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
@apt I have all the original 32x32 icons in either PNG (lossless compression) or TIFF (uncompressed), then I use nearest neighbour scaling to resize (aiming for a factor of 32 — an integer multiple — with the new size to maximise accuracy).

Richard Moss MossRC
Oh, also, I did a big long interview with the guy who made it, Bob Pappas, a few years ago. He sent me some photos to show how he did the swing animation, along with various other things. I'll include his story in my second Mac gaming history book, to be called something like *The (Even More) Secret History of Mac Gaming* or simply *The Secret History of Mac Gaming Volume 2*, when I eventually get that done.

Richard Moss MossRC
Returning to my #macicons tribute posts, here's MacGolf, first released for black-and-white Macs in 1985. This was one of the earliest golf games to employ the behind-the-golfer perspective that became standard for the genre, and the icon does a remarkable job of both saying "hey I'm a golf game" and showing what the game looks like when you play it. The icon was later colourised for a re-release with colour graphics in-game.

As best as I can guesstimate from my Mac gaming history research, MacGolf was *probably* the best-selling Mac game of the 1980s other than Flight Simulator (which may or may not count as a game).
The MacGolf icon. It's a 1-bit pixel art drawing of a male golfer with a checkerboard pattern on his shirt. He's holding a golf club that looks like a putter, looking ready to swing to hit the ball. The green and the pin are a short distance in front of him.

vga256 vga256@dialup.cafe

celebrating palette cycling that mark ferrari pioneered in

this scene is from the last chapter of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. the combination of complementary colours and a restricted palette produces one of the finest ferrari-esque palette cycles i've ever seen.

Richard Moss MossRC
Just received this thing of beauty: a DVD repackaging of the cancelled Tomb Raider 10th Anniversary Edition that Core Design worked on before Crystal Dynamics got their competing version greenlit, complete with fan patches and other content.

Thank you so much to @Ash for putting this together and to everyone who's helped to preserve and expand on this wonderful bit of history.
The front of the Lara Croft Tomb Raider 10th Anniversary Edition DVD case, featuring professional artwork of classic Lara Croft and great moments from the game. Inside the DVD case, there's a printed manual on the left and a DVD on the right The inside of the case includes a description of the DVD contents: unfinished builds of the game, fan patches to make it more stable, and related media. It directs you to tomb-of-ash.com or the latest updates and says the DVD "is made specifically for archival purposes." Also in the photo are the credits pages from the manual.

Richard Moss MossRC
@lauraehall First thing that comes to my mind is an old Mac game called The Fool's Errand, which has a storybook scroll that you can only read in chunks initially. You have to solve puzzles (with hints in the story) in order to progress, and along the way there's a meta-puzzle to solve as well.

A lot of Obra Dinn has roots in a variety of classic Mac games. Obviously the art style, but much more of it too.

Richard Moss MossRC
I've just heard that the audiobook version of my new book, *Shareware Heroes:The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet*, will be published in the US and Canada on March 28th by Tantor.

I recorded and edited the thing back in July-August, so I'm glad we've finally got a date on it.

Richard Moss MossRC
@eaplmx
It's been a long time since I wrote it, but I enjoyed re-reading it last year while doing a few updates to fix typos and an outdated author bio.

And good to know the system works; I guess purchasing power must be regarded as substantially lower where you are than in Australia. (If you want to pay at or above the regular price you still can, though.)

Richard Moss MossRC
I've enabled purchasing power parity on my Gumroad store, which means that if you live in a country where the World Bank recognises that the typical person's income — and hence purchasing power — is low then you may get an automatic discount.

Currently I have the text-only version of *Secret History of Mac Gaming* and the *Football Manager, one day at a time* ebook on there. Will add other work I own distribution rights to as and when possible. (So nothing new for a while yet.)
https://mossrc.gumroad.com

Richard Moss MossRC
@potatoMoose @AaronMT Excellent! Thank you for buying a copy. I hope you enjoy reading it.

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:

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🙏 Share with any fellow devs that would enjoy 🙏

@bookstodon

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

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