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
There's a new offshoot of Mac abandonware / software archival site Macintosh Garden: Mac Mod Paradise. It's for mods and other player-created content from classic Mac games.

Website: http://mac.mod-paradise.com
Background on its creation: https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/mac-garden-universe-expands-mac-mod-paradise-here

Richard Moss MossRC
The original SimCity has a cool icon. It seems totally natural and logical when you look at it — a minimalistic silhouette of a city — but it couldn't have been easy translating all of that into 32x32 pixels while taking care to ensure there's something representative of all the game's key elements: residential, commercial, and industrial zones, plus the ever-present helicopter. #macicons
The SimCity Mac icon, showing a number of skyscrapers drawn in silhouette with dots and lines, as well as a factory pumping out pollution and a helicopter hovering in the sky. Everything is drawn in solid black on a white background.

Richard Moss MossRC
Spending Christmas Eve in style. #tombraider
The title screen for Tomb Raider fan level No X-Mas Without a Tree, showing a snowy German town Lara looks at a message scrawled on the wall: "What about my xmas tree? Lara stands on a ledge overlooking a courtyard

Richard Moss MossRC
@robotspacer I wish I'd been able to get it into the first edition as well, but I was told at the time that we didn't have the budget for my icon gallery and timeline ideas.

Richard Moss MossRC
I've just published the audio recording of the "Shareware Downunder" PAX Aus panel I was on in October with @johnpassfield, Terry Burdak from Paper House Games, and Arieh Offman from ACMI.
https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/pax-panel-shareware-downunder

Richard Moss MossRC
I still find myself drawn into the Colony icon every time I look at it. @croqueteer had a tough job with it — how do you translate the magic of the game's real-time wireframe 3D graphics into a static 32x32 pixel grid? — but I think it strikes a perfect balance between the clean/clear lines that every good icon needs (for legibility) and enticing imagery to attract your interest in playing the game. And like every good game icon, it's instantly recognisable to anyone who's played the game (and seen the cool ray-casting 3D as well as the creepy giant eyeball alien). #macicons
The icon for classic Mac game The Colony, shown at three different sizes. It portrays a black and white 3D corridor with a giant floating eyeball staring back at you.

Richard Moss MossRC
@HeimComputer You got it before Christmas! Excellent. Happy reading for whenever you do decide to open it and dive in.

Richard Moss MossRC
@HeimComputer You got it before Christmas! Excellent. Happy reading for whenever you do decide to open it and dive in.

Carly Kocurek sparklebliss@mastodon.gamedev.place

If you're into You might like this interview two of my students and I have out -- it's with Jessyca Durchin, who produced Barbie Fashion Designer @histodons

https://www.romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/159

Richard Moss MossRC
@MichaelKlamerus I've heard from several people that it's their favourite episode of the show. I think it's one of the best things I've ever made; it's certainly the best showcase of what I wanted my podcast to be.

Benj Edwards benjedwards@mastodon.social

Hi, I'm Benj. I've been collecting computers and video games to preserve tech history since 1993

I started vintagecomputing.com in 2005 and began freelancing shorty thereafter for sites like PCWorld, Fast Company, The Atlantic

I introduced a lot of early video game and microcomputer history to the web

I also make music and created a bunch of joysticks. I run a BBS and a MUSH

Right now, I'm Ars Technica's AI and ML reporter, but history's still in my blood

EGA portrait of Benj Edwards created by Julia Minamata

Richard Moss MossRC
As we near the close of 2022, I'm remembering the best thing I made in 2020, a #podcast/audio #documentary about GDC founder and Balance of Power creator Chris Crawford's incredible departure from the games industry with his moving Dragon Speech.

I got Chris and a few people who knew him at the time (Don Daglow, Johnny Wilson, Gordon Walton) to reflect on the moment, and what it means to them, as we hear excerpts from his impassioned monologue about his dream.
https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/30

John Passfield johnpassfield@mastodon.gamedev.place

Hello, I realised I never did an official - I’m John Passfield, game developer. I made some classic 90’s games like Halloween Harry/Alien Carnage and Flight of the Amazon Queen. I also co-created Ty the Tasmanian Tiger. I’ve been making games since I was in high school (in the eighties!!). I toot about games, movies and comics (I also draw the occasional cartoon). I’m currently making games in Unity and SwiftUI for PC, mobile and Apple Watch.

Richard Moss MossRC
@lunarloony It's interesting how Bob is quaintly charming, and really kind of sweet, if you look at it now. I don't know if it was the marketing or the elitism of the PC tribe that made it fail, but it's a shame either way. And yes, I'm ever-frustrated by the game of "where'd they hide it now?" that I have to play when searching for settings I need to change on my Mac or PC, or once-simple tasks I'm trying to help a friend/relative accomplish on their iPhone or laptop.

Richard Moss MossRC
@HeimComputer Ah, lovely! Either way, I hope you enjoy it. Lots of love and care went into making that book, and I'm so pleased with how the Expanded Edition turned out after all the new content additions and the quality-of-life design tweaks.

"Critical Kate" Willaert katewillaert@digipres.club

Quick : I research and write about forgotten geek history, with a focus on playable female protagonists aka .

I created the greatest video on Youtube:

https://youtu.be/dGwWpbHLcXU

Richard Moss MossRC
@jesse To me, a lot of the problem seems to be that today's UI designers and programmers take little heed — if they're even aware — of the human interface guidelines Apple's Mac team wrote back in the mid-80s (or the underlying principles thereof). Too often they're chasing trends, giving themselves busywork, or optimising purely on data and stats, rather than following a principal that computers/software should be both fun and functional.

Richard Moss MossRC
@jesse She was such a treasure for the Mac team to have. What a wonderful thought it was that a computer OS could smile and say its own version of hello every time you turn it on, and to have a mascot that says "moof", and all those other delightful touches of whimsy and fun that she added.

Richard Moss MossRC
Let's look at another Classic-era black-and-white Mac game icon. This one's from Bill Appleton's World Builder game-making tool (made in 1984, released in '85), which let you create your own adventure/RPG hybrids (or pure point-and-click adventures, if you had the patience to create all the hotspots). He himself made the commercial game Enchanted Scepters with it, but there were several popular shareware titles by other authors.

Anyway, what I love here is how the icon takes the design language of the Mac's own UI — that a hand with a pen or brush indicates an app used for creativity — and extends it to a third-party application meant for making media-rich Mac games. And the fact that it looks like the hand is marking out the world just perfectly fits both the name and the function of the software — the World Builder is used to build virtual worlds. I think it's a neat collision of ideas. #macicons
The icon for Mac game creation toolkit/application World Builder, showing a hand with a pen marking out the landmass of an Earth-like planet.

Richard Moss MossRC
@yrochat I do and I do not. That sounds cryptic, I know, but what I mean is that I've seen that kind of stuff on a number of old compilation CDs and users group floppy/CD collections, but I can't tell you which ones. Possibly some came from clip art libraries as well.

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