Pleroma

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 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
He's asking for a physical letter in the mail.

Richard Moss MossRC
...Except this one time I found where a developer whose Epic-published game had sold poorly offered a counterpoint, proving as in all things that nothing is guaranteed; high royalties don't mean squat if your game is unpopular.

Richard Moss MossRC
Sometimes he'd get pushback from people dubious about the royalties or suspicious that it sounds too good to be true and Epic must be doing something bad in the fine print. But people who worked with him would usually refute the claims. Epic was the real deal, they'd say.

Richard Moss MossRC
As part of his quest to recruit shareware talent to help Epic compete with Apogee and bigger commercial publishers, Tim Sweeney would periodically post talent call-outs on Usenet. Here are two of them.

Brendan Sinclair BrendanSinclair@mastodon.social

This year's conflict minerals report up, and it's concerning how many companies took their eye off the ball this year.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/industry-shows-zero-improvement-on-conflict-minerals-sourcing

Iain Mew iainmew@c.im

I'm looking ahead to 2009 and would love some more guest posts! Would anyone like to write one on any of these? (timing would be somewhere between late January and late March)

Empire: Total War (PC) Fight Night Round 4 (Xbox 360) Wii Sports Resort (Wii) Wii Fit Plus (Wii) Forza Motorsport 3 (Xbox 360) Batman: Arkham Asylum (Xbox 360) Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 (PS3) Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360) Pokémon Platinum (DS)

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Cool. Thanks! As I'm sure you've guessed, I'm working on a thing and this is all relevant.

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Any word on how Puma Street Soccer sold? I saw mention in there that they made money from selling the engine to Ubi, but nothing on how it fared commercially. (Also, I'm semi-familiar with Football Generation; I had no idea its origins lie in a cancelled Zidane licensed game.)

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Interesting! I haven't played it yet, but I was reading about it earlier and wondered about the story behind it. Seemed like a neat counterplay to the trends of the time that struggled to get air against the dozens of other football games coming out at the time. It got glowing reviews in a Portuguese magazine and a Dutch magazine.

Richard Moss MossRC
This cover conjures images (for me) of a football game played along a city block, dodging bystanders and traffic, bouncing the ball off lamp-posts and shop windows, rolling it under parked cars.

Unfortunately the game itself is just a standard outdoor riff on indoor soccer, presumably based on the Puma Street Soccer Cup that ran for a while in the 90s (and beyond?).
Front cover for the PC version of Puma Street Soccer, showing two players in full kit battling for control of the ball while they apparently rush past some sort of old wall lined by lampposts.

Chris Trottier atomicpoet@mastodon.social

Macstodon: a Mastodon client for Classic Mac OS.

Not to be confused with a Mastodon theme that's also called Macstodon.

https://github.com/smallsco/macstodon

Toot Server Login

Richard Moss MossRC
@Bogusmeatfactory By buying the hint book, obviously! It's exactly the kind of crap that Sierra would pull all the time in the Quest games, so really it's very authentic as a shareware tribute to LLL's gameplay.

Richard Moss MossRC
As for Hugo's inspiration, Gray had just one game in mind: Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry. Here's what he told me when I interviewed him for Shareware Heroes. (He was also inspired by TV series Hammer House of Horror and a book of monochrome clip art.)

Richard Moss MossRC
People who paid the $20 registration fee for the shareware #dos adventure game Hugo's House of Horrors (1991) would receive an auto-playing version of the game intended for children and a hint booklet with floorplans and both "medium" and "obvious" hints.

When the third Hugo game came out, creator David P. Gray put together a trilogy pack and repackaged all the hint booklets into one — a few pages of which are pictured here.

#shareware #retrocomputing #retrogames #gamehistory

Core Design coredesign@nerdculture.de

📢 New mod by Xevengar!

* Play as CJ from GTA: San Andreas * 👍
(also includes a new torso boss - you can see him in the video)

- Download the mod: https://core-design.com/community_tr1laramoddings5.html 🔗
- Video: https://youtu.be/NuzJs5qLSZU 🎞️

Richard Moss MossRC
@dangolding
Congrats! Sounds like interesting and valuable research, too.

Richard Moss MossRC
i helped test the Windows and Android versions of Aerofoil. Great source port.

Life Sim Engine clayote@gamemaking.social

@MossRC Here's Glider PRO in your browser. https://galeforcegames.itch.io/aerofoil

Richard Moss MossRC
"Do we have any quotes to put on the back of the box?" "Eh, kind of, but they're all like, 'This game is not terrible.' Why don't you just make some up instead?" "Sure!" *scribbles down furiously*
Tracksuit Manager 2 box back; quote at the top, which is unattributed, says "probably the best football management game ever!" Several other unattributed quotes offer similar effusive praise.

Richard Moss MossRC
The original game had a lovely quaint charm to it (what Calhoun calls a "quiet domesticity"), but I love the creativity of the commercial sequels, which came with a Room Editor app that people used for all sorts of offbeat and original ideas. Just look at all these cool room designs.
Hands-Off House from Glider 4 Hands-Off House Pac-Man Glider Space Pods Glider

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