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.

Glenda Adams Gmatom@mastodon.social

Some more Apple related . Somewhere along the way I decided to stitch the iconic Picasso style Macintosh poster. I liked how the colors turned out.

Richard Moss MossRC
Here's me and @KyleOrl on Retronauts talking about our latest books (Shareware Heroes and Minesweeper, respectively) and the worlds explored within them. https://retronauts.com/article/2079/retronauts-episode-539-minesweeper-shareware

Richard Moss MossRC
@CodingItWrong And I in turn found out about it from Matt Burch, who actually gifted me my copy after I interviewed him. It's a superb book, and it was really inspirational for me in writing both of my books too.

Richard Moss MossRC
@CodingItWrong Excellent, and thank you! I'm really glad you're enjoying it (and I hope that enjoyment continues). It'd have to contend with an old book from the mid-90s called The Macintosh Bible Guide to Games for that Mac gaming bible label, though.

Richard Moss MossRC
18 month old was clever tonight at bedtime. She knows I'll always read at least one book she brings over, and usually all of them, so to delay her transition to bed she hurried to the shelf and got three Dr Seuss books out because she knows those stories are always long. (So I read one and hid the other two; she was too tired to remember she'd picked out three.)

Glenda Adams Gmatom@mastodon.social

With Apple’s new game porting kit announcement, I have to share a little secret game dev history from Apple days of yore.

Way back in the mid/late 90’s, when 3dfx was THE 3d graphics hardware, Apple secretly contracted with me to build a Glide (the 3dfx API) to QuickDraw 3D Rave conversion library. This would let games that only ran on 3dfx hardware also run on ATI 3d chips that were built in to the iMac… 1/2

Richard Moss MossRC
@BrendanSinclair First thing I do on every streaming service is look for the setting to turn off autoplay. If they don't have it then I probably won't watch anything on there.

Richard Moss MossRC
The Colony was infamous for the many ways in which it would kill you. Here's one involving one of two infinite corridors you could get trapped in (warning: loud sounds).

Richard Moss MossRC
Given the news that @croqueteer has released the source code to his landmark 1988 adventure/FPS hybrid The Colony (https://github.com/Croquetx/thecolony), I thought I'd dig out and repost the #macicons entry I wrote about it:

I still find myself drawn into the Colony icon every time I look at it. @croqueteer had a tough job with it — how do you translate the magic of the game's real-time wireframe 3D graphics into a static 32x32 pixel grid? — but I think it strikes a perfect balance between the clean/clear lines that every good icon needs (for legibility) and enticing imagery to attract your interest in playing the game. And like every good game icon, it's instantly recognisable to anyone who's played the game (and seen the cool ray-casting 3D as well as the creepy giant eyeball alien).
The icon for classic Mac game The Colony, shown at three different sizes. It portrays a black and white 3D corridor with a giant floating eyeball staring back at you.

Richard Moss MossRC
@MichaelKlamerus @Bogusmeatfactory Not the first, but very early, and using the same raycasting techniques that drove the rise of FPS games in the 90s — except with a fascinating story to unravel, a very low framerate, and a sadistic design that'll kill you for anything.

There's a great tale behind its creation, too, which is laid out on the GitHub project page as well as in my Secret History of Mac Gaming book.

Core Design coredesign@nerdculture.de

📌 Examining the roles of Vicky Arnold and Heather Stevens, the women behind the early franchise, an article by Llewella Chapman: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QA5I5X8M3WZHFGAKSKPE/full?target=10.1080/14680777.2023.2217346

It's a must read! 👍

Michael MichaelKlamerus@dosgame.club

Source code for the 1988 game The Colony has been posted to Github

https://github.com/Croquetx/thecolony

screenshot of the Mac version of two objects with eyeballs looking at the player in a room

Mike Piontek robotspacer@xoxo.zone

Y’all ever wonder what the game you’re working on in World Builder for Macintosh System 6 would look like on the @playdate and then accidentally start designing and coding it a little bit? Haha this is rhetorical question it happens to everyone

Photo of the Playdate handheld game system from Panic, showing a monochrome, dithered image of a bus stop shelter. A hand cursor is pointing at the shelter and a menu underneath it shows the options Look, Search, Take, and Open. Photo of the Playdate handheld game system from Panic, showing an email interface. The “e-mail” title at the top is stylized a quirky way, with an at sign for the letter a, a heart over the letter i, and random capitalization. In the bottom-right corner a mascot girl with pigtails and a cowlick leans on her hands, smiling.

Richard Moss MossRC
Found this while hunting for a floppy disk that still works (so I could copy USB drivers to a fresh Win98 laptop install). The Polish-made Epic MegaGames-published Robbo was my first experience with shareware on DOS/Win3.1 rather than Mac. Cool game. Doesn’t look like I have the first disk anymore.
Adventures of Robbo disk 2 of 2 floppy. This copy was distributed by The B&N Companies of Atlanta, Georgia, although I don't know how it got to me and my brother here in Australia.

Richard Moss MossRC
I'm pleasantly surprised by Super Action Ball, a cool Korean arcade-style PC football/soccer game from the mid-90s with anthropomorphic animals, power-ups, and off-the-ball violence.

Gameplay's a bit clunkier than the likes of Super Sidekicks and Soccer Brawl, and less varied than the Kunio-kun games (Nintendo World Cup and its Japan-only sequels), but the presentation is fantastic and it's miles better than the UK-made games of this sort from the time. Shame it never got an international release or a sequel.
Super Action Ball title screen Super Action Ball screenshot on the default field, showing a player about to shoot into an empty goal Super Action Ball screenshot on the ice-rink field, taken just after scoring a goal Super Action Ball screenshot on the grass field

Richard Moss MossRC
@MichaelKlamerus To be fair, all the Marathon 2-engine games are weird.

Richard Moss MossRC
We got some FPSDOC backers to review a (4.5-hour!) rough cut of our film recently and were blown away by the results.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fandamental/first-person-shooter-the-definitive-fps-documentary/posts/3818387

All along I've wanted it to be the first high-gloss gaming documentary that actually gets the balance of depth and nostalgia right, and to make a doco that doesn't fall into the stereotypical oversimplification and cringey 8-bit graphics/music crap that plagued most of the other projects with the pull to get big-name interviews. Looks like we did it.

Richard Moss MossRC
Photo and description of injury, not for squeamish people
Sliding down a full flight of stairs may sound fun, but three days later I can safely say it most certainly wasn't fun for me. Still nursing serious bruising on my leg, butt, arm, and knee. Had some grazing, too, that's mostly healed, and I cracked an IKEA picture frame that we taped back together.

And all that's with instinctual knowledge about minimising fall damage honed by years as a dancer in my 20s. (I probably would have broken something otherwise.)
sensitive media
Black, purple, and yellow bruising on the outside of my right thigh from falling and sliding down a flight of stairs.

Jordan Mechner jmechner@mastodon.art

Opening sequence of our 1997 game The Last Express.
https://youtu.be/U7k3_CX6NII

In today's blog post, I explain this very special game's connection to my latest artwork (and my new graphic novel "Replay"): https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/latest-news/#a-new-departure

John Passfield johnpassfield@mastodon.gamedev.place

This new video by Luke Muscat about the creation of Fruit Ninja is a great watch if you're a designer or just a fan of the game!
https://youtu.be/St5v2uI-Nis

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