Unkillable Cat's Gaming Magazine Nostalgia Thread

[Unkillable Cat]

Oh man...

I'm going through my game collection, sorting through the boxes and deciding what to keep and what to get rid of, when I come across a copy of "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe" from 1990 by Lucasarts (or Lucasfilm as they called themselves back then). For those not in the know, this is a WWII flight simulator that's a little long in the tooth by today's standards, but was a decent hit back in the day.

Anyway, I got the box from my friend's storage as he moved abroad, so I hadn't really taken a hard look at its contents. The box has a chewed-up codewheel (my friend also owned a small yapping dog), a big and worn manual and three of the four floppies needed to play the game, riddled with bad clusters. The box is in good condition so I'm gonna hang on to that, but I figured I would scrap the rest. But I thought I'd leaf through the 225-page manual first, see why it's such a tome.

It opens up with this:

Only the spirit of attack, born in a brave heart, will bring success to any fighter aircraft, no matter how highly developed it may be.

Keep that name in mind for later.

I leaf through some pages and find this:

One of the guys I came over to Europe on the ship with, Joe Cagney, he and I slept in the same tent. This one particular day, everybody from the C.O. on down decided to get drunk, and I mean drunk. After we ran through all our booze, the flight surgeon pulled out his alcohol, and we mixed it with grape powder and water. Suffice to say, all of us were in pretty bad shape. I had an early morning mission the next day, and they came in and rousted me, and I said "Aw jeez, I can't make it," and Joe, the nice guy he was, said "Aw Finnegan, you flake, I'll do it," and I switched missions with him. This early morning flight was led by a captain who I swear had a death wish, and everybody hated to fly with him. And this captain led the flight down a valley, and he was flying low and the valley was lined with antiaircraft. He got through, but Joe didn't, he got it. I was over in Normandy in '84, and I went through the American cemetery and found his grave there.

US Army Air Force Captain James Finnegan

I turn a few more pages and the damn manual is full of these sideboxes with stuff like this. There's even a section in the back on how to do barrel rolls. I realized that this is one of those manuals, the kind that doesn't just contain information needed to play the game, but to understand it. I own another game with a similar manual, "Red Baron" from Dynamix. That manual is monstrous, but not a single page is wasted. Want to know how to do an Immelman Turn? Read the Red Baron manual.

But the difference between the Red Baron manual and the Luftwaffe one are the stories and snippets from men that fought in the war, on both sides.

On a whim I looked up James Finnegan online, and found his obituary from 2008. Reading through it, I spot a familiar name - Adolf Galland.

Turns out Finnegan shot down "Germany's top ace, Adolf Galland" in the war, but didn't learn about it himself until 30+ years later, and then got in contact with Galland himself, with the two meeting in 1979.

...this isn't a manual, this is a keepsake, a historical reference. It ain't going anywhere.

As I put Luftwaffe away, I find another box from that same friend of mine: "Their Finest Hour - The Battle of Britain", another flight sim from Lucasfilm. Hesitantly, I open up the box...and there's another 200-page manual/tome in the box! I do a quick leaf, and find the story of Al Deere, the luckiest RAF pilot to ever live.

To the people that made these two flight simulators and had the sense to make these manuals as awesome as they are - I salute you.

To the men that contributed to these manuals with their life experiences of war - I salute you moreso.

 

[TheGreatOne]

Darklands manual also had a ton of historical references.
It's a good thing modern games dont come with manuals. Publishers these days are trying to make more money environmentally conscious and think of the earth by saving paper. Who reads manuals anywyas LOL

 

[mindx2]

Oh man... [snip]

...this isn't a manual, this is a keepsake, a historical reference. It ain't going anywhere.

[snip]
To the people that made these two flight simulators and had the sense to make these manuals as awesome as they are - I salute you.

To the men that contributed to these manuals with their life experiences of war - I salute you moreso.

People today just don't understand how these manuals (and maps, trinkets, etc.) contributed so much to the actual game. It goes so much beyond "Press X to make something AWESOME happen" that 2 page manuals leaflets that accompany games today... it is something we have lost in today's reading is the hard gaming world today.

