Retro Gaming

One of my guilty pleasures is in retro gaming and retro computing. My basement storage room is filled with arcane devices and hundreds of games: a venerable Commodore 64, an Apple ][e rescued from a garage sale, a local family’s Apple ][gs that was donated to me, a MAME arcade cabinet, a Mattel Intellivision II - the list goes on indefinitely. I just can’t bear to see these things tossed out. Lately I’ve found myself playing Ultima VII: Serpent Isle on my 486 DX2/66 (now with a Roland MT-32!), and my 360 has sat untended for months.

But does playing these old games matter? Does writing about them matter? What value is there in sweatin’ to the oldies? Is it only for reminiscence or nostalgia? In this article I make a few arguments about retro gaming/computing that outline the meaningfulness of tying together the past and the future in the present..

Read the rest of this entry »

“Not being a games designer, Douglas was still thinking linearly,” says Steve [Meretzky]. “As we got more comfortable working together, and I began to assert myself, and Douglas got more familiar with the possibilities of non-linear storytelling, that changed - the majority of the game has the most fiercely non-linear structure of any adventure title I’ve ever worked on.” 

As a followup to friday’s link to Andy Baio’s archeology of Milliway’s (which incidentally made Slashdot), I remembered an excellent article posted in issue #45 of Retro Gamer magazine. Since this is a rather obscure magazine I decided to scan in the entire article because getting back-issues of the U.K. based magazine is rather difficult. You will notice that several of the Infocom folks who contributed to the article also commented on Andy Baio’s page, which gives a sense of interconnectedness to the situation. The article gives a quick look into the creative forces behind the games as well as a sense for the creative environment engendered at the time.

Warning: each page image is over 500kb. It may take you less time to order it from the U.K. than wait for it to download via 28.8k modem.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4

Edit: I forgot to include a link to the publisher’s web site! If you’d like to order a copy of, or subscribe to, Retro Gamer - which comes with my highest recommendations - head on over to Imagine’s eShop to order it online.

It has been a long time since I had something worth posting here, so I hope I don’t disappoint with what I think is an utterly fascinating story. Yesterday, Andy Baio of Waxy.org posted a story reminiscent of a game archaeologist’s dream that he pieced together from internal e-mails, design docs, and prototype builds all culled from a network drive image of Infocom’s shared network hard drive. Yes, someone made an image of the “Infocom Drive” before splitting from the company in 1989 and has kept it safe for all these years. Revealed on the hard drive are (quoting Andy):

design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

So why does this matter? Because he went through the drive and weaved together the tale of why Milliway’s: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was never completed nor released. If you have not played the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy IF game (designed and created by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams) you’re missing out on a crucial piece of computer game history and a damned fun (difficult!) game. I’ll let Andy tell the story, except for two points:

1. It tells the story of a venerable game company in decline; crisis even. Being 1989, Infocom had already merged with Activision and Milliway’s had been languishing since its inception in ‘85. The company closes with not a bang…
2. It comes with a playable prototype of Milliway’s (!!)

Comments from the ex-Infocom folks on the story seem to agree with some of Andy’s story, however it is quite clear that there is more to this than meets the eye. It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the following weeks, as it quite clearly has ruffled a few feathers - and for good reasons.

Thankfully Jason Scott’s new documentary, Get Lamp, is scheduled for release some time this year. I suspect that his own exploration into the world of interactive fiction, complete with interviews of major designers and programmers, should be just as utterly fascinating just as his epic BBS: The Documentary was.

Image courtesy of gaygamer.net

Although I initially reported on Periscopic’s excellent re-envisioning of the Oregon Trail some time ago, the game managed to garner nearly universal acclaim from gamers and critics alike, most notably indiegames.com who ranked it #19 in the top 20 freeware adventure games of 2007.

It took me a little while, but I managed to get a hold of Periscopic’s co-founder and Head of Conceptual Design (not to be confused with the Head of Impressionistic Design) - Kim Rees. Kim ever so kindly rounded up the crew to give us a peek at how Thule Trail was built from concept to finished product. Much thanks goes to Dino Citraro - Periscopic’s other co-founder - who invited me to ask a few questions about the game in the first place. The sheer craftsmanship put into this game is stunning and is a testament to how the right kinds of collaborative relationships in game development can lead to great things - but I’ll let our Oregonian friends over at Periscopic describe how that works… Read the rest of this entry »

Normally I avoid posting news, but I found this bit o’ information a little too tasty to keep to myself. First reported at the Dark Castle News blog, a Return to Dark Castle trailer video (Youtube version here) has been posted over at the publisher’s web site. The gameplay looks hilarious, and definitely captures the spirit of the original. I can’t wait for this classic to hit the Super Happy Fun Fun online store.

If you missed my earlier coverage of Return to Dark Castle you might want to take a peek at the article.

When I was 12 years old I received $25 for my birthday from my aunt. With the $5 I had saved from the previous weeks worth of allowance, I had a whopping $30 to blow on something frivolous. I convinced my mother to drive my sister and I to the largest computer store in the city (40 miles away) so I could buy myself a new computer game. After searching through the racks for almost an hour, I gave up - the games I really wanted were over $60, and the games selling for $30 or less looked unappetizing. I had given up and was ready to leave when my sister grabbed a copy of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge off of the shelf and handed it to me: “Buy this one! It has monkeys!” At first glance I wasn’t interested, but the screenshots on the back of the box reminded me a little of my other adventure games like King’s Quest IV and Police Quest II. I reluctantly agreed to allow my sister to chip-in $20 to buy it, and pouted the hour-long ride home as my sister opened the box and pawed through the ‘feelies’ inside. Sitting in the den in front of our 286 I unenthusiastically installed the game, and loaded it up. Within minutes my sister and I were transfixed upon the monitor and practically rolling on the floor laughing at the ridiculous conversations and character expressions. Monkey Island 2 quickly became one of our favorite PC games and was the gateway to a larger world of cinematic adventure games. Within weeks, I convinced my parents to buy me an AdLib sound card for christmas so I could hear the glorious midi music. In this article I look at LucasArts’s seminal iMUSE system - the Interactive Musical Scoring Engine that was used in every LucasArts adventure game from 1991-2000.
Read the rest of this entry »

Although Keira posted a comment several months ago in response to the rather dystopian sketch I scribbled of the BioWare sale, I accidentally overlooked her blog, Write the Game, until recently. A writer, musician, composer, and seasoned gamer among other things, Keira Peney has the uncanny ability of consistently writing thoughtful and organized articles.

I’ve spent the last few days reading her impressive back-catalogue of posts and while I think all of them are certainly worth your time, her six-part composition on the history of video games stood out for me. These articles demonstrate Keira’s intimate knowledge of retro games, a keen eye for details, and impeccable research skills. For someone born in 1984 (the year of King’s Quest I, Championship Lode Runner, and Seven Cities of Gold) she sure as hell knows her Dune II and Command and Conquer - two games that I spent countless hours playing and subsequently debating about with my junior high school friends. If you’re at all interested in reading a thoughtful piece on the history of video games (and their developers) with some interesting analyses, be sure to read the entire series of articles (start at the bottom).

Edit: Keira posted a reply to the lively ongoing discussion started by Michael over the Brainy Gamer on “photorealism” in video games. I’m hoping to continue the discussion in my next post, and attempt to outline some new ideas on the subject.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to another province. One of the first friends I made in our new community was a kid named Fraser. In a far corner of Fraser’s basement, his parents had a Macintosh 128k covered in a protective plastic sheet. Although it was strictly taboo (the Mac was only to be used for word processing!), when his parents were busy upstairs Fraser and I would sneak into the room and quietly load up a few games he had copied from our school’s library. Two of the games that we secretly giggled over in front of that monochrome screen remain burned into my childlike mind to this day: ChipWits and Dark Castle.

ChipWits was an edutainment game that was released in the early days of the Macintosh. One part puzzler and one part GUI-based programming teacher, ChipWits used an icon-driven programming language (IBOL) to command a miniature robot on rollerskates around a room. Through combinations of operators and arguments, the robot would traverse the room picking up, eating, or frying objects at your maniacal whim. I don’t doubt that games such as The Incredible Machine, and more recently Chibi-Robo, gained much of their inspiration from this classic.

Dark Castle was a mixed action/puzzler/platformer that put you in the shoes of the bumbling adventurer Duncan in his quest to defeat the Black Knight. The game featured eery waveform sound effects and wonderful character animation reminiscent of later ‘rotoscoped’ animation. (Interesting side note: Co-developer Jonathan Gay later came to pioneer the now-ubiquitous Flash animation software. The designer and illustrator Mark Pierce later became the co-founder of software giant Macromedia. Holy jebus!) Full of slapstick humor and frustrating puzzles, Dark Castle is probably one of the least known indie masterpieces of the 1980’s.

Unfortunately, neither of these games have been playable on modern systems without frustratingly clunky emulation software. That is, until now! I was very pleasantly surprised when I found out that both have been remade into modern sequels by indie developers:

Read the rest of this entry »

This has to be one of the most original fundraising ideas I’ve ever seen. Do you remember the ill-conceived and unpublished classic, Penn and Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors? No? Perhaps you’ll remember the infamous Desert Bus - one of the three mini-games packed into the Penn and Teller game for the Sega CD.

From Wikipedia:

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends). Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out.Some players who have completed the trip have also noted that, although the scenery never changes, a bug splats on the windscreen about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light does fade, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights. 

I played it last year on my Sega CD (after downloading it here) and the description that Wikipedia gave it is absolutely accurate. It is truly the worst, funniest, game that I’ve ever played in my life. After the initial laughs wear off, the tedium sets in and the next 7.8 hours of your life will be among the worst.So, LoadingReadyRun.com is hosting their first annual Desert Bus For Hope marathon for the children’s charity Child’s Play. The Canadian comedy group is self-inflicting the worst kind of torture I’ve ever seen: sponsors pay them to play Desert Bus, hour by torturous hour, until the clock (or the money) runs out. If you’ve got $5 to spare, head on over to the Desert Bus web site and prolong their suffering.

I thought I’d create a new regular feature that highlights new or budding indie projects that may not have reached audiences through the regular news sources. This week I bring you two very impressive freeware indie projects, both remakes of the 1993 space-sim/rpg Wing Commander: Privateer.

The first, Privateer: Ascii Sector, is an impressive ascii-based interpretation of the original. The graphics are colorful and almost completely faithful to the gameplay of the original … minus one dimension of course. While the interface shares many similarities with roguelikes, there are many interesting enhancements that give the game a completely unique style. Most of the time I was absolutely stunned that a single developer - Christian Knudsen - built the entire game - ascii art, gigantic maps, fluid and colorful animations, and in-game economy algorithms - his work is absolutely polished. The game is currently at v0.2, and Christian is hard at work at bringing v0.3 to completion. If you play the game, please send Christian some encouragement, either over at his forums or at his Great Games Experiment page - I’d love to see a final release candidate of the game get released some day. Download it here.

The second project, Privateer Gemini Gold, is a 3d platform-independent remake of the game for Windows, Linux and OS X using the Vega Strike game engine. If you’re looking for a way of playing the original Privateer with high-res 3d graphics without running Dosbox - this project is definitely the way to go. A very large team of 3d artists, programmers, designers, playtesters and audio engineers have created a truly faithful reproduction of the original game. The development team is die-hard dedicated to the project, and respond to suggestions and comments on the forums regularly. If you were a fan of the original game, you will be immediately at home with this remake - it is probably the most detailed remake of a 3d game I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t played this classic, I strongly suggest heading over to the download page and giving it a shot.

Congratulations to Petri, of Kloonigames fame! He correctly guessed that the pumpkins I carved (in order) were: Day of the Tentacle, Katamari Damacy, and The Legend of Zelda. Petri’s prize choice was a copy of Defcon. There were only 2 entrants in the contest - was it really that tough?

Defcon, like all of Introversion’s games, stands out as an impressive indie effort. The game succeeds precisely in its focused effort: the play map is small, the player has only a few different options in battle, and the battle interface is simple and clear. With that simplicity comes the polish of balanced gameplay, a very Cold War era-esque aesthetic, and chilling soundtrack. I hope Petri enjoys it as much as I did!

I don’t usually post news, but I thought this was a nice little surprise. One of the artists and developers for the DS port of Dragon’s Lair has posted some insider sneak peeks (videos and screenshots) of an alpha release of the game. The game is being developed by United Coders and published by Conspiracy Entertainment. According to Gamespot, Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp, and Space Ace will both also be ported to the DS at a later date.

Dragon’s Lair has always drawn serious polarities from gamers - some people (like me) have fond memories of dumping $20 worth of quarters into it at the local arcade; others find the game unforgiving or simply unrewarding. According to the source of this news clip, the game has both a “classic” 1983 mode that is identical to the original game, and a new mode that makes use of the DS’s stylus and microphone.

As reported earlier this month over at Wired’s Game|Life blog (yet somehow glossed over by other blogs!), Swedish car rack maker Thule has released an online flash game called The Thule Trail. The game is a genuinely hilarious re-take on the Apple/DOS classic The Oregon Trail. The developers over at Periscopic obviously dedicated themselves to creating an authentic Oregon Trail experience - this time with a car or SUV instead of wagons, and road junk food instead of buffalo meat. And not a single blatant advertisement throughout the game that I could see, other than the car rack on top of your SUV.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pictured above: Spaceflight in Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress.

This news has been covered by plenty of other news organizations, but I thought I’d mention it here for anyone that came by to read my interview with Stephen Emond. Furthermore, I am reviewing a copy of the book, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture, from Geek to Chic - the book features Richard Garriott quite prominently throughout (the review should be posted in a week or two).

Read the rest of this entry »

On September 4th, the University of Texas Videogame Archive held a fundraising event to both raise money and promote the development of the new museum collection. An article over at GameSetWatch listed some of the memorabilia that were auctioned off at the fundraiser; one of those items was a pre-release copy of Emond’s book, “Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide”. A web search yielded few results, and I was compelled to contact Stephen regarding his soon-to-be-published book. He told me that not only was his book auctioned-off at the fundraiser, but he was an invited guest for the entire affair. I asked Stephen a few questions about his experiences at the fundraiser, his interests in the Ultima series, and (of course) his upcoming book.

Read the rest of this entry »

Above: Screenshot from Lothian’s burial in Ultima VIII: Pagan. (with respect and admiration)

I was saddened to read, courtesy of Raph Koster’s blog, that John Watson - a respected and well-liked designer/programmer/writer for many Ultima and Wing Commander games (among many others since) - passed away on September 9, 2007. After reading through the memorial page that has been set up by the Wing Commander CIC, it is obvious that his unexpected death has been grievous for his friends, family, and co-workers; I offer my deepest condolences to those who knew him.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Ultima series has always held a special place in my heart. I can imagine no better time than to write a full review of Ultima VIII: Pagan in light of this sorrowing news, and attempt to redeem what I think was one of the most underrated RPGs of the 1990’s (to which John is listed as the co-designer and a co-writer of). I will post the review and analysis in the coming weeks.

In some more oldie gaming news, thanks to the Boring Beige Box podcast I recently found out that Sierra On-Line’s visionary (yet financially doomed) massively multiplayer online service of 1991, The ImagiNation Network, has been given new life thanks to the ImagiNation Network Revival Project!

If you’re not familiar with the INN, or (like myself) didn’t have the chance to sample the service during its relatively short tenure of 5 years, here’s a short history lesson. And if, like me, you thought that MMORPGs began with the advent of Ultima Online - you’re in for a big surprise.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I was in junior high school, there were only a handful of kids with computers. Most of those who were fortunate enough to have a computer in their home weren’t interested in learning how to use them, and even fewer used them to play computer games. Except for a couple of kids that were in my grade. One of those kids, Willy, found out that I liked role-playing games and handed me an old creased black box while my social studies teacher’s back was turned. I looked up at him, wondering what I’d have to trade for the rather austere black box with the words “Ultima VII” on the front.
He shrugged and whispered, “Here. You can have it. I can’t figure out how to play it.”

Read the rest of this entry »