The Life & Times of Video Games (Richard Moss)

How 2006 PS2 hit Bully (aka Canis Canem Edit) showed an alternate future for Rockstar and the open-world genre, with its compromised-yet-brilliant schoolyard satire — here I dive deep into the game, not for its overblown controversies but rather for its struggles against technological limitations and its triumphs in world-building, satire, and focused, more intimate and structured open-world game design. And I wonder why, nearly 15 years on, open-world games continue to strive for bigger and bigger playgrounds filled with more and more trivial collectibles rather than building on the legacy of Bully's deliberate, glorious smallness.

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, 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.

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

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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.

Support comes from my Patreon and PayPal backers, with special credit going to Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. Thanks fellas!

Original scoring and sound design by me.

These days Laura Groppe runs the Girls Intelligence Agency, which does research and consulting on the female youth market.

Find out more about my new book project, Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet, at Unbound.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcMy book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as on the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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An 87-second promo trailer for The Life & Times of Video Games, encapsulating the essence of its form, style, and content over three seasons and counting.

Have you ever wondered about the stories behind your favourite video games? Like, how they were made and why they were designed a certain way?

The Life and Times of Video Games has the answers to all of this and more, packaged in half-hour audio documentaries that take you back to the past and loop you into the present — to understand not just how games used to be, but how they shaped the medium into what it is today.

Find out more at lifeandtimes.games.

(And if you're a current listener, please share this with anyone you think might be interested in the show.)

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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.)  

Far from a mere "Worms in 3D", Hogs of War was its own breed of madness. Hear the story of how it evolved from a concept of "Command and Conquer with pigs", what made it such a well-designed satire, and how this underrated PlayStation game saw the funny side of serious global conflict.

All music and sound effects in this episode were composed and performed by me, except for the bits that I lifted out of Hogs of War.

Hogs of War is available for Playstation 3/Vita/PSP via PSN, and its PC port (slightly better graphics but solo campaign AI is broken and lots of glitches) is on GOG. If you'd like to play it, I suggest either grabbing the PSN release or tracking down a copy of the PS1 original.

Remember to share this episode on social media and to leave a review of the show on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcasting app you prefer.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might like to consider listening to the previous entry this season, Super Mario Kart, or one of the many other game design/development-focused stories I've done — consider, for instance, the episodes on Lode Runner, Midwinter, FIFA 3DO, the grid-based level editor of the original Tomb Raider games, or the graphical innovations of pixel artist Mark Ferrari. Or for a change of pace, perhaps you'd like to learn about the origins of the "boss button" or of the App Store's race to the bottom in game pricing?

There are "soundbites", too — short clips from interviews I've conducted over the years, like with Tetris Company co-founder Henk Rogers, former Microsoft executive Jon Kimmich, and legendary puzzle designer Scott Kim.

***

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media:Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income viaPatreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The sound designers from Age of Empires I and II, brothers Chris and Stephen Rippy, tell the story behind the iconic "wololo" priest chant — for converting enemy units to your side — that's since become a popular meme, as I delve into its strange legacy.

All sound effects in this episode come from Age of Empires or Age of Empires II, except when otherwise noted. Music is a mix of my own stuff and a few tracks from the Age of Empires soundtrack, plus snippets from Babes Wodomu's Wololo, R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion, Microsoft's Age of Empires: Definitive Edition launch date trailer, and a random fan-made wololo song I found.

Most of those t-shirts I mentioned are available at https://www.redbubble.com/shop/wololo+t-shirts, though you can also find some at various other print-on-demand-type clothing stores.

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, 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.

I've also just added a third way that you can donate to the show — a premium, ad-free feed on Breaker, where you'll get all the bonus audio that goes to Patreon (but none of the non-audio Patreon perks) for a monthly subscription of US$2.99. Head to https://www.breaker.audio/the-life-and-times-of-video-games-premium for more info.

For more information about the show or how you can donate, as well as where to listen links, a web player, and partial transcripts to the episodes, head to my website at lifeandtimes.games

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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. 

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

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. 

My first book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is getting republished in October 2021 (this month!) by Bitmap Books in an "Expanded Edition", featuring a revised layout and design, more images, additional written content, and new sections including a timeline and icon gallery. Head to Bitmap's product page for more details. 

My second book, meanwhile, Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet, has just been copyedited and will soon be going through design and typesetting phases. It'll be out around Q2 2022, but you can preorder from Unbound.

How a game designed in a week helped to change everything — for the company that made it, for a local industry in turmoil, and for a global industry in transition. 

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.

LINKS

• You can't get Flight Control on iOS or Android anymore, but the HD Mac and Windows port is still available on Steam — if your computer is old enough to run it.
• The clip of Eli Hodapp speaking on The Touch Arcade Show is from episode 222, published in September 2015 — shortly after Flight Control (along with many other EA-owned games) was delisted from the App Store
• For more from me on the early mobile games business, be sure to check out episode 1 - Race to the bottom as well as the extended interview I posted with Pocket Gamer co-founder Jon Jordan after that episode came out. I also briefly touched on early iPhone hit Trism in episode 6 - ROM Hack — which featured Trism creator Steve Demeter talking about his stint in the ROM hacking and translations community.

If you're curious what these guys are up to nowadays, you'll find Eli at GameClub carving out deals to pull more old iOS and Android games out of purgatory and into their subscription catalogue. Rob is a stay-at-home dad, years deep in a bigger-than-he'd-expected project to design his family's new house. And Morgan is also enjoying the home life after winding down Defiant in 2019, happy that it had served its purpose and was no longer needed. He says he's also writing a script for a new game some ex-Defiant people are building, consulting on various upcoming game projects, and writing short stories (which he describes as a "very nice" change of pace, as he can get a story done in days rather than the years most games he's worked on took to complete).

Thank you to my Patreon supporters for making this episode possible — especially my producer-level backers Joel Webber, Vivek Mohan, Seth Robinson, Simon Moss, Carey Clanton, Scott Grant, Wade Tregaskis, 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 or just don't want to deal through those platforms.)

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

I speak to Kelsey Lewin, a video game historian and collector, retro games store owner, and self-proclaimed Wonderswan enthusiast, about the challenges — and also the merits — of researching and archiving the artefacts connected to games development and culture, both past and present. She also shares her insights on how the growth in retro gaming helps fuel interest in games history, why some of the most interesting stories are far beyond the typical narratives of games history, what quirky things we can find when looking into the Wonderswan and its inventor, the famed Game Boy hardware designer Gunpei Yokoi, and much more.

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.