 

[DwarvenFood]

Anyone wanna hack the PC version of Golden Axe?

Someone found out that the baddies in the game are kept as [NAME].SPR files, so if you want to replace some annoying baddies, just copy/rename one .SPR file over another.

Let's say you want to get rid of the knights at the end of Stage 7 and replace them with blue magic-giving gnomes, you'd copy and replace KNIGHT.SPR with BTHIEF.SPR.

Presto! Your mean knights of malice are now cowardly loot-carrying gnomes, awaiting a good kicking!

(Make a backup of the game files first, of course.)

I already did this years and years ago
You can do even better than that, you can replace the player character sprites with bad guys !!

Always fun playing as the skeletor or the giant dude, or even the end boss.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

#143 of Retro Gamer just arrived. Codexers will want to sink their teeth into the Black Isle Studios feature, 6 pages of nostalgic goodness with MCA as the host. Since I'm not part of the Avellone cult, I'll leave it to others to hunt down a copy of the mag, scan in the pages and post them as the latest holy scriptures or whatever.

Besides that, there's not much here that interests me. They have features on the Amstrad GX4000 (a console so successful its catalog consists of a whoppin' 26 titles), it has a "Top 25 Best Games" list for the Atari ST and F-Zero is the main attraction for this issue.

 

[Don Peste]

scan in the pages and post them

Can we?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

#144 of Retro Gamer flew into my mailbox today.

This issue has a rundown on the Magnavox Odyssey, the first console ever made back in 1972. How primitive was it? The games featured overlays that you put over the cathode tube of the telly!
There's a top 25 list of the best X-Box games of all time. Unsurprisingly Halo is at #1, but Codexers might be surprised to find KOTOR at #2.
There's a rundown on Marvel superhero games. They don't mention or name them all, but there's a "facts" banner at the end of the article that mentions that "Lego Marvel Super Heroes" was released on 12 systems and that Spider-Man has appeared in 57 games so far.
There's an interview with the founder of Gamestar, the sports game label that was active during the 1980s.
There's also an Interview with David Darling, co-founder of Codemasters. He has an interesting quote: "Most people thought [the NES] was a joke because it had low-res graphics and it was a toy."
They also mention that a Mega Man: The Legacy Collection will be released on the consoles and PC later this year, which features the first 6 Mega Man games plus extras like challenge modes, a museum full of behind-the-scenes stuff and just general Wily-ness. Sounds interesting as long as they don't overcharge for it or screw it up otherwise.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Here's a thought...gaming mags have been released for 30-35 years now, and most of them ran a section on hints, tips, cheats and walkthroughs for various games.

And as the years went by and the Internet came and sites like GameFAQs and such popped up pretty much everywhere, posting most of these hints, tips, cheats and walkthroughs online.

Now I'm wondering...has anyone tried to make any sort of compilation of all those cheats, like in a torrent or something? Like those 'spergs that make printed books based off Wikipedia articles, only for game cheats?

I'm asking because I had a look at my collection of cluebooks, and with 2 notable exceptions I found that the entire contents of the books were posted online already, but also because I'm finding small things here and there which I can't find online at all.

Anyone have any further info on this?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

#145 of Retro Gamer has been deployed.

Their main piece is a in-depth look at Space Harrier, combined with a "WORLD EXCLUSIVE" interview with its creator, Yu Suzuki. Good thing RG has access to quality translators.

There's a similar one about Arkanoid, and even I was surprised how many platforms that game got converted to.

Their Top 25 list for this month is for PC Engine games - who'd have thunk that a pinball game would sit at #2?

Codexers will most likely be interested in the nostalgic lookback at the Bard's Tale series (Pop quiz, what was the working title of Bard's Tale during development?) and a sneak look at the upcoming Bard's Tale 4. Brian Fargo and Rebecca Heineman are interviewed, and all the dirt about the development process is dug up. They even have a sidebar for the ARPG The Bard's Tale from 2004.

