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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.

Richard Moss MossRC
Announced three new cast members for my upcoming TerrorBytes documentary series today: Denis Dyack (Eternal Darkness, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kane), Sam Barlow (Immortality, Her Story, Silent Hill Origins, Silent Hill Shattered Memories), and Yoshiro Kimura (Rule of Rose, Shadows of the Damned).

It's going to be fascinating talking to these guys about their work and influences. (And boy am I glad to have an episodic structure to make parsing out their stories and insights easier.)

You can support the project at https://terrorbytesdoc.com
Denis Dyack cast picture for TerrorBytes Sam Barlow cast picture for TerrorBytes Yoshiro Kimura cast picture for TerrorBytes

Richard Moss MossRC
Got the perfect companion to the Tomb Raider remaster release this week: an interactive strategy guide for TR1 in which they mix video recordings of the game with FMV scenes where the host dresses up like Lara. I wish present-day video walkthroughs and web-based strategy guides would go this camp and over the top.
Front cover for the GameWizards Tomb Raider Interactive Strategy Guide, promising "full motion video", "view actual game play", and "jump to any trouble spot and get answers quickly" as major selling points. Back cover, showing screenshots of the software and asserting "This is the first ever CD ROM that allows you to conquer the game by watching actual segments of the game in full-motion video."

Richard Moss MossRC
Here's the entire TerrorBytes docuseries cast confirmed so far — all 35 of them. I have one more ready to announce next week and we're chasing several others. You can support the project at https://terrorbytesdoc.com
An image with headshots, names, and most-noteworthy horror-related roles for the 35 confirmed cast members of TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming documentary series.

Richard Moss MossRC
I'm delighted to share the trailer and pre-sales campaign launch for TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a five-part docuseries I'm writing/directing.

It'll feature over 40 interviews with developers, composers, voice actors, and genre experts, including Ken & Roberta Williams, Akira Yamaoka, Thomas Grip, Hifumi Kouno, Graeme Devine, John Romero, Dave Szymanski, Airdorf, Noah Falstein, Jane Jensen, Rob Fulop, Abby & Tony Howard, Akuma Kira, David Chateauneuf, Hubert Chardot, David Mullich, Joe Whyte, Mathieu Coté, and many more.

And everyone who pre-orders will get access to 15+ hours of exclusive online live events such as vidcast panels and producer Q&As.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0tdKEFbEMs

https://terrorbytesdoc.com/

Richard Moss MossRC
I'm delighted to share the trailer and pre-sales campaign launch for TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a five-part docuseries I'm writing/directing.

It'll feature over 40 interviews with developers, composers, voice actors, and genre experts, including Ken & Roberta Williams, Akira Yamaoka, Thomas Grip, Hifumi Kouno, Graeme Devine, John Romero, Dave Szymanski, Airdorf, Noah Falstein, Jane Jensen, Rob Fulop, Abby & Tony Howard, Akuma Kira, David Chateauneuf, Hubert Chardot, David Mullich, Joe Whyte, Mathieu Coté, and many more.

And everyone who pre-orders will get access to 15+ hours of exclusive online live events such as vidcast panels and producer Q&As.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0tdKEFbEMs

https://terrorbytesdoc.com/

Richard Moss MossRC
Finally got a book that makes The Secret History of Mac Gaming look small (at least until I do my volume 2). Kudos to @mwichary and team on producing such a fine book (it's about keyboards, for anyone unaware) and shipping the massive thing around the world in perfect condition.
Marcin Wichary's Shift Happens towering over my own Secret History of Mac Gaming Expanded Edition.

Nathalie Lawhead (alienmelon) alienmelon@mastodon.social

i just published a new post!
"Backrooms, Liminal Spaces, And The Subliminal Menace Of Loneliness in Indie Horror Games"
http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/backrooms-liminal-spaces-and-the-subliminal-menace-of-loneliness-in-indie-horror-games
"This is about the horror of liminal spaces, and the intrinsic surrealism of our digital world… That beautiful awful loneliness of existing in the electric void of shared virtual fantasies that video games are."
~

A collection of screenshots. Old school video game terrors: Tomb Raider Yetis, Tomb Raider’s Great Wall level, the sad zombie in Space Quest XII, and Alone In the Dark (original).

Richard Moss MossRC
@matt_diamond Ah, wonderful. How lovely for it to go full circle — the archives that helped and inspired me at every juncture of my research now mentioning the product of that research. Thank you!

Glenda Adams Gmatom@mastodon.social

Something with a little gaming slant- a cross stitch scene from Dark Castle, one of the early classic Mac games. If you played it, you can hear the sound he made when he ran into a wall, in your head forever. 7/10

Benj Edwards benjedwards@mastodon.social

Macintosh turns 40 today, and to celebrate, I wrote about the weirdest and rarest Macs ever made. Read it at Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/macintosh-at-40-the-oddest-and-rarest-macs-ever-built/

Damiano Gerli damianogerli@mastodon.social

I spoke with @shadsy about the Video Game History Foundation's project for a new digital library for gaming magazines and developer documents. https://www.timeextension.com/features/why-the-video-game-history-foundation-is-creating-a-digital-library-of-games-media

A library of magazines inside the VGHF's headquartiers

Richard Moss MossRC
Happy 40th birthday to the original Macintosh and to the first commercially released Mac game, Alice (aka Through the Looking Glass). The former was a revelation in how we interact with and comprehend our computers; the latter kicked off a long line of offbeat and creative interactive computing experiences and games that could only exist on a computer like the Mac.

You can read about the creation and influence of both in my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming. The publisher has the Expanded Edition on sale today to celebrate the milestone. https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/the-secret-history-of-mac-gaming-expanded-edition
A screenshot of 1984 Mac game Alice, which was officially called Through the Looking Glass for its boxed release.

Richard Moss MossRC
Poster for my next documentary project, TerrorBytes, a five-part episodic series about horror games. Pre-sales will start next month ahead of a year of supporter-exclusive live events and other perks while we make the thing.
Poster for TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Video Game Horror, a Robin Block Production that's written/directed by Richard Moss and produced by Daniel Richardson

Denis - The COVID info guy - DenisCOVIDinfoguy@aus.social

COVID barely gets a mention these days – here’s why that’s a dangerous situation.

"COVID complacency, by governments, the media and the public, is a threat to the overall health of the population, to health services and particularly to those most vulnerable, including older adults and those with pre-existing health conditions."

@auscovid19

Source: https://theconversation.com/covid-barely-gets-a-mention-these-days-heres-why-thats-a-dangerous-situation-220867

Richard Moss MossRC
@Gmatom It's a lovely memory, at least, and a beautiful little story you can share when you talk about her.

Richard Moss MossRC
Good insights here on why there's often a discrepancy between what the press says about a sequel and how fans react to it, snapped from an interview I'm transcribing with Mark Terrano about Age of Empires. (He was network programmer on AoE1 and lead designer on AoE2.)
Mark Terrano: I think the press, because of the number of games they play, they always have a bigger appetite for change than the audience does. You know, the audience is pretty satisfied with an incremental change and the press wants everything to be radically different. But they don't have to deal with the risk of that either. I mean, having a core audience and a loyal audience, you know, they really have expectations of what the brand and the game is going to deliver, that they build up. And of course everybody has a slightly different version of what makes Age of Empires amazing. So you capture as much as you can and, you know, you build in new strategies and new freshness as well as great content and try to pack a lot in the box. I mean, that was always — we just said this put a lot in the box. And that's a little bit of a different philosophy than there is now. But we really wanted to give long term value and just provide a lot of ways for people to play the game and enjoy it.

Richard Moss MossRC

@darylbaxter @Gmatom Yeah, really just a remarkable team all around — not only the programmers, but also the rest of them too. By the way, I enjoyed the oral history in your book but I wish you'd proofread it more; it can be hard to read at times with all the typographical and syntactical errors.

Richard Moss MossRC
@Gmatom That doesn't surprise me at all, having spoken a few times to Gavin Rummery (who wrote the level editor) and heard great things about the other main programmer Paul Douglas.

Richard Moss MossRC
A bit of Tomb Raider trivia that's not widely known concerning Aspyr is that before signing up to publish the Mac ports of TR1 and TR2 in the late 90s, they were a tiny Mac publishing house run out of the home of one of their co-founders.

They had no right getting or even bidding on the contract from Eidos, but they went for it anyway and pretended they were a larger company. (And then they hired @Gmatom to do the porting grunt work, which she smashed out with awesome improvements.) I talked to the founders about this once; it'll be in the second volume of Secret History of Mac Gaming, if that's ever finished.

Richard Moss MossRC
Really cool to see Aspyr sharing their approach to the Tomb Raider remasters and to tease at the effort that went into preserving the original game in a 1:1 graphics and controls overhaul.

And also interesting (though very much unsurprising) to note that they pitched it to Crystal Dynamics and were the driving force behind the project.

https://blog.playstation.com/2024/01/16/tomb-raider-i-iii-remastered-ps4-ps5-features-detailed-new-key-art-revealed/

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