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
Every time my wife puts this pillowcase on the bed I silently say to myself "every day is a fresh start, but printing errors are forever."
A white pillowcase with the black text "everyday is a fresh start" printed across it.

Hisham hisham_hm@mastodon.social

TIL the WWW originally had a logo, and nothing else is better at expressing the naive academic techno-optimism from the 1990s than a design that looks hand-coded in PostScript and that slogan at the top.

The historic World Wide Web logo, designed by Robert Cailliau — it contains the letters WWW and the text "World Wide Web", "Let's Share What We Know"

Richard Moss MossRC
@AaronMT Happy reading! I hope you enjoy the book as much as (or even more than) I enjoyed writing it.

Aaron Train AaronMT@fosstodon.org

Excited to dive into Shareware Heroes by @MossRC

John Passfield johnpassfield@mastodon.gamedev.place

OMG. I found this EA marketing book with every single preview and review for Ty the Tasmanian Tiger from every newspaper, magazine and online site in North America!

Richard Moss MossRC
@tvler Lovely photos. Happy reading!

tvler tvler@mastodon.social

The Secret History of Mac Gaming by @MossRC

Iain Mew iainmew@c.im

I wrote about Empire: Total War, history, and definitive editions:

https://www.superchartisland.com/empire-total-war

Richard Moss MossRC
@retrohistories I'm the same, except replace Tweetbot with Fenix for Android. I've temporarily switched to another third-party app that launched recently, but it lacks a couple of key features I rely on and I'm sure it'll be gone soon too.

The Video Game Library 📚 thevglibrary@mstdn.social

🚨 NEW CATEGORY UNLOCKED 🚨

By popular demand, has added a brand new category to the site! 📚

Browse THOUSANDS of books about and right here:

👉https://thevideogamelibrary.org/blog/categories/game-development

🙏 Share with any fellow devs that would enjoy 🙏

@bookstodon

A screenshot of over 100 Game Development book covers from The Video Game Library

Richard Moss MossRC
@lunarloony That's a pretty good shareware game to get stuck with. I can relate, though — until we got dial-up internet around 1997-98, my shareware gaming experience was limited to the first episode of The Adventures of Robbo and the same eight or nine unregistered Mac games that I played over and over. (Then once we had internet I got my hands on a bunch more Mac-exclusive shareware as well as the first episode of Quake and a few commercial demos that I played on repeat.)

Richard Moss MossRC
@lunarloony Thank you! That's great to hear. I missed a lot of the shareware stuff in my book when growing up, too, partly due to age (born in 87) but mostly down to having been Mac-only until my older brother got a Win3.1 laptop in the mid-90s. It was fascinating to dig into all of the earlier history during my research phase.

Richard Moss MossRC
@cognitivegears Good! I'm glad that's sorted. I asked my publisher and apparently the Kindle version should have been available months ago — there was some weird Amazon glitch. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the book!

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Beautiful art style.

Richard Moss MossRC
@woolie @Lauren_nicole_roth Great. Happy reading!

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.

»