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.

Gameplay details for "Mars After Midnight"
https://dukope.itch.io/mars-after-midnight/devlog/495856/gameplay-loop
Try the delicious Wet Dust Pie.

Myst is "moody, magical, and filled to the brim with mysterious mechanisms..."

It's also the latest subject of our Why I Love series of developer-penned pieces, with this one contributed by Andy Cargile of Smart Technologies

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/building-a-myst-ery-why-i-love

It's true - this is Alto's world. We're just mousing around in it.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-alto

Two years ago I published the history of Simulmondo, the first real Italian software house.
For better or worse, researching that history made me realize what I really wanted to write about. While I still can't say my main job is history, for me the direction was clear. Here is the link if you want to read it again: https://genesistemple.com/once-we-were-giants-the-history-of-simulmondo-italys-first-software-house-part-i

@glennf I backed it last week! Looks like it'll be a very cool book, and I knew it'd be good the moment I saw you were editing it.

The article's still online, too! Here's a link, in case anyone wants to read it: https://the-magazine.org/20/carriage-return/index.html

Found a printout of one of my favourite past articles, Carriage Return, a feature on a typewriter repairman in Carlton (an inner Melbourne suburb) that I wrote for @glennf and The Magazine. I've also got the first draft, appropriately written on a typewriter my now-wife bought for me from him.

Fun fact: Tom's *still* at it, a decade later (now around 79 years old, I think), and he's become world renowned for his work — he's even traded letters with famous typewriter enthusiast Tom Hanks.
The first page of a printout of the article Carriage Return, published July 4, 2013, about a typewriter repairman in Melbourne who is nearing retirement. A closeup photo of a Craftamatic typewriter fills most of the page. A page of text from the article, beginning "Typewriter Tom lives with his two sisters in an apartment above his shop on Elgin Street, just outside Melbourne's Central Business District. He fixes typewriters for a living, or at least he used to."

I found the very first version of my Secret History of Mac Gaming book synopsis, written back in 2014 when I started the project. Here are a few selected pages. The overarching vision stayed the same, but some stuff got tweaked, merged, or cut along the way.

I'll see if I can revisit the cut ideas for the second book, which will have a broader (and I hope not too unwieldy) scope.
The first page of my original Secret History of Mac Gaming book synopsis, featuring both a short and a long description The third page of my 2014 Secret History of Mac Gaming synopsis, featuring prospective chapter summaries for the first three chapters ("A Serious Machine", "Nineteen-Eighty-Four", and "Game Development for the Rest of Us") as well as a prologue. The eighth page of my 2014 Secret History of Mac Gaming synopsis, featuring prospective chapter summaries for chapters 22 to 26 — "E-Zines and Indie Kings", "Evangelists", "Built-in Games", "MacJesus, MicroShaft Winblows, and the Many Oddities of Mac Gaming", and "The Mac Game Console" The tenth and final page of my 2014 Secret History of Mac Gaming synopsis, featuring prospective chapter summaries for chapters 32 and 33 ("Intel Inside" and "A People's History of Mac Gaming") as well as an epilogue, a bonus chapter/appendix of extra anecdotes, and a timeline

For Kotaku I did one of the most difficult features I worked on so far. I went out of my way to try and speak to people, only to receive vague threats. The history of what was supposed to be a celebration of Italy's 150th anniversary turned to a farce which echoed all around the world. The story of Gioventù Ribelle and how Meloni wanted to sponsor a video game. https://kotaku.com/georgia-meloni-italian-pm-fps-shooter-game-pope-unreal-1850163072

For the latest issue of my newsletter, I wrote about the work of @NanoRaptor! I find her tech photoshops endlessly fascinating, thought-provoking, and hilarious.

https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/the-cursed-universes-of-dana-sibera/

Very cool to see classic Mac robot coding game @chipwits is getting rebooted with one of its original creators at the helm. ChipWits was a big hit for its day, and a major influence on the Mac gaming scene in the 1980s. (I covered its creation in Secret History of Mac Gaming, if you want to know more.) Here's how it looked the first time around, and a link to the website to check out the new version: https://chipwits.com/
The ChipWits 1984 start screen. The window titlebar says "Greedy in Greedsville" and there's a big drawing of the main character. A screenshot of ChipWits 1984 showing how the notation works for creating robot instructions. A screenshot of ChipWits 1984 showing a program in action.

this morning i was looking for a copy of Klause Breuer's windows 95 conversion of ChipWits (a very popular programming game for the original ), and was sorrowed to hear that he passed away ten years ago of a brain tumour 😢

it took several hours, but I managed to dig out several of his programs, including ChipWits, from the waybackmachine. To my knowledge, none of these programs have been on the web for over a decade.

i spent the day creating a memorial for a programmer whom i did not know personally, but used his software over a decade ago. i guess i hope that people can still enjoy his work even though he has left us.

... a kind of in memoriam.

http://www.dialup.cafe/~klaus

A screenshot of Klause Breuer's conversion of ChipWits for windows. It features black and white pixel graphics identical to the Macintosh version.

