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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 an upcoming book on the creation of #AgeOfEmpires and another upcoming book that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.

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
Anyone well-versed in Polish games history able to help me understand the broader context and significance (and maybe popularity too) of two old football games — Rzuty Karne from 1987 (for the ZX Spectrum) and Liga Polska Manager from 1995 (for Amiga and PC)?

Dr Becci Quirky Brain Coach thequirkybraincoach@neurodifferent.me

Do you periodically burn out?

I've just learned something while researching that could benefit you...

I was reading the work of autistic researcher Dora Raymaker.

She explained that the functioning of an autistic person running up to burnout can look like a "seneca cliff".

A seneca cliff is a model of a system which shows that growth or functioning is pretty good (even seeming to increase) and then, when decline comes, functioning falls off the cliff...at a rate much faster than growth.

It occurred to me that lots of people say to me "I was fine until I wasn't" or "I felt like I was actually ramping up or doing much more until I burnt out".

With this in mind, if it's hard for you to know when a burnout is coming (we can't always tell when we're in it), then you could reflect on whether or not you've been ramping up or putting in extra effort...this might indicate that a crash could be coming.

If this is helpful, pass the information on to your , or friends and family.

This is a graph of what a seneca cliff looks like. There is a line showing that the system is growing or functioning well, and the line dips down sharply to indicate fast collapse once the system has expanded past what it is capable of dealing with.

Iain Mew iainmew@c.im

New! @MossRC with a fascinating post on Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, reaching the upper limits of realistic motion controls, and why the frisbee mode is the best:

https://www.superchartisland.com/tiger-woods-pga-tour-10

Richard Moss MossRC
@iainmew Just FYI, I had to copy and paste the URL to open the link for some reason — it didn't render as a link. (Maybe it isn't getting parsed correctly by Mastodon/your instance with the www bit at the start?)

Richard Moss MossRC
@plauk I think it's a shame we've never seen much exploration of that nested inventory idea. Another version with the kinks and quirks smoothed out would be really interesting.

As for Enchanted Scepters being a point-and-click adventure, it comes down to semantics. It's rare that there are actually any clickable objects in the illustrated scenes, but you can of course use the mouse to operate all the menus and select commands. (Many later World Builder games included lots of clickable objects and hotspots, though.) Whereas most people would probably think of "point and click" meaning that you can use the mouse to directly interact with objects in a scene. Hence why I called Deja Vu "arguably" the first.

Windows 3.1 icons winicons@botsin.space

3000 icons - 3559

Richard Moss MossRC
Next up in my #macicons series, let's look at Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True (1985). It was arguably (though perhas not technically) the first point-and-click adventure game and the first title in the #macventure series (that includes the more popular Shadowgate).

ICOM's concept was to make a game version of a 1960s pulp novel, with gritty characters and noir vibes and a cynical, dry-humoured narrator. I think the icon nails that perfectly.
The icon for classic Mac game Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True. It's a 32x32 pixel 1-bit black-and-white illustration (that I've blown up to a larger size) of a man who looks like he's been lifted straight out of a mid-20th-century crime drama — beard stubble, cigarette, hat tipped over one eye, scar over the other eye, and directional lighting that puts him partly in shadow.

The Video Game Library 📚 thevglibrary@mstdn.social

Always a treat to see Books get the spotlight. ♥️📚

In the latest @TWiT, @leo chats with
@Unbound CEO, Wil Harris, and showcases some really great reads from authors like:

Laura Kate Dale, Daniel Hardcastle, Andy Robertson, Richard Moss, and Konstantinos Dimopoulos.

@bookstodon

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"

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