The Life & Times of Video Games – Détails, épisodes et analyse

I was on a panel about shareware games at PAX Australia in October, with Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage co-creator John Passfield, indie developer and bookshop owner Terry Burdak, and ACMI games curator Arieh Offman. This is the full audio from that panel.

You can find a PDF of my slides from the panel at this Dropbox link. I've also got John's slides in PowerPoint format (so you can play the videos yourself) and Terry's in another PDF.

As for where to find us and the things we talked about:

• My new book, Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet, has a website here
• You can find out more about John's past work at the Play It Again website and his personal site.
• Terry's games studio and shop are located in Melbourne's inner north. You can check out their games and buy some things at https://www.paperhousegames.com/
• If you live in or are ever visiting Melbourne, be sure to visit ACMI and stop by the free Story of the Moving Image exhibition.
• And you can find us all on social media. I'm @MossRC on Twitter and @mossrc@social.mossrc.me on the Fediverse (Mastodon et al); John is @JohnPassfield on Twitter and @johnpassfield@mastodon.gamedev.place on the Fediverse; Terry is @PaperHouseGames on Twitter and Instagram; and Arieh is @OffmanArieh.
• Special thanks to Helen Stuckey for conceiving and organising the panel

And here's the original panel description:

I'm still a ways off of finishing the next full episode, but here's something to fill the void in the meantime.

When I spoke to Home of the Underdogs founder Sarinee Achavanuntakul, we had a long segue into the broken world of copyright and its connections to the abandonware scene in games. I'm not sure how much of it will make it into the main story, but I thought a solid chunk of what she said could stand well on its own — especially in light of recent industry discussions around preservation and digital sales (or re-sales) of games.

So here it is, with a fairly substantial intro from me that felt almost like a dress rehearsal for the abandonware discussion I'll have to include in the full episode.

If you'd like to contribute your thoughts/memories/insights on the Home of the Underdogs, please record a voice clip (in any audio format) and send it to me at richard@lifeandtimes.games, DM me @MossRC on Twitter, or upload directly to this drop folder.

You can support The Life & Times of Video Games in any of the following ways:

• subscribe to my Patreon
• make a one-time or recurring donation via paypal.me/mossrc
• buy my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming
• preorder my second book Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet
• or just by sharing your favourite episodes and telling other people about the show

If you've listened to episode 30 of the show, even if you weren't previously aware of his work, you'll know what a brilliant orator Chris Crawford is. The Dragon Speech, that famous moment where he charged out of the games industry — by literally charging out of the room — was arguably his magnum opus. And it was only possible thanks to Chris's mastery of the spoken word. Here he describes his approach to public speaking and gives tips on how everyone can give better speeches.

To learn more about Chris, his Dragon Speech, and his immense importance to the early years of the games industry, be sure to listen to episode 30, 'The Dragon Speech, and Chris Crawford's improbable dream'.

You can support The Life and Times of Video Games by sharing your favourite episodes with others and by making a donation, either in the form of a one-off payment via paypal.me/mossrc or a recurring payment (with some reward perks!) via patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames

Given the hellish year we've had in 2020, I thought it'd be fun to close the year with a touch of levity...in the form of my cat, interrupting me, and just generally wanting to be podcast famous. 

Happy holidays. May your 2021 be blessed with joy and happiness and dreams fulfilled. Or at least better tidings than this year brought.

Thank you to my Patreon supporters for making this show possible — especially my producer-level backers Scott Grant, Rob Eberhardt, Carey Clanton, Vivek Mohan, Seth Robinson, Wade Tregaskis, and Simon Moss.

To support my work, so that I can uncover more untold stories from video game history, you can make a donation via paypal.me/mossrc or subscribe to my Patreon. (I also accept commissions and the like over email, if you're after something specific.)

I speak to Bitmap Books founder/publisher/owner/designer Sam Dyer about the hows and whys of publishing visually-led, high-quality books about games history, including why he loves to publish them and why they are so much more than just "picture books" — indeed, as we cover in the interview, there's both a huge amount of care and craft that goes into making them and we can learn so, so much from looking at the graphical evolution of the medium. We also discuss the challenges and processes of book publishing, the history of Bitmap Books, and Bitmap's current and upcoming projects. 

This is the sixth entry in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month-or-three 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. The previous one was with Kelsey Lewin of The Video Game History Foundation. Before that, I talked about computer role-playing games with the author of The CRPG Addict blog. Other interviews include Shmuplations.com proprietor and Japanese-to-English translator extraordinaire Alex Highsmith. Follow the "games history explorers" tag or the Interviews category on my website to see them all.

Interview conducted November 24th, 2020. [Note that since completing this interview, I have started working with Bitmap on some stuff and they have republished my Mac gaming history book as The Secret History of Mac Gaming Expanded Edition.]

Links:

• Commodore 64: A Visual Compendium
• Commodore Amiga: A Visual Compendium
• NES/Famicom and SNES/Super Famicom visual compendiums
• The Art of Point-and-Click Adventure Games
• Metal Slug Book

It was "the greatest speech he ever gave in his life", and it marked a turning point in his pursuit of his dream, but it had the note of a eulogy. This is the story of how — and why — the legendary designer Chris Crawford left the games industry in an opening-day lecture at the 1993 Game Developers Conference, an event that he had founded just six years prior.