One section that they have in the mag that I haven't mentioned before is "Future Classic" - where they look at a recent game they think will sit in people's minds and hearts for decades to come. They're up to #51 now, and this month it's Amnesia: The Dark Descent. (Codexers: Start your raging.)

One of the games they review at least had me smile because of its retro sillyness: Tembo the Badass Elephant. Unfortunately their score is 4/10, ending on "There's a great new character here, but he's married to an unrefined platformer."

 

[Unkillable Cat]

From the pages of the latest Retro Gamer, comes something that requires more than turning pages and hallucinating over strange symbols inscribed on them.

The latest issue of Retro Gamer (#149) has an interview with Clive Townsend, maker of several 8-bit games, including the Saboteur games of old, one of the first (decent) stealth games around. In there he mentions how he was never really pleased with the released version of the game and has always wanted to update it.

Well, guess what he just did?

A demo is available, but otherwise the full game goes for 4 quid and is played via the browser. The plan is to fund the development of Saboteur 3, which could be interesting, seeing Townsend's talents being applied to the modern-day gaming age.

 

[FeelTheRads]

That's cool stuff, played them a lot of my Spectrum clone. I sucked at them, though.

 

[DwarvenFood]

I loved the map layout of the second Saboteur, and using the motorbike was cool:

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

I remember in the eighties going to buy religiously Zzap 64 every month at WH Smith (only place which sold it in Paris). I loved the bitchiness of the reviewers (and yes, Rignall included). But then, they didn't understand a thing at all about interactive fiction or RPGs, they only cared about dude bros kind of games, even if those were not as shitty as now at the time.
And then, once in a blue moon, they would award a gold medal to hipster shit like The sentinel to show that they understood "hi-brow" art.
Nevertheless, good times.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Retro Gamer #150 is out. This issue they celebrate 10 years in business (Retro Gamer went bust under their first publisher and needed a re-launch in Dec 2005) and decided to celebrate by compiling a "Top 150 games of all time"-list, something they haven't done since 2004.

If you're hoping for a retro-centric list, or a list that at least takes older titles into account - you're wrong.

I'm not gonna mention a single game on the list (except to say that the #1 title was released in 1990) but instead I'll give you an idea of how bad it is by revealing some related data.

First, the 10 publishers/developers with the most titles in the list, and how many:

1. Nintendo - 19 titles
2. Sega - 17 titles
3. Capcom - 8 titles
4. Square - 7 titles
5. Konami - 6 titles
6. Rockstar - 5 titles
7. Bethesda - 4 titles
8. Namco - 4 titles
9. Valve - 4 titles
10. Bioware - 3 titles

The single biggest problem with this list? All of them are still in business. (So much for Retro Gaming)

Next up, the number titles based on their date of release, first for the 2015 chart. (Note that I'm guessing with these numbers due to this data being presented as numberless columns in the mag)

1975-1979 = 1 title
1980-1984 = 16 titles
1985-1989 = 18 titles
1990-1994 = 37 titles
1995-1999 = 28 titles
2000-2004 = 24 titles
2005-2009 = 14 titles
2010-2014 = 11 titles

Compared to the 2004 list (which only featured 100 games):

1975-1979 = 2 titles
1980-1984 = 21 titles
1985-1989 = 27 titles
1990-1994 = 29 titles
1995-1999 = 15 titles
2000-2004 = 6 titles

And finally, how the votes were sent in:

Via E-mail = 32.80%
Via Facebook = 22.35%
Via Blog = 17.04%
Via Retro Gamer Forum = 15.59%
Via Gaming Websites = 9.49%
Via Twitter = 2.73%

Finally one spoiler - the Elder Scrolls games appear on the list in chronological order, i.e. the newest game has the highest rank.

In other news, they have a "How it was made" look at Jet Set Willy and the original Civilization. Good reading, those two. They also have an in-depth look at the Commodore 64 (they open one up and give us a peek inside) and interview Paul Dini about his Kick-Off games, and how he's trying to get a new one out the door.

