Pleroma

Pleroma

Richard Moss | @MossRC@social.mossrc.me

Author of *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet*, *A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games*, and a soon-to-be-published book on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires, plus various other books in progress.

Writer/director on TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a critically-acclaimed 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

But by this point, already, they were shifting towards something faster. The first playable prototype felt too slow, and Rick was grappling with the challenge of how to find the fun — of how to streamline and whittle down their extensive ideation into a great game.

(I don't want to spoil the story, but the answer came from one of the programmers, Tim Deen.)

An internal memo from Rick Goodman to his Ensemble colleagues about the prototype build v.02, in which he shares his notes from playing the build. The key quote is "My principle concern right now is that I spend a lot of time just looking at the game at the start."

Richard Moss MossRC

The vision for Age of Empires evolved considerably over time. Here you can see a hint of how much more geared they were early on towards Sid Meier's Civilization and other slower-paced strategy and simulation games. Initial plans were akin to a modern survival sim colony builder with Civ elements.

A design document discussing visions of a game starting near the end of an ice age, and needing to survive as the ice recedes during the early portions of the campaign. Designer Rick Goodman is critiquing the idea, questioning what it will add to the player's experience and where it might all fall apart.

Richard Moss MossRC

I'm going to post semi-random dev materials from Age of Empires 1 every day from today until the end of the KS campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabedurham/age-of-empires-how-ensemble-studios-made-history) for my book about the creation of the game. First up, the cover and a page from one of lead designer Rick Goodman's earliest design docs.

Dawn of Civilization! Game Design Document, October 13, 1995. Company Confidential, Copyright Ensemble Corporation. Note: All changes to this Design Document implemented since Sept 1st have been italicized. [Handwritten] Includes Revisions to Tech Chart Page 28 of the design doc, including the tail end of a section about natural disasters as well as a brief note about the game commencing at the end of an ice age, a short section pondering the inclusion of scenarios, and the beginning of a section about the game's interface.

SimCity2000 Traffic Helicopter sc2000@mastodon.social

Hanford
November 2, 3830

Hanford (patcoston/hanfordville.sc2)

Richard Moss MossRC
My latest book is much more than the story of how Age of Empires (1) was made; it's a story of brothers, camaraderie, innovation, and dreams — the cost of chasing them, the passion that drives them, and the joy when they come true. Now available for preorder from Boss Fight Books.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabedurham/age-of-empires-how-ensemble-studios-made-history

LucasArts Places lucasarts_places@mastodon.social

Loom (DOS EGA)

Room 006: Loom Island - Dye Hut Interior

Richard Moss MossRC
This essay about refusing genAI in journalism is fantastic. Great reporting — and great writing more broadly — is irreducibly human. And not just the final prose, but rather the whole process that leads there — including ideation, research, and *every* phase of editing. https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-to-accept-big-tech-s-ai-poisoned-future-of-journalism

Richard Moss MossRC
@jfaulken Likewise. When Gabe was briefing for the cover design, I said something like "it'd be cool if it could involve a priest" but was eager to see whatever resonated with the artist. And right from the first draft I loved their idea and the core composition of the artwork.

Richard Moss MossRC
My latest book is much more than the story of how Age of Empires (1) was made; it's a story of brothers, camaraderie, innovation, and dreams — the cost of chasing them, the passion that drives them, and the joy when they come true. Now available for preorder from Boss Fight Books.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gabedurham/age-of-empires-how-ensemble-studios-made-history

Richard Moss MossRC
Update: Figured out how to release the tabs holding it together and get the back cover off, thanks to some guides for other PDAs at https://www.ifixit.com/Device/PDA

Thanks to @wolfinpdx for the link.
The back over removed from a Toshiba e570 PDA, with swollen battery now exposed.

Richard Moss MossRC
@wolfinpdx There don't appear to be any Toshiba models in there, but I got a few ideas for things to try from looking through the guides for PDAs from the same era.

Mike Piontek robotspacer@xoxo.zone

Transfer Point is now available! It’s a point-and-click adventure game about regret, forgiveness, and email. It was made in World Builder, a Mac app from 1986. You can play it free in your web browser. InvisiClues are also available here if you need a hint! robotspacer.software/transfer-

Richard Moss MossRC
This Toshiba PDA (model e570) has a very swollen battery. Anyone know how I can finish taking it apart? I can't see how/where to separate the metal plate behind the screen.
The back of the unit, showing a huge crack down the middle from battery swelling. Photo of the inside front, with screen held separate from the unit, showing a metal plate underneath.

Arne Brasseur plexus@toot.cat

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

Glenn Fleishman glennf@zeppelin.flights

I am nearly 95% funded for my new book, Flong Time, No See, a collection of what (I think) are charming and quirky essays that weave together the history of obscure printing practices and working people’s lives. The campaign ends Tuesday! kickstarter.com/projects/glenn

Antti Peltola ⁂ anttipeltola@mastodon.world

😂

"To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI."

"It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."

theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_

Richard Moss MossRC

This in-development C64 fan conversion of The Secret of Monkey Island looks incredible. https://pixeldust.se/monkey-island-project

Mike Piontek robotspacer@xoxo.zone

Transfer Point is a point-and-click adventure game for Macintosh. It was made in World Builder and MacPaint, and it fits on an 800K floppy disk. It also has an egret. Coming soon for most web browsers, or as a download to play on your classic Mac. robotspacer.software/transfer-

Richard Moss MossRC
@voxel @MichaelKlamerus @cyningstan Thanks guys. I'm adding these to my list and will give them all a go.

Richard Moss MossRC
I already asked this on r/dosgamng, but eager for more responses: what are your favourite *modern* DOS games? Not DOS-inspired or DOS-style, but rather actual new games made for DOS systems in the past decade or so.

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