***

Chris is still at it, still chasing his dragon, now with a more stripped-back storyworld and storyworld engine. You can read about these — and perhaps have a go at making your own interactive storyworld — at his website, which is full of essays, reflections, development diaries, and educational materials from the past 30+ years of his life.

Thank you to my patreon supporters for making this episode possible — especially my producer-level backers Scott Grant, Carey Clanton, Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, Seth Robinson, Vivek Mohan, and Rob Eberhardt.

To support my work, so that I can uncover more untold stories from video game history, you can make a donation via paypal.me/mossrc or subscribe to my Patreon. (I also accept commissions and the like over email, if you're after something specific.)

Thank you also to my sponsor, Richard Bannister, for his support. You can check out his modern reimaginings of classic arcade games at retrogamesformac.com.

I've just added one more way you can listen to and share the show — it's now available on the audio sharing platform Vurbl at https://vurbl.com/station/3Ul4MkAwo7Z/

To find other ways to listen, head to lifeandtimes.games/listen

Utopia and Intellivision World Series Baseball designer Don Daglow, one of the original five game programmers in Mattel's Intellivision group, describes his years spent at the company dodging forklifts, dumpster diving, listening to toys being smashed, and sharing a space with the rest of the electronics division.

To learn more about Don Daglow and his mega-influential game Utopia, be sure to listen to episode 29, 'Utopia, and the teacher who made a game of its impossibility'.

I've just added one more way you can listen to the show — it's now available on the audio sharing platform Vurbl at https://vurbl.com/station/3Ul4MkAwo7Z/

You can support The Life and Times of Video Games by sharing your favourite episodes with others and by making a donation, either in the form of a one-off payment via paypal.me/mossrc or a recurring payment (with some reward perks!) via patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames

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.

• Don wrote a book in 2018 about the business and design insights he's gained from his long career making video games (nearly 50 years if you include his mainframe games!). If you buy it on Amazon via my affiliate link, I get a small percentage of the sale price.
• It's also worth noting, for anyone up for some further reading, that I've done in-depth genre histories for Ars Technica on two of the genres that Utopia influenced — city-building games and real-time strategy.
• I'll also have more content from my two (so far!) interviews with Don in the coming weeks and months — probably a "soundbite" in mid-November and a full episode in 2021, plus maybe more of each of those.
• Utopia is one of several Intellivision games slated for re-release on the upcoming Intellivision Amico console. In the meantime, you can grab a fan-made remake on Itch.io (Mac or Windows), track down a copy of the Intellivision Lives! collection from some years back, boot it up in an emulator, or just watch some videos of it on YouTube.
• All music in this episode was my own, except selected clips from Santa Paravia, Astrosmash, Fascinating Fruit, and Utopia, and the IBM mainframe playing a song.
• Thanks to my sponsor for this episode, Richard Bannister. You can find out more about his Retro Games for Mac collection at his website or by listening to my Indie Spotlight interview with him.

To support my work, so that I can uncover more untold stories from video game history, you can make a donation via paypal.me/mossrc or subscribe to my Patreon. (I also accept commissions and the like over email, if you're after something specific.)  

This is a sponsored post, but don't let that turn you off. I made a point of doing the interview as I would any other — and Richard Bannister has some fun stories to tell.

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. He's got his own version of Mr Do — via Amstrad CPC clone Fruity Frank — called Fascinating Fruit, and a Snake/Pac-Man hybrid called Wacky Snake, plus a Crystal Quest reimagining called Space Diamonds and a JezzBall/Barrack clone called Little Green Balls that I can personally attest feels just like the original. And many others, available individually or in two discounted bundles.

In this interview we discuss his 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.

Interview notes:

• His Breakout-style game is called Shaded Bricks
• It's inspired by Commodore 64 game Crillion
• 1992 Mac game Diamonds
• Fascinating Fruit is based on the arcade game Mr Do
• But also on Amstrad CPC game Fruity Frank
• cheat codes include "drfauci" to give your character a mask and "fiveaday" to swap fruits and vegetables out for junk food (see below for how they change the appearance)
• I covered the rise and fall of Ambrosia Software in a PAX talk that you can read/listen to here
• Ambrosia Software's Pengo clone Bubble Trouble is no longer available, except via abandonware sites
• Ice Squishing
• His shareware games included Smashing Windows and Star Chaos
• Pang aka Buster Brothers arcade game
• Crystal Quest is available on modern systems (Mac, Windows, Xbox 360) thanks to the company co-founded by its creator Patrick Buckland
• There was indeed a Game Boy port, though the game was never going to work well with d-pad controls
• Richard Bannister's original shareware clone was called Space Debris
• His new version is Space Diamonds

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.

Chris was only a design consultant on 2004 game RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, but its remastered "Complete" edition has just come out on Nintendo Switch and the PC version is free on the Epic Games Store right now (until October 2). The original two games are also still sold via the likes of Steam and GOG.

Transport Tycoon, meanwhile, lives on in open-source project OpenTTD and in a mobile port (Android, iOS) of the original game by Chris's company 31X. 

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Carey Clanton, Rob Eberhardt, Simon Moss, Vivek Mohan, Wade Tregaskis, and Seth Robinson. If you'd like to become a supporter, for as little as $1 a month, head to my Patreon page and sign up. Or for one-off donations you can use paypal.me/mossrc.

Please remember to tell other people about the show, and to leave a review by following the links at ratethispodcast.com/ltvg.

I'm currently writing a new book called Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet (the subtitle got changed to "The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet"). You can learn more and/or pre-order your copy from Unbound.