Finally, their retro review corner is taken up by only one game - Broforce. They give it a 7/10 rating.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Retro Gamer #151 is out. It has a big feature on Street Fighter 2, but it also has a not-so-big feature on Head Over Heels, the awesome isometric platformer that everyone that owned an 8-bit computer should at least have heard of. They even get Jon Ritman's retrospective on it.

Except, being Retro Gamer, they can't seem to release a mag without a goof or two. Here's the cover for the game, take a look.

Now, one side panel of the Head Over Heels article shows all the relevant items you can come across, like Hush Puppies, the Prince Charles Daleks and the doughnuts you can see under Heels. Except this panel calls them "cannonballs".

Other bits of note is an article about 21st Century Entertainment (which is what rose from the ashes of Hewson after that company folded in 1991), a look at "Hunchback!" and an interview with Ron Gilbert, from which we get this quote:

During the production of Monkey Island I bought a car. And I remember going to the car dealer and it being such a laughable experience, because really buying a car should be like buying a bar of soap. I should go in, find the bar of soap I want, go pay for it and leave. And that's what buying a car should be like. But it's not. Instead it's this game they play where they want to overcharge you for the car and you have to play all these games to get the cost down! It was ridiculous, and there was a point where I said, "You know, I'm going home, I really don't want to do this anymore," and I tried to leave, and the guy physically stopped me from leaving the car dealership...so that's kind of how Stan showed up, this ship salesman where you have to go through this idiotic ritual with him, like you do in real life. And I like how when he disappears and reappears again, you never see how he got there...

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Issue 152 of Retro Gamer is out, and for once it has a lot of interesting articles to read.

First there's the small news item on the 'Revolution 25th Anniversary' box set they're releasing later this month. This looks like to be the first physical copy of a video game I'd actually like to buy in years. It features all five Broken Sword games, Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky and In Cold Blood, an audio CD AND a USB stick with the complete soundtracks for all the games, comic books for BaSS and Broken Sword, plus a DVD with loads of documentaries and previously unreleased footage - all this for a suggested retail price of $30.

--

Then there's a retrospective on WipEout 2097, one of the first Playstation titles to transcend the platform and gain fame and recognition outside of it. The article features concept art and interviews with various people involved with the game, but the meat of the interview is with the game's producer, and he gives this lovely quote as to why the game had different names depending on regions:

It was WipEout XL in the US becase - apologies to all US citizens - someone at Psygnosis was determined that the US audience wouldn't understand the idea of 100 years in the future in the title and would question where the previous 2096 games were.

Wipeout was also one of a handful of titles in video gaming history that had surplus planned development time remaining after it was complete - 5 months to be precise. Those months were used to refine, improve and add features to the game. One of those features were the various game modes, and Andy has some interesting things to say about that.

Only the European version of WipEout 2097 had ghost vehicles in Time Trial because Atari held a patent at the time from Hard Drivin', but it was only a US patent. The Link mode was a specific request from Sony, as I recall. It was a huge pain because we had to keep everything in sync for it to work, which meant the game would never frame out. As the US/NTSC version of the game had to run at 30fps - as opposed to the 25fps of the European/PAL version - this proved one of the toughest challenges. I don't think it was worth it from a user experience - I believe only about 1000 link cables were sold in the UK, for example. But it was good for reviews; Official Playstation Magazine gave us 9/10 in their review - but 10/10 with the Link Mode.

--

RG also has a 20th Anniversary article for Duke Nukem 3D, which for some reasons features monsters from shovelware expansion packs as part of the game's bestiary collection. Scott Miller is interviewed, but most of the text goes into talking about the game's level design, though its controversy as a game with adult content also gets brought up.

--

Tim Schafer makes an appearance as RG delves into the design of Psychonauts. A somewhat ironic comment is in there when Tim is asked how he sold the idea (to the Xbox execs) of an adventure-platformer revolving around exploring people's psyches.

I work cheap.

Another one demonstrates just how far Microsoft were up their own arse.

The testing came back from Microsoft and they were "Well, they liked it but they, um...there was a problem with those puzzles, the adventure game parts." And we asked why and if people couldn't get through it, and they were, "No, they got through it, but there was a period where they were confused about what to do. And then they figured it out." And I was thinking that's what an adventure game is.

