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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
@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!

danjmcs danjmcs@mastodon.online

"The ultimate exploration and celebration of Horror in video games." @MossRC
https://terrorbytesdoc.com/

Richard Moss MossRC
One huge highlight of making my new project, the TerrorBytes docuseries, was just the vulnerability our interviewees showed—like Mary Kenney's voice cracking talking about parenting themes in The Walking Dead, Graeme Devine tearing up over how much The 7th Guest meant to him, others talking about grief or their own fears.

The series is ostensibly about horror games, but it's also an exploration of our humanity—a story of people tearing themselves open, pouring their deepest fears and anxieties into their games, and of creativity and passion and how we're inspired and moved by the media we consume.
The 7th Guest co-creator Graeme Devine gets emotional remembering what a key moment in the game's development meant to him.

Richard Moss MossRC

I talked to GamesHub about TerrorBytes and why now is the perfect time for a horror gaming documentary. https://www.gameshub.com/news/features/terrorbytes-horror-games-documentary-2688513/

Richard Moss MossRC

Psyched to finally share the launch trailer for my latest project, TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a five-part, 5.5-hour celebration of horror in games featuring insights from Swery65 (Deadly Premonition), John Romero (DOOM, Quake), John Carpenter (legendary horror filmmaker), Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill composer), Ken and Roberta Williams (Sierra co-founders), Jane Jensen (Gabriel Knight), David Szymanski (DUSK, Iron Lung), Airdorf (FAITH: The Unholy Trinity), and many more. https://youtu.be/LJr2-tJL0IQ

You can preorder your copy at https://terrorbytesdoc.com

Richard Moss MossRC
It's apparently seven years today since I created https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/, the Classic MacOS-themed website for my first book.

(One day I intend to do a new version of this design and the Shareware Heroes site design — with a toggle to switch between them — for my personal site.)

Richard Moss MossRC
We're doing a backer review of a rough cut of episode 2 of TerrorBytes at the moment, and I love this comment from one of the backers. Games are made by real people with real fears, passions, and struggles. Too often that is sidelined to just talk about the gameplay and stuff. Not here.
Most people I know play games or enjoy movies/television. It's a no brainer to recommend they watch it but what I would tell those that normally prefer one or the other or for those that have significant others like me who aren't into games l'd ask that they watch it with them. I say that because the episode shows the real adult humans who wrote narrative/created art/designed levels/composed music and that passion shines through in this documentary. Games are awesome but rarely do we get to see the people who create them. For years game companies made people use pseudonyms so only the publisher got credit or other companies couldn't poach talent. But now we live in a world where much like movies and TV we know who directed a game or composed the music and we might buy...

Richard Moss MossRC
So word's out that Unbound are in financial trouble. Report linked below includes official info, but I can add that it's been going on over a year. I've had two payments for Shareware Heroes delayed (but later paid) due to cashflow problems and now a third is overdue.

Causes that I know of are expected funding/investment evaporating last-minute, expansion plans not going as well as hoped, and shipping costs blowouts from war and COVID (which stung them because they charged shipping upfront for upcoming crowdfunded books, then costs doubled).
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/exclusive-unbound-faces-financial-uncertainty-as-authors-wait-for-delayed-payments

Richard Moss MossRC

This is incredible. https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi

Richard Moss MossRC

Every Australian needs to read Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, a fascinating and accessible book about fire, ecology, and land management in 1788 (the year white folks came) versus today. Everything we've been told (at least in Vic & NSW) about fire in this country is wrong, essentially.

230 years ago, indigenous people used hot and "cool" fire with such scalpel-like precision that raging bushfires were rare, plants and animals thrived, food was plentiful, and instead of wilderness, everywhere was thought of and managed like parkland.

Fixing the mistakes of 240+ years of mismanagement and bad policy will be hard, but the authors are clear that without radical change the big fires will just keep getting worse. (See the third image for some of their proposed solutions.)

Front cover: FIRST KNOWLEDGES Edited by MARGO NEALE COUNTRY: Future Fire, Future Farming BILL GAMMAGE & BRUCE PASCOE Back cover text: What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. For millennia, Indigenous Australians harvested this continent in ways that can offer contemporary environmental and economic solutions. Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not solely hunters and gatherers, the First Australians also farmed and stored food. They employed complex seasonal fire programs that protected Country and animals alike. In doing so, they avoided the killer fires that we fear today. Country: Future Fire, Future Farming highlights the consequences of ignoring this deep history and living in unsustainable ways. It details the remarkable agricultural and land-care techniques of First Nations peoples and shows how such practices are needed now more than ever. Bill Gammage is a historian at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. His books include The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War and three prize-winning titles - Narrandera Shire, The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938 - 1939 and The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Bruce Pascoe is an Aboriginal Australian writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children's literature. He is the enterprise professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne. He is best known for his work Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? which re-examines colonial accounts of Aboriginal people in Australia and cites evidence of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This is the third title in the First Knowledges six-book series. The fourth and fifth books in the series will be published in 2022. A page spread from the book Country on what we need to do to transition to fire management policies based on indigenous learnings.

Jesse Gallagher jesse@pub.frostillic.us

I remain very pleased that I wrote this post gushing about Realmz earlier this year: https://frostillic.us/blog/posts/2024/3/31/realmz

Richard Moss MossRC

@MisterArix Indeed. And I think about that every time I see an American journalist or editor say "corporations are entities, not people" in response to somebody misusing the pronouns.

On top of the legal and moral insanity of corporate personhood, clinging to the singular form in language use absolves the corporation's executives/management of responsibility for their actions and dehumanises the people who work there.

Richard Moss MossRC

Random language oddity: Collective nouns get third-person plural pronouns (they/them) in British English but third-person singular pronouns (it/its) in US English. British English also distinguishes between organisations as legal entities (it) vs groups of individuals (they), depending on context.

Hence why it's usually correct in the UK/Australia to write, say, "[company or team name] find peace in loss of their sandwiches" whereas in the US it should always be "[company or team name] finds peace in loss of its sandwiches."

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