PAX Panel: Shareware Downunder
Photo by Rob Caporetto
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Soundbite: Home of the Underdogs founder Sarinee Achavanuntakul on abandonware vs piracy
01 Mar 2022 — Filed in: Soundbites | Season 5
The founder of influential old website The Home of the Underdogs, Sarinee Achavanuntakul, discusses the difference between "abandonware" and piracy, and explains why the former needs to exist.See full show notes and episode player…
If Monks Had Macs (Ludiphilia re-release)
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The Tomb Raider grid (remastered)
To celebrate the 25th birthday of my favourite game franchise, I thought I'd pull out the old Tomb Raider grid episodes from Season 1 and merge them into one. I also put some time into cleaning up the audio, though it'll still sound rough compared to newer episodes — given the lower-fidelity recordings I was using then. Here's the original episode description:
Every aspect of the original Core Design Tomb Raider series (and by extension the franchise's success post-Core) comes back to the grid that lies beneath it — the majority of the puzzles; the platforming; the cavernous chambers and ruins and outdoor areas that provide a sense of isolation, of solitude and discovery; and Lara Croft's iconic acrobatic movement style. And yet it never would have happened if not for one pragmatic choice made by a programmer early in the game's development.
This is the story of how that came to be, and how it made Tomb Raider…well, Tomb Raider, based on interviews with Heather Stevens (née Gibson) and Gavin Rummery as well as my past work covering Tomb Raider's history as a freelancer. The second part, which was originally a separate release, also includes discussion of the place that such a grid system has — or might have — in game design today.
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This is the story of how that came to be, and how it made Tomb Raider…well, Tomb Raider, based on interviews with Heather Stevens (née Gibson) and Gavin Rummery as well as my past work covering Tomb Raider's history as a freelancer. The second part, which was originally a separate release, also includes discussion of the place that such a grid system has — or might have — in game design today.
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33 - MobyGames
He called it MobyGames, and 22 years later it's the de facto source for credits, screenshots, and other general information about video games. It is the "IMDB of video games". This is its story.
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Interview: Kate Willaert (A Critical Hit)
05 Aug 2021 — Filed in: Interviews
We also voice our complaints about Google's Usenet archives, discuss the horrible world of YouTube publishing, the struggles of getting your work seen/read/heard as a content creator today, the value of a good hook for getting people interested in history, how to structure a historical narrative, our font choices for writing draft scripts, and much, much more.See full show notes and episode player…
32 - Flight Control
Features interviews with Defiant Development co-founder Morgan Jaffit and Firemint founder / Flight Control creator Rob Murray, along with a clip of former Touch Arcade editor Eli Hodapp.See full show notes and episode player…
Interview: Andrew Borman (Strong Museum of Play, PtoPOnline)
28 Apr 2021 — Filed in: Interviews
Soundbite: Chris Crawford on thinking in processes vs facts
24 Feb 2021 — Filed in: Season 4 | Soundbites
He calls it process-intensive thinking, and here, in this excerpt from our interview, he explains what that means, why he thinks it's rare, and how he believes it will eventually reshape our society.
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31 - Ghosts of Games That Never Were
29 Jan 2021 — Filed in: Season 4
What about the games that never make it to market? Do they have stories worth telling, or lessons worth learning? These are the ghosts of games that never were.
With help from The Video Game History Foundation's Frank Cifaldi, The Strong Museum of Play's Andrew Borman, Games That Weren't author/curator Frank Gasking, Tomb Raider superfan Ash Kaprielov, and a couple of old developer interviews, I round out season four by looking at the life and death (and afterlife) of Half-Life for Mac, Desert Bus, Citizens, and Core Design's Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition — along with the strange fascination we have with games that didn't get published.
With help from The Video Game History Foundation's Frank Cifaldi, The Strong Museum of Play's Andrew Borman, Games That Weren't author/curator Frank Gasking, Tomb Raider superfan Ash Kaprielov, and a couple of old developer interviews, I round out season four by looking at the life and death (and afterlife) of Half-Life for Mac, Desert Bus, Citizens, and Core Design's Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition — along with the strange fascination we have with games that didn't get published.