This is the fifth 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.

Interview conducted May 25th, 2020.

Links

• I couldn't fit them inside the podcast summary character limit, so if you're interested you'll need to head to the episode page on my website: lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/interview-kelsey-lewin.html

To support Kelsey and her work you can:

• Donate to the Video Game History Foundation
• Follow her on Twitter @kelslewin
• Subscribe to her YouTube channel
• Buy stuff from Pink Gorilla Games

You can support me and my work by: 

• Subscribing to my Patreon 
• Donating via PayPal 
• Following me (@MossRC) or the show (@LifeandTimesVG) on Twitter and Instagram (@lifeandtimesvg) 
• Buying my books — The Secret History of Mac Gaming is available now, albeit temporarily in digital form only (as it's now out of print) from Bitmap Books, while 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") is still some ways off being finished out August 2022 and can be

Frustrated by the unjustified furore that surrounded his tame interactive movie game, designer Rob Fulop turned to Santa for help. And with a clever business model he and his team at PF Magic invented a new kind of game, one in which you adopt and care for a digital animal — a virtual dog or cat, or something more exotic, with a personality and needs and quirks not unlike a real one.

Petz hexing is a deep rabbit hole to fall down, but if you're curious I'd recommend starting with these links:

Ballz & Linez: Remembering the Golden Age of Petz HexingPetz: A lost community of mostly female coders/gamersCarolyn's CreationsAnd for more on the Petz AI, I thought these were interesting:

Socially Intelligent Virtual PetzCreating Emotional Relationships With Virtual CharactersVirtual Babyz: Believable Agents with Narrative Intelligence(Also take a good look at what one of the Dogz/Catz developers did next.)Support comes from my Patreon backers, with special credit to my three $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Wade Tregaskis, and Simon Moss. Thanks fellas!

To learn more about my book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, head to its official website secrethistoryofmacgaming.com.

Music and SFX credits:

Two short clips from Night Trap's 1993 3DO versionExcerpt from 1993 Senate Committee Hearings, via YouTubeAnd everything else is my own work.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income (which means more time to produce the show) via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc

Can't afford to give me money?

Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to [RadioPublic.com](RadioPublic.com) for more info.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Links:

The Secret History of Mac Gaming: Richard Moss - AmazonAmazon.com: Night Trap: 25 Years Later — Explore the history of the ground-breaking Full Motion Video (FMV) game, Night Trap, in this documentary brought to you by My Life in Gaming.

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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.

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

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.

Nathan McCree has an album coming out soon called the Tomb Raider Suite that contains fully orchestrated renditions from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of reworked material from the first three Tomb Raider games, recorded at Abbey Road Studios. You can learn more about it here.

The original Tomb Raider game is available digitally on PC, Mac, PlayStation 3 and Vita, and mobile through several different storefronts. If you buy the HD-ified iOS version via lifeandtimes.games/tr1-ios then I'll get a small cut of the sale price. (It's actually the best version, provided you have an external gamepad you can use.)

Music credits:

Selected portions of the original soundtrack from Tomb Raider 1, composed by Nathan McCreeAnd everything else is my own work.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcPlease remember to subscribe and to leave a review on iTunes. A small donation of a few bucks a month on Patreon would go a long way, too, and it'd get you a bit of cool bonus content here and there on a private podcast feed.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Links:

Tomb Raider I on the App Store — LARA’S BACK FOR MORE CLASSIC ACTION! We’re going back to where it all began for one of the most famous video games of all time. That’s right, Tomb Raider I is now available for your iPad and iPhone in all its ORIGINAL glory. We've not messed about with it, so it’s the full, unedited, unadulterated experience from the classic release at a super-low price. How better to find out if you've still got what it takes to beat a legendary game than by taking on the lost city of Atlantis and the pyramids of Egypt? It’s probably not for the faint of heart!

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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.

Links

• The Nostalgia Box website 
• The Nostalgia Box is @nostalgia_box on Twitter 
• And @nostalgiabox on Instagram 
• Jessie Yeoh interview snippet taken from this WAtoday article
• There are some photos from my trip on the episode page

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. Learn more at lifeandtimes.games/donate (I also accept commissions, if you're after something specific.) 

Also remember to rate this podcast on whatever podcasting platform you prefer.

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.

Relevant links:

romhacking.netFinal Fantasy II Demiforce translation patchRadical Dreamers Demiforce translation patchSpotlight: Earthbound on Lost LevelsDrymouthIf you're looking to try out console game emulation, I recommend OpenEmu (Mac-only) or RetroArch. ROMs are easy enough to find, although I should note that downloading ROMs of commercial games is probably illegal in your jurisdiction.

Music Credits:

Main Theme and Castle Pandemonium from Final Fantasy II (composed by Nobuo Uematsu)'Requiem ~ dream shore' and 'Far Promise ~ Dream Shore' from Radical Dreamers (composed by Yasunori Mitsuda)Scars of Time from Chrono Cross (composed by Yasunori Mitsuda)Seeker by Kai EngelAnd a bunch of my own stuff

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcPlease remember to subscribe and to leave a review on iTunes or whatever podcast platform you prefer. A small donation of a few bucks a month on Patreon would go a long way, too, and it'd get you a bit of cool bonus content here and there on a private podcast feed.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How a quest to put sound in a couple of games in the mid-1980s led to a revolution in computer game audio design and production.

***

These are, in a sense, the sounds of a revolution in video game history, the sounds of a change so profound that it opened the door to entirely new genres. They’re digitised audio samples, a recorded analogue waveform converted into a digital signal — and then back into analogue audio through your headphones, in this case, via a couple of Macintosh games from 1985 and 86. 

We take this capability for granted nowadays, as we use our voice calling apps and record videos with our smartphones. But you only have to roll back the clock 35 years to get to a time when this sort of technology was beyond the reach of the masses — when digital audio was something only used by specialist researchers and archivists and cutting-edge or experimental sound engineers. And when the thought of using it on an off-the-shelf personal computer was almost unheard of. 

But then the Apple Macintosh came out in January 1984. And Apple's so-called "computer for the rest of us" had a secret capability that would unlock this door to digital audio for the masses. 

Featuring interviews with tech entrepreneur Charlie Jackson (Silicon Beach Software founder and Airborne designer) as well as former Silicon Beach Software VP of R&D Eric Zocher (who later worked as an executive at the likes of Adobe and Microsoft).

Adapted from a chapter on Silicon Beach Software in my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming.

You can find more of Dick Noel's music via Discogs and the Internet Archive. And about his life in a brief obituary at The Hollywood Reporter.

