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.

Jordan Mechner jmechner@mastodon.art

Tore through John Romero's "Doom Guy" in two days. I was moved, & learned a ton. His open and insightful account of 1980s, 90s & 2000s game-dev stirred powerful memories.

Reading chapter 5, I felt like I finally got to meet the crazy kid who wrote & mailed this letter in 1985.💾📨

(John assures me I wrote back, but the letter hasn't turned up in either of our archives. I hope it does someday, I'd be curious to read it.)

first page of John Romero's March 1985 letter to Jordan Mechner 2nd page of John Romero's March 1985 letter to Jordan Mechner

Richard Moss MossRC
One of my favourite bits of #gamedev wisdom you can hear in FPS: First Person Shooter, the new documentary film I worked on as a producer and co-writer — now available for preorder at https://fpsdoc.com
A quote from Warren Spector, said while talking about System Shock: "The most exciting thing is when players do things that surprise themselves. Even better is when they surprise the people who made the game. That's magic."

Richard Moss MossRC
Thinking about EA's impending FIFA-but-it's-not-called-FIFA-anymore release and how the FIFA organisation's incompetence means they get to avoid the mess that happened when Sports Interactive changed publisher and their football management series effectively split into two, both claiming to be the real continuation. (Not that it lasted for long — Championship Manager 5 was late to market and obviously not a sequel to CM4, and its devs took another four games to make something actually good.)
Football Manager 2005 front cover. This was the *developer's* continuation of the Championship Manager series. Football Manager 2005 back cover Championship Manager 5 front cover. This was the *publisher's* continuation of the Championship Manager series. Championship Manager 5 back cover

Richard Moss MossRC
@simeon They tend to *feel* productive, but these days we have a whole lot of scientific data to show that productivity rises slightly for the first week or two then drops significantly when people work more than 8 hours a day.

I bet there are a lot of bugs in games made through crunch that could be directly attributed to programmers working under crunch conditions and getting sloppy with their code.

Richard Moss MossRC
We got some killer dev stories into the 4.5 hour runtime of FPS: First Person Shooter. Most are positive, about influences, design revelations, and fun stories, but we managed to sneak in references to how brutal and crushing the work was too. Here's one quote from the doc that we're sharing around.

You can preorder the film in digital or limited edition blu-ray (including a "big box" version) at https://fpsdoc.com until August 1st.
Cliff Bleszinski quote on the development of Unreal: "I was 16 hours a day, just working. It was sleep, work, sleep, work. Pounding cases of Mountain Dew. I don't know how I didn't get kidney stones."

Damiano Gerli damianogerli@mastodon.social

I have some budget for freelance pitches over on voxelsmash.com - indie / AA reviews and interview-led features are most definitely welcome. Rates for features start at $50.
If you're having trouble getting your pitch accepted, give us a try, why don't you?
Boosts appreciated.

Richard Moss MossRC
@iainmew One day I'll get around to playing Red Dead, even if I'll probably just wind up dropping out of the story halfway through to spend hours wandering around its world exploring and causing mischief — same way I play GTA. I've always imagined I'll enjoy that stillness and silence you talked about.

Robert Shenton miltage@mastodon.gamedev.place

For I made SkiFree but you're the yeti

ArcturusDeluxe arcturusdeluxe@mastodon.gamedev.place

Project Osiris is a remake of the Amiga FPS Alien Breed 3D I made using the GZDoom engine. Check it out!

https://arcturusdeluxe.itch.io/project-osiris

Play History PlayHistory@oldbytes.space

One of the great, unwritten histories of the arcade are those of the component suppliers.

This ad from @gamingalexandria 's latest Play Meter showcases P.S Hurlbut, one of the earliest manufacturers of video game cabinets.

The pieces that make up games have stories of their own.

Brendan Sinclair BrendanSinclair@mastodon.social

Anyone interested in and emulation is advised to sign up for the excellent Read Only Memo newsletter.
https://www.readonlymemo.com/

Ernie Smith ernie@writing.exchange

Over at @tedium, I have a take on Threads, Mastodon, internet culture, and UX.

Key point: Learn to live with a grimy internet with slightly janky UX. because odds are it is the internet we actually want.

https://tedium.co/2023/07/08/threads-social-media-brand-safety/

Richard Moss MossRC
@kevin We hear that a lot; apparently there's no "blu-ray only" option because it's really expensive to manufacture small print runs of BD discs + packaging on these long films, so we offset/hide the cost by throwing in all that swag (which is cheap to manufacture but greatly increases the perceived value).

Richard Moss MossRC
If you've ever wondered what goes into making a 4.5 hour documentary from 48 interviews (and even if you haven't), David Craddock and I talked openly and in detail about a lot of our processes and struggles on FPS: First Person Shooter (preorders available now) in an excellent interview with WASD & Beyond podcast. https://linktr.ee/Wasdbeyond

Richard Moss MossRC
You can now preorder the digital and limited-edition physical versions of the 4.5-hour documentary about first-person shooters that I've been working on with fellow author David L. Craddock and a few other people for the past two years. We interviewed 48 people and covered 50 years of gaming history, going right back to 1973's Maze, with an emphasis on the 90s FPS golden age. https://fpsdoc.com

Richard Moss MossRC
@Moosader Yes indeed. It's a transcription error that I never noticed because I'd not heard of Whataburger before (being Australian). On
a related note, I have a short errata section at the top of the sources list on my book website: https://sharewareheroes.com/sources.html

If you spot anything else let me know and I'll add it to the list.

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.

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