Soundbite: Chris Crawford on how to give a great speech
17 Jan 2021 — Filed in: Soundbites | Season 4
Here he describes his approach to public speaking and gives tips on how everyone can give better speeches.
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A Christmas gift from meow to you
24 Dec 2020 — Filed in: Bonus
Happy holidays. May your 2021 be blessed with joy and happiness and dreams fulfilled. Or at least better tidings than this year brought.
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Interview: Sam Dyer (Bitmap Books)
23 Dec 2020 — Filed in: Interviews
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30 - The Dragon Speech, and Chris Crawford's improbable dream
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Soundbite: Don Daglow on life at Mattel in the early days of the Intellivision
27 Nov 2020 — Filed in: Soundbites | Season 4
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29 - Utopia, and the teacher who made a game of its impossibility
When Don Daglow pitched management at Mattel on an Intellivision game about trying to build a perfect society, he thought he was just creating a "line filler" in their product calendar. Instead he made one of the most important games of all time.
Indie Spotlight: Richard Bannister (Retro Games for Mac Collection)
26 Oct 2020 — Filed in: Interviews
Richard Bannister is best-known for his Mac-native emulator ports of BSNES, Nestopia, Genesis Plus, and Boycott Advance, plus some two-dozen others, which he built and maintained through the 2000s and returned to relatively recently after a long hiatus. But he also has a fantastic game music player called Audio Overload (with Mac and Windows versions) that supports more than 30 console/handheld/computer file formats.
And this year, during a period of unemployment, he decided to flex his creative muscles and make some games. He's up to 20 in all, each inspired by a classic arcade game or early home computer puzzle game — and very often by multiple variants of a particular game — and he's selling them on the Mac App Store. In this interview we discuss this Retro Games for Mac collection — its inspirations, design, development, cheat codes(!), and future plans — as well as his 90s shareware games and his contributions to the emulator scene.
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28 - Transport Tycoon (aka the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer)
On the rise and, um...fade out(?) of Chris Sawyer, the genius creator of bestselling, critically-acclaimed simulation games Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon — who made a career out of working at the cutting-edge, in bare metal assembly code that he wrote and optimised (and optimised again) on his own.
Until the cutting-edge left him behind.
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Until the cutting-edge left him behind.
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Soundbite: Vance Cook on inventing new control mechanics for virtual golf
22 Sep 2020 — Filed in: Season 4 | Soundbites
Also listen for insights into the difference between sports games that aim for simulation versus those that aim for the "emotional experience".
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27 - Links
This is the story of Links and the huge shadow it cast over its genre.
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26 - The Nostalgia Box
I go inside Australia's only permanent video game console museum and find that what makes it special is more than just the size of its collection — or the fact that it exists.
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See full show notes and episode player…
Interview: Kelsey Lewin (Video Game History Foundation and Pink Gorilla Games)
25 Jul 2020 — Filed in: Interviews
Kelsey co-directs the Video Game History Foundation with Frank Cifaldi, where the two of them have been doing amazing work in preserving and archiving the artefacts of games development and culture — not so much the games themselves, but rather more the packaging and documentation, the source code, the marketing materials, the magazines, etc. And she also co-owns Pink Gorilla Games, a retro games store located in Seattle.
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Soundbite: a one-stop shop for (shareware) games
30 Jun 2020 — Filed in: Soundbites
Glenn Brensinger, former sysop of Software Creations, talks about how his then-boss Dan Linton's "Home of the Authors" Software Creations bulletin-board system (BBS) served as a sort of prototypical Steam.
The interview was done as part of my research for my upcoming book Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet, which is on Kickstarter until July 8th.
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The interview was done as part of my research for my upcoming book Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet, which is on Kickstarter until July 8th.
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Interview: The CRPG Addict
09 Jun 2020 — Filed in: Interviews
We also explore how his approach has changed as he's learnt more about the genre's history, the merits and failings of a scoring system for comparing games, the value of talking about a tiny niche within a niche in such detail, how he learnt to stop feeling guilty about loving role-playing games, and more.