A partial transcript of this episode is available at https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/20, along with all of the show notes and past episodes.

Music and Sound Effects credits:

• A Dreamer's Holiday by Dick Noel with Ray Anthony and His Orchestra
• Explosion
• Crowd noise
• Continental Airlines ad from 1969
• Game audio clips taken from:
• Airborne (Mac, 1985)
• Dark Castle (Mac, 1986)
• The Three Stooges in Brides is Brides (arcade, 1984)
• Galaga (arcade, 1981)
• Donkey Kong (arcade, 1980)
• Ground Zero (Mac, 1984)
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (DOS, 1992)
• Dragon's Lair (arcade, 1983)
• PowerMonger (Amiga, 1990)
• Phrase Craze Plus (Mac, 1986)
• Spaceship Warlock (Mac, 1991)
• Spike (Vectrex, 1982)
• Sinistar (arcade, 1983)
• Shufflepuck Café (Mac, 1988)
• Elite (BBC Micro, 1984)
• Alley Cat (Atari 8-bit, 1983)
• Choplifter (Apple II, 1982)
• Ant Attack (ZX Spectrum, 1983)
• King's Quest (PCjr, 1984)
• The Black Cauldron (DOS, 1986)
• Manic Miner (ZX Spectrum, 1983)
• The Manhole (Mac, 1988)
• At the Carnival (Mac, 1989)
• Air Ace 2 (Amiga, 1989)
• Uncharted 2 (PS3, 2009)
• Mercenaries 2 (PS3/Xbox 360, 2008)
• Everything else is my own work

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, and Seth Robinson. You guys keep me going, and we never would have gotten close to this point without your help and encouragement. If you'd like...

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.Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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I speak to games historian and graphic designer Kate Willaert about her research and current projects, as well as her efforts to turn this work into a job.

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.

Interview conducted 1 May 2021

Links:

• Kate has talked lots about her Carmen Sandiego research, both on Twitter and her blog. Here's one example.
• Tetris: The Games People Play, a graphic novel about the history of Tetris
• The intro to Kate's (eventually) 50-part video series on playable female protagonists
• MobyGames tag for female protagonists (excludes games with multiple playable characters)
• Hardcore Gaming 101 feature on 1980s video game heroines
• The rules governing her 50-part playable female protagonists series are laid out in the intro video and this article
• Atari Compendium's collection of scanned magazines
• The Internet Archive's Magazine Rack
• The Usenet archives on Google Groups are now mixed in with the other groups and not easily browsable, but search still works
• The UTZOO-Wiseman archives on archive.org are a great resource for Usenet posts
• American Radio History
• newspapers.com
• newspaperarchive.com
• Kate's Moonlander article
• Kate's YouTube channel
• I didn't go into specifics on the many significant games made in 1973, so here are several off the top of my head:
• Maze, arguably the first first-person shooter
• Spasim, one of the earliest 3D games
• Airfight/Airace, the first computer flight combat sim (covered on this show in ep2)
• Moonlander
• Empire (the PLATO one)
• David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games...

It’s strange to think of a time before jumping was a standard video game action, to be expected whenever and wherever you have control over an individual character. A time before you could hop onto enemies’ heads and not die, or swing on ropes, or move back and forth across a vast level — many times wider than the screen.

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.

Relevant links:

• David Crane's 2011 GDC Classic Game Postmortem on Pitfall! 
• Pitfall Harry in Raiders of the Lost Shark is part of this Saturday Supercade episode 
• Pitfall TV commercials (I only ended up using two of these):
• https://archive.org/details/Pitfall_1982_Activision
• https://archive.org/details/Pitfall_1982_Activision_US.mp4
• https://archive.org/details/Pitfall_-_Atari_2600_-_Australian_Commercial_1983
• https://archive.org/details/Pitfall_1982_Activision_US_a.mp4
• X-Play: Know Your Roots with David Crane 

All music is my own work, except for the clips from Pitfall II and Jungle Hunt. Sound effects come from Atari 2600 versions of Pitfall I + II, Adventure, Superman, Dragster, Pong, Combat, Jungle Hunt, and Grand Prix, and from Utopia for the Intellivision. (Plus some stock tennis sound.)

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, and Seth Robinson. And a very big thank you (and warm welcome!) to my four new patrons this week. If you'd like to become a supporter, for as little as $1 a month, head to my Patreon page and sign up.

I've also just added a third way that you can donate to the show — a premium, ad-free feed on Breaker, where you'll get all the bonus audio that goes to Patreon (but none of the non-audio Patreon perks) for a monthly subscription of US$2.99. Head to https://www.breaker.audio/the-life-and-times-of-video-games-premium for more info.

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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

I speak to the creator of Shmuplations.com, a large repository of translated interviews with Japanese game developers, about his approach to doing the translations, his insights on the Japanese games industry, and the highs and lows (and struggles) of running a time-intensive side hustle.

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. 

Links:

• Castlevania – Developer Commentary
• Kazuko Shibuya - Square Developer Interview
• Mega Man - 2011 Developer Interview
• Women and the Famicom – 1991 Special Interview
• Women of Game Design - 1990 Developer Interview — Yuki Ikeda; Hisako Takizawa; Reiko Oshida; Yuko Tataka; Sanae Nito; Kanae Saeda; Kaori Ikeda; Meiko Wada; Capcom Sound Team
• What is Game Design? Three Perspectives — Hideo Kojima; Kouichi Nakamura; Satoshi Tajiri
• Super Mario Kart - 1992 Developer Interview
• Rez - 2001 Developer Interview
• Shmuplations Patreon
• My book: https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/ 
• Life & Times of Games on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames 
• Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG 
• Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg
• Podcast website: https://lifeandtimes.games  

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

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $10+ backers Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, Vivek Mohan, and Seth Robinson. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. (And as a Patron you'll get to skip those pesky cross-promotions from other shows on my network, among various other bonuses like transcripts and extra content.)

The story of how a terrible description of the Donkey Kong arcade game led to the creation of Lode Runner, one of the greatest games of all time and one of the earliest games with a built-in level editor.

Lode Runner Legacy is available for Windows and Nintendo Switch. An official remake of the original game is also available on Android and iOS.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

• Website: lifeandtimes.games
• Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG
• Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg
• YouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

• Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreon
• or PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Links:‎Lode Runner Classic on the App Store — DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY ON FOOL’S GOLD Play the authentic Lode Runner… this is the real deal! AWARD WINNING GAMEPLAY Lode Runner Classic combines the game play and all 150 levels of the award-winning Apple II original Lode Runner with graphics and features engineered for today's advanced smartphones.