But Microsoft weren't done exploring their anuses.

But that was the beginning of this trend where some higher-ups at Microsoft was critiquing [?] our game once and they were like, "You know Tim, there are winners and there are losers out there. And you should make a game for the losers because there's a lot more of them."

--

Other notable articles cover Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper, Ikari Warriors and Turrican 2, as well as the Vectrex console and notable Gameboy Color games.

 

[Don Peste]

Do you remember any articles on Retro Gamer about Gobliiins/Woodruff/Coktel Vision?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Do you remember any articles on Retro Gamer about Gobliiins/Woodruff/Coktel Vision?

From what I could dig up...no, they haven't done a feature on any of these...yet.

Something for them to add on their 'to-do' list.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Just flipped through the latest issue of Retro Gamer. The one before that didn't have much of value, save for an article/plug on a new set of plastic protective cases for game boxes...the console game boxes, that is.

Anyway, the latest issue has, among other things:

# An article about the death of the Coleco Chameleon, sparing no punches in shifting the blame where it was due.

# A man being confirmed for a Guinness World Record for 'Largest game ported to the Spectrum ZX81', for his work on the Laserdisc version of Dragon's Lair.

# Every issue of Retro Gamer features a look into the collection of a game collector, but I think this issue has the first PC game collector. He has a whole room stuffed full of boxes and game-related products, with his most valuable possession being a set of ODST armour he likes to cosplay in, but I was more impressed with him scoring original boxed copies of Doom 1 and Doom 2 for free because he cleaned out some eBayer's catalogue one time. Sadly it's hard to make out any real details in the photo provided, but I could make out the SSI Goldbox games, the Wing Commander series and almost all the Space Quest games, so this guy has a bitchin' collection.

# The big article of the mag celebrates 20 years of Quake (which conveniently ties in with the upcoming release of nuDoom, though Bethdrones don't even get interviewed, let alone named). Among the interviewees are John Romero, Graeme Devine, Adrian Carmack and Todd Hollenshead, and we get some insight into the story of iD Software during those years - Romero being fired and the subsequent brain drain being a centerpoint (at the time of Quake 2's release, iD had no programmers from the Doom era and only one from Quake 1). The article also does a "Top 10 Quake mods" list (Team Fortress, Quake Rally, Threewave CTF, Malice, Action Quake II, Chaos Deathmatch, Rocket Arena, Warsow, Challenge Promode Arena and Tremulous) and a reader's poll on "favourite Quake game" (Q1 44%, Q2 32%, Q3 24% and Q4 with 0%). Well worth a read.

# French development house Microïds is interviewed, and they're probably one of the oldest game developers still around. Founded in 1985, they established themselves as Amstrad CPC devs and translated Prince of Persia into French, before moving on onto other projects before teaming up with comic book artist Benoit Sokal and releasing not only Amerzone, but then later the Syberia series. They're still doing good, holding exclusive rights on all games based on Agatha Christie novels, for example.

# Graphic artist Stuart Cox is interviewed, and his first notable output were the graphics on several Spectrum and Amstrad games released by Elite. For those of you that follow Gury Larry, RG used the chance to ask him whether the stuff about the Thundercats game were true. Cox said that he had no memory of anything that could shed any light on the subject - even though he worked on the graphics for the game.

# Finally they review the Revolution 25th Anniversary Collection box release, and they rate it an 8/10.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Retro Gamer started in 2004, but in 2005 the publisher went tits up so the mag stopped after 18 issues. Work had started on the 19th issue, and someone saw a reason to release that + other related stuff on a CD. I figured it would be nice to finally take a look at this disc (along with the other 18 coverdiscs that Retro Games gave away) and the "front page" of the disc had this quote:

Classic movies, albums and books are all endlessly repackaged and re-released. There are TV channels dedicated to retro TV. Classic novels never truly go away. For reasons too inexplicable to imagine, nostalgia tours featuring Kim Wilde, Bucks Fizz and Nik Kershaw sell out Wembley Arena. The industries are set up so that retro product is an essential aspect of their publishing schedules and bottom lines. "Recycle, recycle, recycle" seems to be their mantra.

