some #90s #worldwideweb #history for fellow old web nerds:
if you had a #macintosh in the early 90s, you probably played the multiplayer tank battle game, Bolo.
and if you played Bolo, you probably visited jolo's Bolo Home Page. it was *the* bolo resource on the web, and it began its life on the authors' Duke University Med School web space, before it moved to lgm.com where it lived for ten years.
lgm.com was cybersquatted in the late 2000s, and the bolo home page disappeared from the public consciousness.
the site has hundreds of individual pages, and exploring its pages truly feels like an exercise in hyperlinking.
i spent the last few days recovering the site from IA and rebuilt its absolute link structure. please enjoy the Bolo Home Page for the first time in 15 years :)
I know I'm barely here and so shouldn't ask, but our tiny cat Nessie is on life-support at the vet, and costs have already exceeded what we can bear. Any help or shares are so gratefully received.
💜 A love letter to the lost places of the internet, and a call to action to never stop building these places, again and again. 💜
🌻 Yesterday, I read this beautiful essay by @catvalente.
I might have cried just a little, but don't tell anybody. 🥲
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start
Some more Apple related #NerdStitch. Somewhere along the way I decided to stitch the iconic Picasso style Macintosh poster. I liked how the colors turned out.
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
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).
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.
📌 Examining the roles of Vicky Arnold and Heather Stevens, the women behind the early #TombRaider franchise, an article by Llewella Chapman: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QA5I5X8M3WZHFGAKSKPE/full?target=10.1080/14680777.2023.2217346
It's a must read! 👍
Source code for the 1988 game The Colony has been posted to Github
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
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.