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Continuing the story from Part 1, this is how the original Tomb Raider's grid-based engine/level editor impacted on the series, on Lara Croft's rise to fame, and on the shifting sands of blockbuster game development. This episode also discusses the place that such a grid system has — or might have — in game design today. Featuring input from former Core Design artists and level designers Heather Stevens and Andy Sandham as well as programmer Gavin Rummery.

Related links:

The Tomb Raider Grid (part 1)"It felt like robbery": Tomb Raider and the fall of Core Design, my article for Ars TechnicaRaiding the Fan-Made Tombs of Lara Croft, my article for Rock Paper Shotgun on the level editing communityVideo of 20th anniversary panel at Play Expo 2016, organised by Ash Kaprielov and featuring several people who worked on the series (including Heather and Gavin)TRLE.net, the central hub of the custom levels communityLevel Editing Forum, discussion boards for the custom levels community (lots of cool projects ongoing)Tomb Raider 1 for iOS (I get a small cut of the sale price if you buy via this link)Tomb Raider 2 for iOS (likewise)My affiliate link to buy Rise of the Tomb Raider on Amazon — Xbox One, PS4My affiliate link for to a Tomb Raider video game search on Amazon

Music credits:

Selected portions of the original soundtracks from Tomb Raider 1 and Tomb Raider 2, composed by Nathan McCreeAnd everything else is my own work.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcPlease remember to subscribe and to leave a review on iTunes or whatever podcasting service you use. A small donation of a few bucks a month on Patreon would go a long way, too, and it'd get you a bit of cool bonus content here and there on a private podcast feed.

There's also now another way to help, and that's to listen via the RadioPublic app. It's free to use on both Apple and Android devices and you can easily import all of your existing subscriptions from another all. And the best thing is that it's from a not-for-profit company that's working to make the podcasting ecosystem more sustainable, which means that, among other things, when you listen, I get paid. So check it out. Head to radiopublic.com to find out more, and subscribe or listen via lifeandtimes.games/radiopublic.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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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.)

How Nintendo and its mascot created a genre, and a combat-racing franchise heavyweight, and in the process gave us a masterclass in game balance, with the best-selling 1992 Super Nintendo game Super Mario Kart.

All music and sound effects in this episode were composed and performed by me, except for the bits that I lifted out of Super Mario Kart.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might like to consider listening to the previous entry this season, on Sega Rally Championship. Or for other development-focused stories I've done, consider the episodes on Lode Runner, the Tomb Raider grid (and part 2), Midwinter, Dogz, FIFA 3DO, colour cycling/palette shifting, and Airfight — some of which feature interviews with the creators.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcMy book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

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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.

Music Credits:

• Lee Rosevere - And So Then, Theme from Penguins on Parade, and Old Regrets from the album Music for Podcasts 3, and Small Steps and More On That Later from the album Music for Podcasts 4
• Ondrosik - Love is Over, Interlude, Crazy, and Etude from the album Nostalgic and Procrastination
• Revolution Void - Time Flux, How Exciting, and The Narrative Changes from the album The Politics of Desire
• Paleste2 from the Free 20s Jazz Collection on Archive.org
• And a few bits of my own stuff

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

• Website: lifeandtimes.games
• Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG
• Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg
• YouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

• Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreon
• or PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc

Please remember to subscribe and to leave a review on iTunes. A small donation of a few bucks a month on Patreon would go a long way, too, and it'd get you a bit of cool bonus content here and there on a private podcast feed.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

The Strong Museum of Play's digital games curator Andrew Borman describes his deep passion for uncovering and preserving cancelled, unreleased, and prototype games. This is so much more than a vocation for him, and here you get to hear all the stories and insights he shared with me when I interviewed him for the season 4 finale, The Ghosts of Games That Never Were.

Highlights include the stories behind cancelled Halo and Elder Scrolls games, an unreleased version of Until Dawn, an early version of Resident Evil 2, and some in-depth discussion about the significance of finding and sharing these stories. We also talk a bit about Andrew's work at The Strong and the amazing power and value of institutional backing in games preservation.

Interview conducted January 14th, 2021.

Links (many of these go to YouTube):

• I can't find a surviving archive of Andrew's Resident Evil 1.5 post, but here's a great Eurogamer article about the game and the community quest to preserve it
• The Strong Museum of Play
• Research fellowships at The Strong
• This page on The Tomb of Ash has info, screenshots, and download links for Core Design's cancelled Tomb Raider 10th Anniversary Edition
• Episode 31 of this show also included a segment on said 10th Anniversary Edition
• Tomb Raider's video game hall of fame entry
• Andrew has multiple videos on the Haggar Xbox demo build for a Halo Mega Bloks game. Here's the most recent one. And here's the first one.
• A video Andrew made about the Sonic Extreme skateboarding/hoverboarding game that turned into the Sonic Extreme we actually got
• Elder Scrolls Oblivion cancelled PSP game
• Andrew's Star Wars Battlefront 3 unseen PC footage video
• Andrew's video on Until Dawn's unreleased PS3 version
• VICE Gaming/Waypoint has an excellent Halo 1 oral history
• Manse was mentioned four times in Ambrosia Software's newsletter before its quiet cancellation
• Here's the Wikipedia page on Captain Comic
• Andrew's Stargate SG1: The Alliance hub page from his old website has both articles and videos

Former Links, PGA Championship Golf, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour lead Vance Cook explains how and why his team(s) created new ways to swing a virtual golf club — beginning with the C-shaped gauge in Links and leading into "TruSwing" on Front Page Sports Golf and PGA Championship, and then ending with the motion-controller (Wiimote) swing in Tiger Woods Wii.

Also listen for insights into the difference between sports games that aim for simulation versus those that aim for the "emotional experience".

This soundbite uses leftover material from Episode 27 - Links, though that story's not a pre-requisite for listening.

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Carey Clanton, Seth Robinson, Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, Rob Eberhardt, and Vivek Mohan. 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, as word-of-mouth is the main way my audience grows, and if you'd like to leave a review you can do so by following the links at ratethispodcast.com/ltvg.

I'm currently writing a new book, 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.

It began as an impromptu April Fools' Day gag, but Pimps at Sea was the joke that kept on giving. This is the story of how a chance encounter on the streets of Chicago led to a semi-annual tradition, an industry/fan-favourite insider joke, and a cult classic multiplayer game.