Not so the games industry. At the mercy of technology, it hurtles ever forwards, with scarcely the opportunity to catch its breath. Blink and you’ve missed an entire generation of consoles. Cough slightly, and whole genres have fallen in and out of fashion before you’ve had the chance to play a single derivative clone. For the games industry, the past doesn’t extend much further than two years ago; anything older than that gets sent to the glue farm, living out its final moments pondering why it has just been shot through the face with a steel spike.

Whereas the music and film industries embrace their heritage, kissing it roughly on the lips at every opportunity, the games industry’s past is an unwelcome relative, only begrudgingly invited to family parties (or, rather, repackaged as some cheap and cheerful plug-and-play compilation, as sold in one of those neon-drenched novelty shops, alongside the Airzookas, and wind-up penises).

These words are over 10 years old, but they're still relevant today. Mostly. The indie gaming scene was still lurking in the background at that time and digital distribution was just another fad.

By the time this CD came out, Future Publishing had snapped up Retro Gamer and it lived again, starting with #19 and continuing non-stop to this day. Sadly no more coverdiscs, though.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Issue #155 of Retro Gamer is out. For some reason almost every article in this issue didn't interest me at all except the interview with Ed Fries, whom headed Microsoft's gaming division for most of the past 20 years. He started out coding Atari 8-bit games in the early 80s before applying as an intern for Microsoft in 1985, where he worked on Excel and then Word before moving over to their gaming division. He has some very interesting things to say.

A story from his Atari 8-bit coding days:

When I moved away to college I brought my Atari 800 on the air plane but had to ship out a small TV to use with it, so I didn’t have that when I arrived. I had forgotten to bring an alarm and needed to be awake at a certain hour the next morning so I programmed the Atari to wake me up. It was a fun challenge to work ‘blindfolded’ without a screen and sure enough it started buzzing at the right time, just as I planned!

His involvement with the X-Box in its early days:

I had been running Microsoft’s games business for some time when [the team] from the Windows DirectX team came in my office and pitched me on the initial idea for the Xbox. I agreed to help [out] by providing the first-party game line-up for the console. My main concern was making sure we had a great set of games ready for when the machine was going to launch. One unique aspect of the Xbox was that it had a hard disk and I was a fan of that because I believed it could help us bring PC-style gaming to the console world. There were two teams internally with competing visions for a Microsoft console. One was from the Windows CE team that had put a version of Windows on the Dreamcast. The other was our Xbox team which had a different vision. We won out and their project was cancelled and many of them joined our team and helped make Xbox better.

He was in charge of bringing in developers to work on the X-Box, so he's responsible for Bungie and Molyneux making the X-Box their home platform. But otherwise he denies being involved in any major decisions and aspects of the console. He wasn't involved with X-Box Live and he didn't make the call about which X-Box ended up being developed (see quote above).

And why he quit at Microsoft:

That’s a long story but I guess it can be summed up as the environment became very political after we became successful with the first version of the Xbox, and I had no wish to be part of that.

A point worth mentioning is his tone during the interview: He's not critical of others and gives credit where it's due, even when it comes to competitors during his Microsoft years. Either he's being very careful about his phrasing so as to not step on any toes, or he's generally just a nice guy. This only applies to people and companies though. When it comes to talking about the industry in general, he's a bit more open and critical:

I think the industry has gone through an incredible amount of change over the last ten years or so. There’s been, on the high-end, the sort of relentless consolidation as budgets have gotten bigger and bigger, and fewer and fewer teams can do it, and the teams have gotten bigger and bigger. So triple-A is just insane. If you go to visit Bungie, you’ll see 600 people in a giant converted movie theatre spending, whatever, $300 million to make a game – how do you even do that? How many teams in the world can do that? And those people are some of the very best in the world, and it’s still really hard for them. And then there’s this massive gap between them and the indie devs and nearly everybody who was in the middle is now gone. In fact, most of them are gone. They’re being pushed to both extremes, and so the publishers can’t find enough high-end developers to make games for them because they’ve all been pushed out.