@pgv
And thank you for reading it. I first learnt about Seumas via a fan of his games who hoped to see his work covered in my book, and I was similarly touched by the story I heard, so in a way I'm just paying it forward.

Did you know that the Independent Games Festival's main prize, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, is named after the creator of its *second* winner? Seumas made one of the last great shareware games, Tread Marks, a 3D combat racer with deformable terrain, released in early 2000.

Seumas had been diagnosed Hodgkin Lymphoma three years earlier, aged 18. As his health declined, he defiantly made the best Breakout game ever, DX-Ball 2, with help from his family, then after meeting his hero John Carmack he dove into this more ambitious, innovative project.

He released the game on January 3rd, 2000, then accepted the IGF main prize March 10th, assisted by an oxygen tank and seated in a wheelchair. He died 11 days later. Carmack later penned a moving eulogy (see attached images).

In honour of his gamedev dream, his family continued making games under his company name, Longbow Digital Arts (now Longbow Games). They made the Hegemony RTS series and puzzle-platformer Golem. https://longbowgames.com

As my own tribute to Seumas McNally's legacy, and to the brilliance of his games, I told a longer version of his story to close out my new book, Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet. More info on the book at https://sharewareheroes.com
Tread Marks screenshot DX-Ball 2 screenshot In Memory of Seumas McNally, by John Carmack 3/27/00 ------- Two years ago, Id was contacted by the Startlight Foundation, an organization that tries to grant wishes to seriously ill kids. (www.starlight.org) There was a young man with Hodgkin's Lymphoma that, instead of wanting to go to Disneyland or other traditional wishes, wanted to visit Id and talk with me about programming. It turned out that Seumas McNally was already an accomplished developer. His family company, Longbow Digital Arts (www.longbowdigitalarts.com), had been doing quite respectably selling small games directly over the internet. It bore a strong resemblance to the early shareware days of Apogee and Id. We spent the evening talking about graphics programmer things -- the relative merits of voxels and triangles, procedurally generated media, level of detail management, API and platforms. We talked at length about the balance between technology and design, and all the pitfalls that lie in the way of shipping a modern product. We also took a dash out in my ferrari, thinking "this is going to be the best excuse a cop will ever hear if we get pulled over". Longbow continued to be successful, and eventually the entire family was working full time on "Treadmarks", their new 3D tank game. Over email about finishing the technology in Treadmarks, Seumas once said "I hope I can make it". Not "be a huge success" or "beat the competition". Just "make it". That is a yardstick to measure oneself by. It is all too easy to lose your focus or give up with just the ordinary distractions and disappointments that life brings. This wasn't ordinary. Seumas had cancer. Whatever problems you may be dealing with in your life, they pale before having problems drawing your next breath. He made it. Treadmarks started shipping a couple months ago, and was entered in the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developer's Conference this last month. It came away with the awards for technical excellence, game design, and the grand prize. I went out to dinner with the McNally family the next day, and had the opportunity to introduce Anna to them. One of the projects at Anna's new company, Fountainhead Entertainment (www.fountainheadent.com), is a documentary covering gaming, and she had been looking forward to meeting Seumas after hearing me tell his story a few times. The McNallys invited her to bring a film crew up to Canada and talk with everyone whenever she could. Seumas died the next week. I am proud to have been considered an influence in Seumas' work, and I think his story should be a good example for others. Through talent and determination, he took something he loved and made a success out of it in many dimensions.

@flargh I had that same thought once (for my nearsightedness), then after 20 minutes of research decided it'd be a bad idea because apparently the procedure exacerbates dry eye syndrome (which I have).

@vga256 They're beautifully produced, just like Ceremony. Obviously missing the audiovisual stuff that's only possible on computer, but on the other hand you get a wonderful tactility that's only possible with books and physical mixed-media production.

@matt_diamond @vga256 It'll probably run in emulation. It's definitely worth playing, regardless.

@Vidyala @vga256 If you love the books then you should definitely try Ceremony of Innocence. It adds so much to them with its animation, narration, and sound design.

@vga256 I'm glad I could help you learn about it. Ceremony of Innocence is one of my favourite things ever. I came across it shortly after my mum gave me the books (which are great) in the early 2000s and was similarly blown away by the experience.

sometimes i come across and projects that blow me away so completely that i end up spending the rest of the day just playing with them.

Ceremony of Innocence (1997) tells the story of two lonely strangers who fall in love through a series of postcards... all based on the novel Griffin and Sabine by nick bantock.

each postcard is lavishly decorated and animated. but what blew me away was the tactile, playful interactivity. sometimes postcards are pried apart, caressed, or tortured into opening... all with the mouse cursor.

voice acting by Isabella Rosselini, Paul McGann and Ben Kingsley. the project won two BAFTAs in its day.

i'm offended that we have nothing today that compares with this multimedia experience. all made in director by Real World Multimedia.

creative director Alex Mayhew has some background on the project here:
https://www.alexmayhew.com/portfolio-item/ceremony-of-innocence/

🙏 thank you @MossRC for the tip about this absolute gem

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