As you'll hear in the episode, Pimps at Sea went through many iterations and received several "development" updates. You can find the original website archived on the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20011107122402/http://www.bungie.com/products/pimps/pimpsatsea.htm and see a few highlights from the years that followed at the episode page on The Life and Times of Video Games website.

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, 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. For more episodes on humorous moments in gaming history, check out Wololo, Bug Salad, and Hogs of War.

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

And if you'd like to commission me to do some games history or consulting work for you, in whatever form, and for this show or for your own thing, don't hesitate to email me on richard@lifeandtimes.games.

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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

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. Follow the "games history explorers" tag or the Interviews category on my website to see them all. (Or just search the show feed in your podcast player for episodes that begin with "Interview:".)

Links:

• Carly Kocurek (she's been researching the girl games movement, amongst other things)
• Control Monger freeware shooter game on Obscuritory
• Bring on the Old and Obscure at Archive.vg
• Bad Game Hall of Fame
• MobyGames user review of Destiny, a game that's like Civilization but terrible
• Knights of the Crystallion on The Obscuritory
• The Colony developer memoir; my book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, tells more of the story behind the game
• Phil's article on one of Cyberflix's games, Lunicus; my book has some general info and a few insider quotes on the company's rise and fall
• Phil's interview with Bob Stein of the Voyager Company
• Millennium Auction article on Obscuritory
• The CRPG Book
• Mystery Science Theater on Wikipedia
• SimHealth article on The Obscuritory
• Video Game History Foundation co-director

Sega Rally Championship changed everything for the racing genre, and the 1995 off-road arcade hit was an incredible game too. This is the story of its development, critical reception, and long-term legacy.

If you're keen to grab one of the Sega Rally games on Amazon, please use my affiliate link so that I get a small portion of the sale price.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcMy book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Links:

Amazon.com: sega rally

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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. Unused material from an interview conducted while researching my upcoming book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, which is publishing in 2018 (during northern hemisphere Spring/southern hemisphere Autumn). More info about the book at unbound.com/books/macgaming. Music from this soundbite comes from a collection of 1920s jazz recordings available at archive.org/details/Free_20s_Jazz_Collection. To support The Life & Times of Video Games, and to ensure you don't miss any future soundbites or other bonus content, please make a monthly donation via Patreon. Details at lifeandtimes.games/patreon. Don't forget to also rate and review the show on iTunes or whatever podcast service you use. The show is on Twitter @LifeandTimesVG.Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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The man behind The CRPG Addict, a blog dedicated to playing through the entire history of computer role-playing games in roughly-chronological order, discusses his decade-long (and counting!) conquest and the roots of his passion. 

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. 

Interview conducted April 30, 2020.

A super-basic overview of the CRPG lineage/family tree, as posited by Chet:

• The top level is PLATO games, the Ultima series, and Wizardry (though it also came from PLATO RPGs), plus SSI's early games
• Then you have key derivatives of these: Might & Magic, The Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, and SSI's RPGs
• And "at least half" of the genre going into the 1990s branches off directly from these
• The period between roughly 1978-83 was the primordial stage, where there were lots and lots of weird ideas that turned out to be evolutionary dead ends
• As an example of how this works, he pointed to The Witcher III, which he believes has a clear antecedent in the Aurora engine games, including Neverwinter Nights, which took influence from the Infinity Engine games, which go back to SSI's Gold Box games, which go back to the early SSI titles. It's the CRPG equivalent to six degrees of separation.

My full list of links from the episode is too long to fit into the summary field, so if you'd like to be directed to all the websites and blog entries and other things that relate to our discussion, you'll have to do so via lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/interview-crpg-addict

***

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

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $10+ backers Eric Zocher, Seth Robinson, Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. (And as a Patron you'll get to skip those pesky cross-promotions from other shows on my network, among various other bonuses like transcripts and extra content.)

Here's some great game design wisdom from one of the legends of the business.

This interview excerpt is plucked from my set of Age of Empires history interviews that I did while putting together an oral history on the AoE series for Ars Technica a while back.

Bruce Shelley has been in the industry for some 30-odd years, with credits including co-creator of Sid Meier's Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, and Age of Empires, as well as key roles in Halo Wars and F-19 Stealth Fighter, among other games.

If you enjoy the Life and Times of Video Games, please remember to rate/review it and to share it with other people — the more listeners I get, the more I'll be able to improve the show and release more great content. You can also support the show financially — and get some bonus, ad-free content as a reward — with monthly donations on Patreon or Breaker, or either one-off or monthly donations on PayPal. Head to lifeandtimes.games/donate for more information.

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While I'm away on my honeymoon, here's my complete talk from PAX Australia 2019, on the rise and fall of legendary shareware publisher Ambrosia Software — the most underrated of the '90s indie publishing giants.

You can find accompanying slides at https://tinyurl.com/paxausambrosiatalk as well as my full script on the accompanying blog post at lifeandtimes.games. So please, enjoy, and I'll see you in a couple of weeks.

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.

***

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, and Seth Robinson. And a very big thank you (and warm welcome!) to my five new patrons this month. If you'd like to become a supporter, for as little as $1 a month, head to my Patreon page and sign up.

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

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.

Support comes from my Patreon and PayPal backers, with special credit going to Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. Thanks fellas!

Music and SFX credits:

The Take That Dyna Blaster segment from GamesMaster season 2, episode 5 (1992)All music is my own workSources:

The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2 by John SzczepaniakEdge Magazine issue 6, March 1994Edge Magazine issue 17, February 1995Game Players magazine issue 22, April 1991Game Developers Magazine issue 1,RETRO magazine issue 6The One magazine issue 81, July 1995Edge Magazine issue 67, January 1999multiple pages from Ragey's Totally Bombastic Bomberman Shrine PlaceThe Complete History of Bomberman - Tired Old HackGames Nobody Talks About Anymore: Eric and the Floaters - Den of GeekRetro Gamer Magazine issues 66 and 67 (they have a two-part history of Hudson Soft)Computer & Video Games Magazine issue 34, August 1984CRASH Magazine, July 1984Sinclair User, July 1984The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcMy book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as on the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

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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. 

For more on the 93/94 congressional hearings and their impact on the industry, be sure to listen to episode 10. It tells the story of how the designer of Night Trap — one of the games lambasted in the hearings for its supposed glorification of extreme violence (it was actually about preventing violence against women) — responded to the witch hunt by making a game so friendly and inoffensive that it couldn't possibly be construed as encouraging violence: Dogz, a game about raising and caring for a virtual puppy. 

