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.

Brendan Keogh brkeogh@aus.social

Hey Australian and folk who work in at least occasionally. Myself and @dangolding are running a big survey for The Australia Council for the Arts where we're trying to track the extent of game music work in the Australian . Please help us out by adding your views to the dataset!!

Please share with any folk you know who fit the bill but might not see this. There's a few passes to High Score conference up for grabs for your time!

Survey here: https://qsurvey.qut.edu.au/jfe/form/SV_bEja7k6HegeXzb8

Richard Moss MossRC
There was a period in the mid/late-90s where the big trend in football management games was having an extensive stadium expansion and management mode — pick where to increase capacity, plonk down shops and kiosks for food/merchandise, relay the pitch, add undersoil heating or a roof or floodlights, improve your safety rating, etc. Many titles even had you setting prices for individual retail/food items and deciding how many to order.
Ultimate Soccer Manager 1 and 2 (second one pictured) let you build roads and shops around your stadium and set prices on the goods. The main menu/home screen of the game included a nice isometric view of the stadium and its surroundings, and you could see everything changing over time as you built it up. FIFA Soccer Manager made you click a "view stadium" button to see a rotatable isometric view of your stadium, but it looked lovely and even had construction graphics for where you're building something new. You could see the stadium during matches (also from an isometric-like view, but directly over the pitch). FSM had the option to buy more land to facilitate more stadium expansion as well as more club-owned shops. PC Futbol 5.0, released in the UK as Premier Manager 97 and in Italy as PC Calcio 5.0, had a rendered 3D look but plenty of stadium expansion options as well. Versions 6 and 7 went much deeper, with dozens of individual both prices and inventory for catering and merchandise items to manage (although you could delegate such tasks to your assistant manager). Football Limited (Bundesliga Manager Hattrick) didn't have the glitz of its rivals, but there's a massive amount of detail and micromanagement across the whole game — and this extends to how you upgrade your stadium — although we'd seen most of the same features presented differently in the first Premier Manager a few years earlier

Damiano Gerli damianogerli@mastodon.social

Noctis was - at one point - the Italian No Man' Sky. In less than 5 MB it allowed users to explore a whole galaxy. It was developed by a programmer who has since isolated himself and who described Noctis as "telling my dreams to the computer".
I interviewed the developer and reconstructed the history of the title for Time Extension https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-making-of-noctis-the-no-mans-sky-forerunner-whose-creator-retreated-from-the-world

Exploring Noctis in space

Phil Salvador shadsy@digipres.club

So now I can talk about it: we're working with Cyan to digitize their video archives! Over 100+ hours of footage from the making of the Myst series.

We're SO excited about this project. Please help a little with our expenses if you can!

https://gamehistory.org/cyan

Greenscreen footage of Atrus from Myst.

Jeff Gerstmann jeffgerstmann@mastodon.social

Noclip has saved a lot of the old classic Game Tapes library and is going to be occasionally publishing their findings to YouTube, which is fantastic news. https://youtu.be/7KKCWGN2fBs

Chris Chapman retrohistories@digipres.club

RT @MegaDriveShock@twitter.com:

This is huge. A 272-page PDF of classified Sega of America docs from ~1996 was just posted online.

There is so much info here that it's almost overwhelming. Manufacturing costs, retail margins, sales, product strategies, emails, etc.

https://segaretro.org/File:SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/1675798596950847488

The Video Game Library 📚 thevglibrary@mstdn.social

When's the last time you played ❓

Big thanks to @MossRC for the reminder about these official "Planning Commission Handbooks" that were missing from the library. 📚

All fixed!

You can find them here:
👉 https://www.thevideogamelibrary.org/

@bookstodon

The English book cover for The Official SimCity 2000 Planning Commission Handbook. The English book cover for The Official SimCity Classic Planning Commission Handbook. The English book cover for The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook.

Richard Moss MossRC
@vga256 @thevglibrary I've had that on my bookshelf for a while but haven't had a chance to read it yet. SimCity 2000 is one of my favourite games, so if the book's really that good then I am going to love it.

Richard Moss MossRC
@thevglibrary @vga256 I'm sure I told you about it at some point. I have the original edition (sans "Classic" in the title), published in January 1990, shortly after the PC port came out.

Richard Moss MossRC
@metalsnake Wow, that must be really thick paper stock. Sounds like I'll be keeping it on the maybe list for a while longer, then.

Richard Moss MossRC
@vga256 @thevglibrary Now looking for a copy. I love it when game guide books do something a bit different. The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook by Johnny Wilson (of CGW fame) is another great one in that regard — it has an in-depth guide to how real cities around the world are laid out (and why), then shows you how to recreate the different styles in-game.

Richard Moss MossRC
@SRG24 @metalsnake I agree on Masters of Doom. Console Wars is full of bad recreated dialogue and portrays a warped/inaccurate view of what actually happened. (And I've also spoken to women whose stories were left out of the book despite being interviewed, for unknown reasons.)

Richard Moss MossRC
@miah @metalsnake I can vouch for Soul of a New Machine. Brilliant book. That and Steven Levy's Hackers were big influences on how I approach long-form journalism and history writing.

Richard Moss MossRC
@metalsnake What's the Oddworld book like? I keep going back and forth on whether to buy a copy, after having read that there's not much new information about the game's history/development in there.

Richard Moss MossRC
@metalsnake Makes you wonder why they bothered having a "mini" version. When Apple first started making their flagship phones bigger than four inches I remember thinking "oh no, now everybody's going to phase out their one-handed smartphone options." But I never predicted that "mini" and "tiny" would be redefined as devices that are only comfortable to *hold* (but not use) in one hand.

Richard Moss MossRC
@torb There are a whole lot of reasons for having a big phone that I can completely understand, but what bums me out is that there are millions of us who want something comfortable in a roughly 3.5"-4.5" range and we're almost completely ignored now.

I remember back when Apple released the iPhone I saw one of the designers talking about how they chose 3.5" for the screen because their research showed that was the optimal size for the majority of adults to touch any part of the screen with their thumb without stretching or changing grip. With today's tiny bezels that would be around 4-4.5".

Richard Moss MossRC
Whoever decided this is the "perfect one-handed size" must have enormous hands. If you can't reach every part of the screen with your thumb while holding it comfortably, it's not a one-handed phone. https://www.asus.com/mobile-handhelds/phones/zenfone/zenfone-10/

I really miss the world where 5.9 inches was considered a phablet. *looks wistfully at his Unihertz Titan Pocket and ageing Xperia XZ1 Compact, mourning a forgotten age when _actual_ small phones could have powerful specs*

Texelsaur 🔜 Megaplex texelsaur@meow.social

Seriously cool Lego recreation of Myst Island here at

John Passfield johnpassfield@mastodon.gamedev.place

If you're in the mood for some adventure after watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, then why not play my point and click game, Flight of the Amazon Queen for FREE! It has full voice and is playable in French, German and Italian!

https://www.gog.com/en/game/flight_of_the_amazon_queen

Iain Mew iainmew@c.im

I've reached the penultimate FIFA World Cup game, and it's a good one: https://www.superchartisland.com/fifa-2010-world-cup-south-africa

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