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
@GabeMoralesVR Good luck with it. I remember reading some years back about a dev having great success with a similar strategy of seeding a pirated copy of their game on Bittorrent to boost interest and awareness in it. There was also the fun story of another game with an unbeatable monster that would doggedly pursue any players who downloaded a pirated copy, so there's plenty of precedent for this kind of thing working.

vga256 vga256@dialup.cafe

some

back in the late 90s, when 's playerbase was exploding, player-built houses were both a convenient secure location, and a social signal of personal wealth. when a new shard (server) opened, players would race around the map trying to find legal "placements" for house deeds... areas where you could erect a home that had flat land, and no rocks or trees in the way. open land was truly scarce, and competitions to place a house were fierce.

to combat the real estate rush, implemented a "decay" mechanic that would make your house collapse/disappear if it was unoccupied for a few weeks. thousands of homes disappeared this way, to the extreme frustration of the player community.

in the late 90s, a player placed this tiny single room house on the Napa Valley shard, between the towns of Minoc and Vesper. it remained occupied for years, until it was converted into a "public house" without locks. the house still stands to this day, 24 years later. it is one of the longest standing player-built homes in the history of the .

read the entire story here, as told by /u/MacroPlanet:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/1097crs/rediscovering_old_places_in_uo_napa_valley/

A screenshot of Ultima Online, showing a character riding a horse, standing in front of a small single room house. The house sits between a bridge and a mountain cliff, with trees around it.

Richard Moss MossRC
@MichaelKlamerus Such a delightful game. I can't wait to introduce all three of Cyan's children's adventures to my daughter when she gets older.

Michael MichaelKlamerus@dosgame.club

Spent tonight playing Cosmic Osmo by Cyan, the creators of Myst, with my 5-year old tonight and we really like it. It controls in a similar way to Myst, first-person node-based navigation, but the game is focused entirely on exploration with no win condition or way to complete the game. You just explore, clicking on everything to see what happens, and occasionally stumble across mini games. It's just a lot of fun exploring the surreal world created by Cyan and I really like the B&W art

inside a spaceship with a window showing a fish in space

Richard Moss MossRC
@woolie @Lauren_nicole_roth Good question. I presume you've searched and it isn't there now? I'll see if I can find out from my publisher if it'll be appearing there at any point. In the meantime, though, you can always buy a DRM-free ePub and PDF version from https://unbound.com/books/shareware-heroes/ and import it into the Apple Books app.

Richard Moss MossRC
@airadam Excellent! I hope you enjoy it. (And is the Kindle edition available for you now? Or if not, what date are you seeing for release? I've been hearing about some weird regional variations from people and my publisher hasn't responded to my question about it yet.)

Richard Moss MossRC
@cognitivegears Does the Kindle version show as available for you now? I haven't heard back from my publisher yet about what was going on with the delayed Kindle release, but hoping it's all good now.

Richard Moss MossRC
@nulleric Thank you for buying them! I'll keep on going as long as there's sufficient market interest for my games and tech history projects.

Richard Moss MossRC
@savaran @mac84tv @ultranurd It'd be interesting to see an article or a list covering all the excellent and popular third-party products that Apple has killed or neutered over the years through system updates that replicated all or most of their features. I can think of several just off the top of my head.

Richard Moss MossRC
@cognitivegears I'll email my publisher to check if that's correct or if something went wrong on the backend with Amazon.

Richard Moss MossRC
@ultranurd @mac84tv I'd love to do a book on Ambrosia specifically one day. I wonder sometimes if the market is big enough to justify the work (it'd be a labour of love, but I'd at least need to make *some money*), but it's been encouraging to see even a few years later I get a steady 200-300 people digging into the PAX talk I republished about Ambrosia at https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/pax-aus-19-ambrosia-sw-talk

Richard Moss MossRC
@eloy It does not. I only covered a small amount of non-games shareware software, and most of that was just in setting the scene and establishing how/why games struggled in shareware pre-Apogee.

Richard Moss MossRC
@schmudde Thank you! I had a wonderful time building that website and tinkering with the design until it felt *just right* to me. I've been meaning to code in a JavaScript screensaver as well, with flying floppy disks or some other thematically-appropriate throwback to the era.

Richard Moss MossRC
@GabeMoralesVR I remember hearing/reading about that, but I've never seen it. Will have to dig out the video. It was fascinating reading his letter to fans about why Llamatron was shareware and feeling the sadness and exasperation in it at how the commercial market had changed, knowing everything that's happened for him since.

Richard Moss MossRC
@lordkhan Thank you! I had a lot of fun building that website and tinkering with the design to make it more fun and nostalgic. Hope you enjoy the book!

Richard Moss MossRC
@jmechner I haven't looked closely yet, but I spotted all of those new things and I expect they'll go a long way towards elevating the story. I'm especially looking forward to reading the legacy section, which looks great at first glance. I always like to have a legacy bit at the end of product histories — and I make a point of including them where possible/appropriate in my own books/articles — because they show the life things take on after they're done.

Richard Moss MossRC
@Liquidream I had the best time building that website; it was so much fun tinkering with layouts and colours and other CSS things that could be appropriated to emulate an old-school DOS vibe.

Richard Moss MossRC
Available today in the US and Canada in paperback and Kindle format — my latest book, *Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet*, delves into the 90s indie games scene and the rise of the shareware business model that presaged free-to-play.

I managed to pack in lots of dev stories, biz insights, and meta-narrative into this one. It covers the origins and early work of id Software, Epic (Mega)Games, Apogee/3D Realms, Ambrosia Software, Jeff Minter, and more, along with surprise hits such as Elasto Mania, Snood, Scorched Earth, etc, market failures like Star Quest 1, and quirky games like Grandad and the Quest for the Holey Vest, plus shareware distributors like TUCOWS and Public Brand Software, the UK licenceware and PD scene, the market shifts that happened as the big indie publishers emerged and then left the shareware scene, and more.

If you're wondering if it's worth buying, there's a thoughtful and fun article/review-ish thing over on Eurogamer: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-legacy-of-shareware-is-everywhere

And you can learn more and buy via sharewareheroes.com
Photo of the hardback and paperback editions of Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet. Screenshot of the main page at sharewareheroes.com. Includes short and long descriptions of the book plus links to buy the book. Screenshot of the "reviews and praise" page at sharewareheroes.com. It looks like an old DOS program, with reviews in boxes down the left of the page and "where to buy" links as buttons down the right side.

Richard Moss MossRC
Wonderful to finally get a hardback copy of The Making of Prince of Persia by @jmechner. PoP was one of my earliest and most formative gaming experiences, playing in black and white on a Mac Plus, and the Kindle version of this book remains one of my favourite game dev stories a decade after I read it.
The Making of Prince of Persia book cover, featuring the Apple II prince sprite in the middle of his jumping animation.

Richard Moss MossRC
I have found it horrifying to watch the rapid rise of wood burning heaters here in Melbourne in recent years, but it is encouraging to see someone in the UK realise the harmful, mega-polluting folly of installing them during a home renovation. Here's hoping for a quick reversal trend to switch to clean energy heating comes soon.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/wood-burning-stove-environment-home-toxins

»