Previous Soundbites: Henk Rogers on randomness and dilemmas in TetrisScott Kim shares a few secrets of puzzle designSpotting "the magic" (Jon Kimmich, ex-Microsoft Games)Mark Ferrari on gatekeepers and a cancelled X-Men gameSteve Capps on online social gaming and Bill Gates playing BridgeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via:Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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When I interviewed the legendary game designer and GDC founder Chris Crawford for episode 30, on his famous Dragon Speech, I asked him if he'd have pursued this dragon had he known he'd still be chasing it three decades later. He admitted that he probably would have not. He'd have instead put his energy into making more simulations, teaching people to think in a way that he only recently realised is rare.

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.

He's also written multiple short essays about this idea on his website. Here are links to a couple of them:

• https://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/i-really-blew-it.html
• https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/object-versus-process.html

You can find a full transcript of this soundbite at lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/soundbite-chris-crawford-2

To support The Life and Times of Video Games, please remember to share your favourite episodes with other people. You can also donate to the show via paypal.me/mossrc or sign up for a monthly subscription on patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames (which will get you various tier-dependent bonus perks like an ad-free podcast feed and research and production notes).

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

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.

If you have an old PowerPC Mac or the Sheepshaver emulator, you can get Escape from Jason Whong via VintageAppleMac.com. Almost all of Ambrosia's games are still available for purchase direct from the Ambrosia Software website.

You can learn more about my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming at Unbound, and if you missed the original campaign you can preorder the special edition on Kickstarter. (All Unbound backers will also receive the special edition.)

Cover image incorporates a photo by Frank Caratozzolo. You can find more of his Macworld NY 2000 photos at http://web.archive.org/web/20020519205631/http://www.utterer.com:80/content/macworld/mwny00/photos.shtml

Music Credits:

• Evan Schaeffer - Tulip Poplars, Anthem, and Big Tree from the album Glow, and Mantra and Graze from the album Big Spash
• Jesse Spillane - Dum Dum Conundrum from The Maddening Parade and No Disclaimer from Art of Presentation
• Kai Engel - Passages from the album The Run
• Ondrosik - Love is Over, Interlude, Crazy, and Etude from the album Nostalgic and Procrastination
• Revolution Void - Outer Orbit and The Narrative Changes from the album The Politics of Desire
• Goto80 and the Uwe Schenk Band - Cable Swingin' Ferret from the album The Ferret Show
• And a few bits of my own stuff

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

• Website: lifeandtimes.games
• Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG
• Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg
• YouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

• Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreon
• or PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc

Please remember to subscribe and to leave a review on iTunes. A small donation of a few bucks a month on Patreon would go a long way, too, and...

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.

Support comes from my Patreon and PayPal backers, with special credit going to Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. Thanks fellas!

Original scoring and sound design by me.

While I fully intend on covering more of the Microsoft games story in future, if you'd like to learn more there are a couple of books by veteran games and tech journalist Rusel DeMaria. Game of X volume 1 delves into the Xbox, while volume 2 looks at the backstory before Xbox.

Find out more about my new book project, Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet, at Unbound.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcMy book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as on the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Music by Kai Engel, Lee Rosevere, and Evan Schaeffer. You can listen to the episode I made on Mark's graphical innovations, which doesn't include this story, at lifeandtimes.games. And you can see a few screenshots of the cancelled X-Men game at his website, markferrari.com. It's under 8-bit Game Art Volume 2. Mark worked recently on a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion called Thimbleweed Park, along with other LucasArts alums Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick, and David Fox. If you buy the iOS version via the link lifeandtimes.games/thimbleweedpark, I get a small cut of the sale price. It's also available on PC, Mac, Linux, Android, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media Website: lifeandtimes.games Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg YouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreon or PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc Please remember to subscribe and to leave a review on iTunes or whatever podcast platform you use. A small donation of a few bucks a month on Patreon would go a long way, too.Support The Life & Times of Video GamesLinks:Thimbleweed Park on the App Store — A brand new adventure game from Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, creators of the classics Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion! Play as five characters to uncover the surreal mystery of Thimbleweed Park -- a town where a dead body is the least of your problems.

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Before computers had proper multitasking support and quick shortcuts for changing apps, playing games when you're not supposed to be could be super risky. But if there's one thing that's been a constant in technology, it's that wherever there are computers, there are also games. And for a while, in the 1980s and 90s, many game developers actually put in a special key command that would bring up a fake productivity screen. This is the story of the rise and fall of the boss button.

If you buy Steven Levy's Hackers on Amazon via this link, I get a small percentage of the sale price. (I highly recommend reading the book, if you haven't already — it's a fascinating look into the early computer industry through the eyes of free-thinking and idealistic programmers, with a good bit of backstory as well on the beginnings of Sierra Online.)

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcMy book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Links:

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: Steven Levy: 9781449388393: Amazon.com: Gateway — This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

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Nintendo Power founding editor and former Nintendo of America marketing executive Gail Tilden remembers her beginnings at the company — before the NES, before Nintendo Power, and even before desktop publishing.

Head to https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/soundbite-gail-tilden for a full transcript of the soundbite.

This interview was conducted for an article about the launch of the Game Boy, Tetris, and Pokemon in the West — which you can find at https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/19/18295061/game-boy-history-timeline-tetris-pokemon-nintendo 

To get access to supporter-only soundbites, and early access to soundbites like this one, you can subscribe via Patreon — where anybody donating $3 or more per month also gets ad-free high-bitrate downloads of every episode plus various other bonuses. Learn more at lifeandtimes.games/donate

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In war, no information is complete. No intelligence absolute. No view of the enemy unobstructed. There’s no such thing as perfect knowledge. It is a realm of uncertainty, where decisions are made on flawed and often outdated data — as though looking through a fog.

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.)

***

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, 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.

I've also recently added a third way that you can donate to the show — a premium, ad-free feed on Breaker, where you'll get all the bonus audio that goes to Patreon (but none of the non-audio Patreon perks) for a monthly subscription of US$2.99. Head to https://www.breaker.audio/the-life-and-times-of-video-games-premium for more info.

