google didn’t talk about ads in the I/O keynote. Everything they announced is the new ad system. One that, in the eyes of Google, no longer needs the open web as an intermediary … Google is betting its entire future on a world where people eagerly hand over their emails, their files, their habits, and their trust – to an AI system that will quietly auction off their attention, word by word, to the highest bidder." by @matthiasott https://matthiasott.com/notes/ad-infinitum
In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web.
While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters.
Well it matters as (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders but not as cultural artifact you can share with others.
This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google's abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It's about monopolizing access to information.
If you care about the web, about people's ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-Googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don't use their browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment.
@praetor Yep, makes sense. I've not coded professionally, despite my CS degree, but I know enough to know that I don't want an LLM coding for me -- especially as I have barely any experience in real-world software architecture, which means the unknown unknowns for me are vast, and you can't maintain or fix code you don't understand.
@praetor Likewise with some game dev stuff I'm doing in my (very limited) spare time. I also want to actually learn and improve my skills, and to think carefully about the design and architecture -- because I know it'll be better (and feel more rewarding) that way.
@thomasfuchs Agreed. I'm deeply concerned at the coming loss of knowledge and insurmountable tech debt that lies ahead if more people in software engineering (and especially the managers) don't get their heads around this soon.
It's a tool; its power lies in the augmentation, not replacement, of skilled human talent.
The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things
New blog:
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.
Oh, you want to know *why?* Sure. Let’s go for a drive.
https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/you-need-ai-that-reduces-your-maintenance-costs
an extremely underrated 2 hour interview with robyn miller by MossRC@social.mossrc.me several years ago
they provide a walking tour through several of cyan's early titles such as the Manhole, Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx. a live art director's commentary.
what i love the most is how much robyn makes it clear how these games were never built for "gamers" as we understand them now. robyn played very few games, and wasn't familiar with genre expectations.
he and rand just focused on making games that let the player explore a world at their own pace, and all else is secondary to exploration and discovery.
@ratsprite Diagrams seem pretty likely. At the very least, there are some fascinating diagrams and charts that the programmers and designers made while working on the games that I'd be wanting to include. But there could be the odd bespoke "here's how this worked"-type diagram to help with explanations, too.
My SCUMM documentary is going on hiatus and I need to decide whether to do it as a book instead.
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
