The Manhole was (and is!) a wonderful, whimsical, open-ended adventure originally meant to be an interactive children's book, but for Robyn's creative meanderings, and it was the first really successful (commercially speaking) HyperCard program. I covered the story behind its creation in detail in my book *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*.
Five years ago yesterday I got together with Robyn on a livestream to replay the game and chat about its creation. You can see the recording of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kX5E7yOHJg&t=1s
Having a case of the Mondays? How about some more #NerdStitch from my collection of retro cross stitch projects, to perk things up! Here’s a small scene from the classic Mac game Dark Castle. If you played it, I can guarantee you are hearing the sound effects in your head right now.
A new Mac platformer game created with Hypercard has been released! You control the titular Blah Blob as you bounce through twenty levels of increasingly devious obstacles.
https://bribrikendall.itch.io/blah-blob or download directly to your vintage Mac from CQ II BBS (cqbbs.ddns.net:6800).
Hi everyone! A week long jam about making blind accessible games is going to be next month! It's all about testing out new tech to make blind accessible games! I hope some folks join! https://itch.io/jam/bare-1
Some 90’s style retro #NerdStitch from my vault. After Dark’s Flying Toasters!
If you are a #gamedev of any sort (computer/console, physical, TTRPG...) who has made or is making games that are:
* Not supported by a publisher
* Under $100k in budget
Then I'd love to play and talk about them in a new blog/newsletter I'm writing called Byway.
To ensure a wide variety of games that I might not discover myself, I'm inviting developers to submit their games directly to me.
More details are over here, and I hope you will consider submitting!
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