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

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

• Website: lifeandtimes.games
• Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG
• Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCov7SwnAUcAUHFV8XxQW8HA

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Related links:

• Ars Technica article on PLATO games: lifeandtimes.games/arsplatofeature
• The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear, out November 14 2017: friendlyorangeglow.com
• to order Kindle or physical editions from Amazon using my affiliate link, go to lifeandtimes.games/platobookamazon
• or to order the iBook edition from iTunes using my affiliate link, go to lifeandtimes.games/platobookapple
• Cyber1: cyber1.org

Music Credits:

All music written/composed by me, except:

• Evan Schaeffer - Riser from the album Glow
• Evan Schaeffer - Portal and Insurmountable from the album Big Splash
• Symphonie inachevee de Franz Schubert - archive.org/details/SymphonieInacheveeDeFrantzSchubert
• 1920s jazz recordings - archive.org/details/Free_20s_Jazz_Collection

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web:

Official site: lifeandtimes.games

Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG

YouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

Patreon: patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames

You can support the show by leaving a review on iTunes, sharing it with a friend or colleague, or donating via Patreon — where you can get extended interviews and other bonus content, along with interruption-free and ad-free episodes in a patron-only RSS feed.

If we can get to at least $350 a month on Patreon, I'll be able to commit to a second 13-episode season to follow soon after this one. So whaddya say? Are you with me? Sign up here: lifeandtimes.games/patreon.

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.

 To get access to supporter-only soundbites, and early access to soundbites like this one, you can subscribe via Patreon — where anybody who donates $3 or more per month also gets ad-free high-bitrate downloads of every episode plus various other bonuses like research notes and full transcripts.

You can also support me by sending a donation to paypal.me/mossrc. Learn more at lifeandtimes.games/donate

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. You can learn more about all these guys, and the surprising impact the Mac had on games history, in my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming.Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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For the 35th anniversary of Tetris' original Russian version, I pulled out this clip from my interview with Henk Rogers — co-founder of The Tetris Company and the dude who got Tetris handheld and console publishing rights back in the 1980s (and also creator of what was arguably the first JRPG, The Black Onyx). 

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.

The interview was originally conducted for my Polygon feature on the Game Boy's (and Pokémon's) introduction in the West.

(Also, Game Boy Tetris turns 30 next week, so happy birthday to that version too!)

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtubeYou can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcMy book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Can't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There was no encyclopaedia nor fleshed-out database of video games in 1999. There were barely even any reliable or comprehensive lists of video games. Not until Jim Leonard decided he needed to build one.

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.

My thanks to the people who contributed to this story:

• Jim Leonard blogs at Oldskooler Ramblings and tweets @MobyGamer.
• John Szczepaniak's Untold History of Japanese Game Developers trilogy is on Amazon. There's also re-edited, prettified version called Japansoft available from Read-Only Memory.
• Clint Basinger runs the excellent Lazy Game Reviews YouTube channel, where he explores and discusses retro games and technology.
• Matej Jan blogs about pixel art and retro games at Retronator. He's also developing Pixel Art Academy, an adventure game for learning how to draw.
• These days John Romero is COO at Romero Games, a triple-A game studio he co-founded with his wife (and company CEO) Brenda. Their most recent title is Empire of Sin.
• Tomer Gabel is now a software architect and consultant. You can find out more about him and his work via his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

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

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 or just don't want to deal through those platforms.)

My first book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is getting republished in October 2021 (this month!) by Bitmap Books in an "Expanded Edition", featuring a revised layout and design, more images, additional written content, and new sections including a timeline and icon gallery. Head to Bitmap's product page for more details. 

My second book, meanwhile, Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet, has just been copyedited and will soon be going through design and typesetting phases. It'll be out around Q2 2022, but you can...

Illustrator Mark Ferrari's artwork was so good it forced Lucasfilm Games to develop new graphics programming techniques so they could fit it on a floppy disk, and force the rest of the industry to come along with them. This is the story of Mark and his pioneering, world-renowned colour cycling and palette shifting techniques, which could be used to make a single computer illustration appear alive.

You can see a collection of Mark's artwork — including his coloured pencil illustrations as well as his computer graphics — at his website markferrari.com.

Gary Winnick has some of his past work viewable at garyart.net.

Thimbleweed Park is available for nearly every current computer and game console. If you buy the iOS version through lifeandtimes.games/thimbleweedpark, I'll get a small cut of the sale price.

Music Credits:

• Evan Schaeffer - Tulip Poplars, Anthem, and Big Tree from the album Glow, and Mantra and Graze from the album Big Spash
• Lee Rosevere - Sad Marimba Planet, More On That Later, Southside, and What's Behind the Door from the album Music for Podcasts 4
• Kai Engel - Seeker, Run, and Denouement from the album The Run
• The ending from LoomAnd a few bits of my own stuff

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

• Website: lifeandtimes.games
• Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG
• Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg
• YouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube
• Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreon
• Please remember to subscribe and to leave a review on iTunes. A small donation of a few bucks a month on Patreon would go a long way, too, and it'd get you a bit of cool bonus content here and there on a private podcast feed.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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:

Remembering a time when the shareware demo ruled PC gaming, this panel discusses the impact and legacy of shareware on the local gaming landscape. Featuring author of "Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the Internet" Richard Moss, game designer John Passfield, whose Apogee-published game Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage (1993) topped the charts just before shareware legends id Software made it irrelevant with Doom, and shareware devotee in their youth, indie developer Terry Burdak (Paper House). Panel chaired by Arieh Offman, ACMI's Curator of Videogames for Play it Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s project.

I interview Gamegeschiedenis van Nederland 1978-2018 (Games History of the Netherlands) author Tom Lenting about his book and the history of the Dutch games industry. 

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. 

Links:

• A full transcript of this interview: https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/interview-tom-lenting
• Tom Lenting's book: https://sites.google.com/view/karel-van-mander-academy/gamegeschiedenis-van-nederland 
• His YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/applemctom 
• And his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-lenting-94ab8712/ 
• Reviews of his book: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2019/05/09/book-review-the-game-history-of-the-netherlands-1978-2018-by-tom-lenting/https://cdii.blogspot.com/2019/09/philips-cd-i-plays-large-role-in-dutch.html
• My book: https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/ 

Life & Times of Games on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames 

Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG 

Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg 

(Newly redesigned) Website: https://lifeandtimes.games 

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $6+ backers Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, Vivek Mohan, and Seth Robinson. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. Head to lifeandtimes.games/patreon to make your pledge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Support comes from my Patreon backers, with special credit going to my two $10+ backers Wade Tregaskis and Simon Moss. Thanks fellas!

Music and SFX credits:

The 49th Street Galleria, Readers! Do You Read?, and Out of the Skies, Under the Earth by Chris ZabriskieAudio recordings from MidwinterAnd everything else is my own work.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media

Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income via

Patreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrcCan't afford to give me money? Consider listening via the RadioPublic app for Android or iOS. It's free. And if you enable analytics then I get paid a couple of cents each time you listen to my show. Head to RadioPublic.com for more info.

