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 @[email protected] on the Fediverse (Mastodon et al); John is @JohnPassfield on Twitter and @[email protected] 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.

The founder of influential old website The Home of the Underdogs discusses the difference between "abandonware" and piracy, and explains why the former needs to exist.

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.

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.

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.

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 collection/book

Lemonade Stand

Kate's article/video on the origin of the term "gamer"

Kate's Moonlander article has good info and sources for the electro-mechanical Lunar Lander game, but those of you looking for more detail may appreciate this article that contextualises its place in early coin-op game history (the article is about Nutting Associates, but Lunar Lander is mentioned at the end)

Kate's best social media posts are highlighted in her newsletter. Two specific ones we mentioned:

The "City Boy Mario" Twitter thread

The Comic Sans Twitter thread

As of August 9th, 2021, the best of these threads are available in an ebook that's part of a video game StoryBundle along with a bunch of other cool games books. Check it out.

Here's an article with more info about the ideal number of characters per line

They Create Worlds book — publisher website | My Amazon affiliate link

They Create Worlds podcast

The Ultimate Guide to Video Game History by Steven Kent

We didn't talk about it, but the best big-picture, whole-industry history of games that I've read is Replay by Tristan Donovan

(And while we're linking to books, note that my first book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is getting an Expanded Edition from Bitmap Books, and my second book, Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet, is currently slated for Q2 2022 publication.)

Kate's Patreon page

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

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 or Ko-Fi, if you're after something specific.)

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

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.

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

Women in Games exhibit at The Strong

Andrew Borman is @borman18 on Twitter

I am @MossRC and @LifeandTimesVG on Twitter

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

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 or Ko-Fi, if you're after something specific.)

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

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).

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

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.