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25 - Pimps at Sea
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Interview: Phil Salvador (The Obscuritory)
01 Apr 2020 — Filed in: Interviews
I speak to librarian, games critic, and blogger Phil Salvador about his website
The Obscuritory and his research and writing on games unplayed and unknown. In a far-reaching interview, conducted in late February, 2020 (and thus before the full brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the West), we explore the challenges, rewards, and lessons we've each found in writing about little-known areas of games history, as well as the importance of being kind and much, much more.This is the third entry in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month(ish) I'll talk to a different person who's exploring games history, in one way or another, to learn about the many ways people are preserving the games industry's past as well as to further our understanding of how this wonderful medium (and the industry that's built around it) has come to be the way it is now.
See full show notes and episode player…Soundbite: Gail Tilden on working at Nintendo of America in its early years
16 Mar 2020 — Filed in: Soundbites
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24 - Bully (Canis Canem Edit)
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Interview: Alex aka Blackoak from Shmuplations.com
11 Feb 2020 — Filed in: Interviews
This is the second entry in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month(ish) I'll talk to a different person who's exploring games history, in one way or another, to learn about the many ways people are preserving the games industry's past as well as to further our understanding of how this wonderful medium (and the industry that's built around it) has come to be the way it is now.
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23 - The Fog of War
Hence the term, the fog of war, a military phrase with origins in the musings of a 19th century Prussian general called Carl von Clausewitz. A phrase that’s since found its way into video game lexicon, and video game design, as we explore here. (Featuring interview clips with former Blizzard lead programmer Patrick Wyatt about the fog of war in Warcraft II and StarCraft.)
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Soundbite: Age of Empires and Civilization co-creator Bruce Shelley's 'inverted pyramid of decision making'
10 Jan 2020 — Filed in: Soundbites | Season 3
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22 - Wololo
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Bonus: The Rise & Fall of Ambrosia Software, '90s Mac Legends - PAX Aus 2019 talk
The synopsis:
For Mac gamers in the 90s, the people of Ambrosia Software were rockstars. Heroes. And with brilliant games like Maelstrom, Escape Velocity, Harry the Handsome Executive, Apeiron, and more, plus a company newsletter that spoke directly to the fans, they could do no wrong. In light of Ambrosia's recent closure (finally!), Secret History of Mac Gaming author Richard Moss recounts the studio's high and lowpoints and tells the stories behind its best games.
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21 - Pitfall Harry, the Jungle Runner
But these ideas were rare, and just beginning to find their way into video game lexicon, when David Crane came along and with one single game turned them into tropes. With just one game that had begun as a simple tech demo of a running man. One game that would go on to define a console generation, amid 64 consecutive weeks atop the Billboard bestsellers chart and a whopping four million lifetime sales on a gaming system that itself sold 30 million units.
That one game is Pitfall!, or Jungle Runner, as it was called during development, an Indiana Jones-like adventure distilled into the (home console) video game technology of the era.
This is the story of Pitfall!'s creation and its phenomenal legacy, pieced together from myriad sources — interviews, reviews, history articles, promo videos, book chapters, retrospectives, and a 2011 postmortem delivered at the Game Developers' Conference by none other than David Crane himself.
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20 - RealSound™ and Voice Characterisations
Features interviews with tech entrepreneur Charlie Jackson and former Adobe and Microsoft executive Eric Zocher, who together co-founded 1980s software company Silicon Beach Software — a pioneer in creative software tools and desktop publishing, as well as the publisher of several popular games (two of which we cover here: Airborne and the original Mac version of Dark Castle).
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Interview: Tom Lenting (Games History of the Netherlands)
05 Oct 2019 — Filed in: Interviews
This is the first in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month I'll talk to a different person who's exploring games history, in one way or another, to further our understanding of how this wonderful medium (and the industry that's built around it) has come to be the way it is now. See full show notes and episode player…
19 - Premier Manager
Soundbite: Former Sega CEO Tom Kalinske on telling the US Senate games aren't "just for kids"
16 Aug 2019 — Filed in: Soundbites | Season 2
When the United States Senate held congressional hearings on video game violence in 1993 and '94, Sega CEO Tom Kalinske went to bat in defence of the industry — and the medium. But he faced major obstacles just getting the senators to understand that the audience for video games was much broader than teenage and pre-teen boys. In this excerpt from an interview I conducted with Tom earlier this year, he describes the experience and lays out his frustrations with the senators. See full show notes and episode player…
18 - Hogs of War
17 - Super Mario Kart
16 - Sega Rally Championship
Soundbite: Henk Rogers on randomness and dilemmas in Tetris
06 Jun 2019 — Filed in: Season 2 | Soundbites
Listen for Henk's memories about the strategy inherent in the game's scoring system and the story of how they fixed a bias in the Game Boy version's random number generator.See full show notes and episode player…
15 - The Boss Button
14 - Lode Runner
Soundbite: Scott Kim shares a few secrets of puzzle design
12 Feb 2019 — Filed in: Soundbites
Legendary puzzle designer Scott Kim discusses the process and principles of puzzle-making for games. This is excerpted from an interview I conducted while researching my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming.
See full show notes and episode player…Bonus: Game devs on the impact of the original Mac
02 Feb 2019 — Filed in: Interviews
For any of you who aren't aware, last week was the 35th anniversary of the release of the original Mac. I published a Medium article to celebrate the milestone, and here now you can listen to an audio version of that. It's 14 current and former game developers talking about the early Macintosh computer and how it inspired them to make something insanely great.
See full show notes and episode player…13 - Girl Games, Inc.
On the 90s girl games movement, and its assault on the status quo of the video game market, featuring Girl Games Inc founder and former filmmaker Laura Groppe.See full show notes and episode player…
12 - Microsoft Games
Before something like the Xbox could ever hope to exist, Microsoft first needed to learn how to be a successful games publisher on the PC. This is the story — or part of it — of how Microsoft got games, featuring input from four key Microsoft Game Studios people — Ed Fries, Stuart Moulder, Ed Ventura, Jon Kimmich — and Age of Empires co-creator Rick Goodman.See full show notes and episode player…
Soundbite: Spotting "the magic" (Jon Kimmich, ex-Microsoft Games)
01 Sep 2018 — Filed in: Soundbites | Season 1
Jon Kimmich worked as a "product planner" and "program manager" in Microsoft's games group in the late 1990s and then in Microsoft Game Studios until 2004. He's since continued to work in bizdev roles in the games industry and has lots of fascinating insights (I posted a different quote on Twitter during the week).
Here he tells us about knowing when a game has that "magic" that means it's going to be a hit, with Halo and Age of Empires as examples.See full show notes and episode player…
Here he tells us about knowing when a game has that "magic" that means it's going to be a hit, with Halo and Age of Empires as examples.See full show notes and episode player…
11 - Bomberman
On June 11th, 2018, character designer and artist Shoji Mizuno passed away. He was a key figure back in the 1990s at the now-defunct Hudson Soft, a renowned Japanese games publisher — having directed art or design, or sometimes both, on more than a dozen games in the popular Bomberman franchise as well as providing original character designs for the Beyblade anime series.
Since this year is also the 35th anniversary of the release of the first Bomberman game on the MSX, I thought now would be a good time to look back on how the explosive puzzle franchise made its way into the world — and into the hearts of millions.See full show notes and episode player…
Since this year is also the 35th anniversary of the release of the first Bomberman game on the MSX, I thought now would be a good time to look back on how the explosive puzzle franchise made its way into the world — and into the hearts of millions.See full show notes and episode player…
10 - Dogz
9 - Midwinter
On the late Mike Singleton and the importance of Midwinter and The Lords of Midnight, his two great works. After switching from high school English teaching to professional game development in the 1980s, Mike quickly rose to the top of the industry. His games pushed the limits of what was possible, and he routinely crafted worlds that were way ahead of their time.
Here, based on archival research and old magazine interviews, I present part of his incredible story.
See full show notes and episode player…8 - The Tomb Raider grid (part 2)
7 - The Tomb Raider grid (part 1)
Every aspect of the original Core Design Tomb Raider series (and by extension the franchise's success post-Core) comes back to the grid that lies beneath it — the majority of the puzzles; the platforming; the cavernous chambers and ruins and outdoor areas that provide a sense of isolation, of solitude and discovery; and Lara Croft's iconic acrobatic movement style.
And yet it never would have happened if not for one pragmatic choice made by a programmer early in the game's development.
This is the story of how that came to be, and how it made Tomb Raider…well, Tomb Raider, based on interviews with Heather Stevens (née Gibson) and Gavin Rummery as well as my past work covering Tomb Raider's history as a freelancer.