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[re-uploaded as mono] 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. If you'd like to hear more of these extended interviews, please sign up as a Patreon backer at lifeandtimes.games/patreon. I'll be posting them throughout the season, along with various other bits of bonus content.Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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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.

LINKS

• PtoPOnline YouTube channel
• Tomb of Ash page about Core Design's cancelled Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition (with instructions on how to play it)
• Ash's highlights video from his Twitch livestream (and his Twitch channel)
• The Games That Weren't book
• Desert Bus for Hope
• The Video Game History Foundation blog (which includes stories of a few cancelled games as well as a cancelled Sega VR headset)
• Episode 7 - The Tomb Raider Grid

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

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 or just don't want to deal through those platforms.)

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 been having some trouble finishing the script for episode 12, on Microsoft's pre-Xbox games efforts, so while you wait I thought I'd release some bonus material. First up, here's a new soundbite. This is from my interview with Jon Kimmich, who 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's his LinkedIn profile, in case you're curious: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-kimmich-7094501/ 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.Support The Life & Times of Video Games

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In 1990, in a bid to move ahead of their rivals, Access Software reinvented virtual golf. Their game Links set the template for golf games over the next decade, with a technological tour de force, and along the way it dominated bestselling PC games charts month after month, year after year. Until suddenly it didn't.

This is the story of Links and the huge shadow it cast over its genre.

If you'd like to play the original Links for yourself and would like to see it the way people saw it at the time, don't forget to turn down the CPU speed in DOSBox — a 386 was still a high-end machine when it came out, and so you want to go somewhat slower than that. 

• TruGolf 
• EA got out of golf games after Rory McIlroy PGA Tour in 2015, but 2K picked up the PGA Tour licence this year and has taken over publishing duties for former EA Sports contractors HB Studios' golf series The Golf Club — now renamed PGA Tour 2K. Their first game together, PGA Tour 2K21, just came out on Switch, Xbox One, and PS4 (disclosure: those are Amazon affiliate links).

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Seth Robinson, Wade Tregaskis, Rob Eberhardt, Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, and Eric Zocher. 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, 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.

To wrap up the year I wanted to revisit one of my old favourites: a story I made for my other (currently-inactive) podcast about one of the strangest and most thought-provoking programs ever created. This is the story of If Monks Had Macs.

Original description

It all started with a Macintosh ad: 'You too can be a knowledge worker.' This is the story of Brian Thomas' 15-year odyssey at the helm of one of the strangest pieces of multimedia software ever created — If Monks Had Macs.

Links

• You can learn more about Brian, and about Monks, at his website: http://www.rivertext.com/monks.html
• The original HyperCard stack is downloadable from http://www.rivertext.com/classic.html and also playable at the Internet Archive 
• Ludiphilia Episode 10, Life After If Monks Had Macs 

All music and sound effects from If Monks Had Macs (with some touch-up by me), except:

• I Am a Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor by Chris Zabriskie
• Oneiri by Kai Engel
• Comatose by Kai Engel
• And some bits I composed myself

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.

Featuring interviews with Pocket Gamer and Pocket Gamer.biz co-founder Jon Jordan and Brian Greenstone, the main man behind Enigmo and Airwings developer Pangea Software — the most successful early iPhone game developer and one of only two companies to have five apps simultaneously in the top 10 best-selling paid apps chart. Brian Greenstone retired from app development last year; he now sells fine minerals and fossils.

Music for this episode came from Slovakian composer Ondrosik's album Nostalgic and Procastination and chiptunes artist Visager's two Songs from an Unmade World albums.

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web:

 Official site: lifeandtimes.games

Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG

Patreon: patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames

You can support the show by leaving a review on iTunes, sharing it with a friend or colleague, or donating via Patreon — where you can get extended interviews and other bonus content, along with interruption-free and ad-free episodes in a patron-only RSS feed.

If we can get to at least $350 a month on Patreon, I'll be able to commit to a second 13-episode season to follow soon after this one. So whaddya say? Are you with me? Sign up here: lifeandtimes.games/patreon.

Support The Life & Times of Video Games

Links:

Air Wings® on the App Store — Air Wings® By Pangea Software • Online multiplayer paper airplane battles! • AirPlay support! • Game Controller support! Enigmo on the App Store — Enigmo By Pangea Software, Inc. • NETWORKED MULTIPLAYER MODE WITH GAME CENTER! • Voted "Best iPhone Game" at Apple's WWDC '08 • 2008 Austin GDC Independent Games Festival Showcase Winner!Cro-Mag Rally on the App Store — Cro-Mag Rally By Pangea Software, Inc • NETWORKED MULTIPLAYER RACING! Race other players on any device that supports Game Center. • Game Controller support! • Play in true HD on your HDTV via Airplay!

On the rise and fall of the Premier Manager series of soccer management games — a former PC gaming juggernaut that lost its way amidst a shuffle of developers and publishers — and the part it played in the broader consolidation/homogenisation of sports games (of all kinds) over the past 20 years or so.

All music and sound effects in this episode were composed and performed by me, except for the bits that came from the Premier Manager games (the football commentary clips and a couple of songs). And the clip from Highlander.

If you'd like to try one of the Premier Manager games, the easiest option is to use the in-browser emulators on Archive.org — which has the DOS, Amiga, and Sega Mega Drive versions of the earlier titles all playable. The early Championship Manager games — which eventually evolved into today's monster Football Manager series — are also playable on there, in DOS and Amiga formats.

Remember to share this episode on social media and to leave a review of the show on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcasting app you prefer.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might like to also listen to the previous entry this season, Hogs of War, or one of the many other game design/development-focused stories I've done — consider, for instance, the episodes on Lode Runner, Midwinter, FIFA 3DO, the grid-based level editor of the original Tomb Raider games, or the graphical innovations of pixel artist Mark Ferrari. Or for a change of pace, perhaps you'd like to learn about the origins of the "boss button" or of the App Store's race to the bottom in game pricing?

There are "soundbites", too — short clips from interviews I've conducted over the years, like with Tetris Company co-founder Henk Rogers, former Microsoft executive Jon Kimmich, and legendary puzzle designer Scott Kim.

***

The Life & Times of Video Games on the Web and social media:Website: lifeandtimes.gamesTwitter: @LifeandTimesVGInstagram: @lifeandtimesvgYouTube: lifeandtimes.games/youtube

You can make a donation to help cover running costs and allow me to rely less on freelance income viaPatreon: lifeandtimes.games/patreonor PayPal: paypal.me/mossrc

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices