Still got the manual and Mac reference card inside, too. It's in a really nice font and there's even a partially-drawn map inside that you can finish as you explore the world.
Turns out I still have the Alternate Reality: The City Mac box (though the disks are long gone).
The first game I ever played — a story I've told numerous times before — is now finally preserved properly and playable in a web browser, after years of working only partially and only in MESS/MAME (or on a real b/w Mac). This is the 1987 Mac port of Alternate Reality: The City, an ambitious, fascinating, and innovative open-world RPG first released on Atari 800 in 1985. https://archive.org/details/moofaday_Alternate_Reality_The_City
@a2_4am Watching my brother play the Mac port of Alternate Reality is one of my very earliest memories. But I shudder to think now how we reformatted and overwrote the floppy around the late 90s when I put the disk in and the computer said it was empty. Wonderful news to see it preserved properly at last.
If you play The Quest from an unauthorized copy, it lets you play for long enough to read the introduction and go buy stuff from the shop. Then on the way out of the shop, a huge Red Dragoon and company appear from nowhere complaining about software pirates, drag you away to the dungeon, and the machine reboots.
@MichaelKlamerus @dosnostalgic Having interviewed and corresponded with the man, and done an entire book on the shareware era, these documents he's sharing are gold but take all his stories with a grain of salt unless they're backed by verifiable data. I've never found him lying — just glossing over (or choosing to forget?) negative details or taking a little more credit than he deserves.
@dosgameclub Also of possible interest to you and others playing along, here's what I wrote / found out about One Must Fall 2097's history for my book Shareware Heroes. And there's an excellent fansite with lots of additional info about the game at http://omfuniverse.tk/
@DanNess 1991 for that one, actually. The other post was '94 and asks people to send an email. But yeah, different world. (And yet, remarkably, so much of the business of games is the same.)
...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.
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.
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.
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
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)
@damianogerli Cool. Thanks! As I'm sure you've guessed, I'm working on a thing and this is all relevant.
@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.)
@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.
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?).
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?).
Macstodon: a Mastodon client for Classic Mac OS.
Not to be confused with a Mastodon theme that's also called Macstodon.
@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.