See full show notes and episode player…6 - ROM Hack
At the dawn of emulation and the World Wide Web, a group of fans discovered the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games that never made it over from Japan. One of them decided to hack into a few of these and translate them, unofficially, with help from some friends — starting with Final Fantasy II for the NES.
Featuring quotes from Steve Demeter, founder of one of the first fan translation groups, Demiforce, who was the driving force behind three high-profile ROM hacks — the Final Fantasy II and Radical Dreamers translation projects, and the Earthbound Zero prototype release.
See full show notes and episode player…Soundbite: Mark Ferrari on gatekeepers and a cancelled X-Men game
04 Nov 2017 — Filed in: Soundbites | Season 1
The story of a cancelled X-Men TV controller game, as told by former LucasArts illustrator Mark Ferrari, who is a world-renowned and innovative pixel artist responsible for popularising multiple graphical techniques — including dithering, colour cycling, and palette shifting. And an inside look at the downside of having marketing-focused gatekeepers in charge of what products hit store shelves.See full show notes and episode player…
5 - FIFA 3DO
A story from the dawn of 3D sports games, and the forgotten link between the 16-bit isometric and 32-bit 3D EA Sports games — this is how FIFA 3DO transformed the way sport was represented in video games.See full show notes and episode player…
4 - Bug Salad
How a marketing guy at shareware game publisher Ambrosia Software ended up eating bugs in front of hundreds of people at Macworld New York 2000.
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See full show notes and episode player…
3 - Color Cycling
This is the story of illustrator Mark Ferrari, whose artwork was so good it forced Lucasfilm Games to figure out how to make a graphics technique called dithering compress to fit on floppy disks — in the process winning awards and triggering the use of dither in the wider games industry — and who pioneered the use of two background illustration tricks that gave the illusion of animation. He became world-renowned for his colour cycling and palette shifting techniques, which could be used to make a single computer illustration appear alive.
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See full show notes and episode player…
Soundbite: Steve Capps on online social gaming and Bill Gates playing Bridge
22 Sep 2017 — Filed in: Soundbites
Steve Capps, one of the creators of the Macintosh and a Microsoft executive in the 1990s, tells a story from his days of working alongside Bill Gates.
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See full show notes and episode player…
2 - Airfight
The story of the one of the earliest flight simulator games, Airfight, a favourite among the PLATO community back in 1973, based on an interview with its creator. Airfight was a multiplayer flight combat sim with wireframe graphics and real-time chat, and it was an influence on the first home computer flight simulator, subLOGIC's fittingly-named 1980 game Flight Simulator for the Apple II and TRS-80.
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See full show notes and episode player…
Extended interview: Jon Jordan on the evolution of iOS gaming and the App Store
10 Sep 2017 — Filed in: Interviews | Season 1
An extended interview with Pocket Gamer co-founder Jon Jordan, who these days writes mostly about the business of mobile games at Pocket Gamer's sister site PocketGamer.biz. These full interview postings will normally be for Patreon backers only, but since I've only just launched the show I thought it'd be good to give you a taste of what you'll be getting when you make a monthly pledge of $3 or more.
We covered a lot of ground in the interview — far more than I could fit into the Race to the Bottom episode. And Jon had some great insights into how the business and design of iOS gaming has evolved over time.
Listen for talk about how surprising it was to see the iPhone become a great games platform, what the early days of iPhone gaming were like, how the business and design of iOS gaming has evolved over time, and what's likely to be in store for the future of the App Store.See full show notes and episode player…
We covered a lot of ground in the interview — far more than I could fit into the Race to the Bottom episode. And Jon had some great insights into how the business and design of iOS gaming has evolved over time.
Listen for talk about how surprising it was to see the iPhone become a great games platform, what the early days of iPhone gaming were like, how the business and design of iOS gaming has evolved over time, and what's likely to be in store for the future of the App Store.See full show notes and episode player…
1 - Race to the Bottom
In the early days of the iPhone App Store, game developers found themselves locked in a race to a $0.99 price point that none of them wanted to become standard. This is the story of how that happened, and how it affected mobile games going forward.
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See full show notes and episode player…