Then the developers say, ‘I just want to make a $5-million game. I just want to make a $10-million game.’ But that just isn’t possible anymore in this world. Even if you could get a publisher convinced to do it, they would push you up to $50 million. Nintendo has tried, I think, a losing battle to fight against that for two decades of, ‘We’ll just keep our style simple. We’ll keep our costs down. We’ll show that what really matters is gameplay.’ Which, of course, is true. But it may be what really matters for playing is gameplay, but for selling games it doesn’t seem to be the case. And then you have gamers saying, ‘Why should I buy an Xbox One if I have a Xbox 360?’ The graphics have to be better, right? And every time those graphics get better, everything gets way more expensive, but people don’t always understand that. Trying to stay on top of the next-gen, whatever that next-gen is, has driven costs through the roof.

...

I have lots of friends now on the indie side of things and it’s tough for them. Many of them are really struggling, but I guess that’s true of any small business these days. So I help any way I can. A really big factor in making indie games these days, along with digital distribution and all this other stuff, is the rise of game engines. This is super-important because people can make games in Unity and other such technologies with very little technical experience and that opens us up in a huge way to people who’ve never been able to make games before. And that, I’m sure, is going to have an incredible, positive influence on the business because we’re going to get content we never would have had before. But does that it make it hard? Absolutely. In the old days, there were only a few hundred people who knew how to do this stuff. Now anybody, anywhere in the world can do it. A person in Vietnam, a man in his apartment, can make a game with a little flapping bird that gets everything just right and suddenly he’s a star. I love that. I think that’s awesome . But does that mean life is easy for indies? No way, no. Now they’re competing in a global market against teams that maybe don’t even have the technical expertise, but they dohave a really cool idea and that can go a really long way.

And then he starts talking about the future of the gaming industry:

We seem to be charging into the VR world lately and computer AI is starting to get really good (see AlphaGo). How those two things will combine, who can say? I mean how much better can graphics actually get now? They can’t! Which, to me, is an awesome thing. We’ve got 30 years of chasing graphics at the expense of creativity, at the expense of innovation and now we’re finally to the end of that. We’re finally onto the absurd end of that where budgets are unsupportable. The number of teams that can do it is unsupportable, and I’m cheering at the bonfire because what’s going to come out of the fire is what’s already happening, which is the whole indie movement of creativity and gameplay. We are back to being the most important thing, which is fantastic. So I spend way more of my time these days hanging out with indie developers who are doing cool things like Don’t Starve, or the Spry Fox team is up the street from me, and I just see how people can now do it. When I started in the game business one guy could make a game, it’s nice to see that coming back.

tl;dr - He's waiting for the Gaming ITZ so that the Indie scene can move in...well, whatever survives of it, anyway.

And his final words in the article are some tidbits of advice for new people entering the industry (which some 'game developers' that keep complaining about everything and feature regularly in the GamerGate thread should take heed of):

It’s always been a hard business. And it’s probably harder than ever. And either you’re up for that or you’re not. I feel like in the past, as we’ve gone through this time of real change, for every bad thing there’s been a good thing. New funding sources have come in from China, I know a lot of people now who are funded by China, where there wouldn’t have been another option. It’s great. It’s been great for the business, for friends who can make the game they’ve been dreaming to make. Then you have Kickstarter, and other types of crowdfunding. Another fantastic way to get yourself out there. Valve, Steam, Early Access etc.. Just getting a closer connection to your customers, being able to fund games directly to the customer, bypassing the publishing infrastructure? Great. These have all been super-healthy, fantastic developments for the budding bedroom coder. So I think things get harder, but other things are much better. I suppose when weighing those two things, I’m optimistic and feel there are still lots of opportunities out there.

But what is Fries doing now? Making homebrew games. He did a port of Halo for the Atari 2600 (yes, really) back in 2010 and is now working on a port of Rally-X.

Interested people can check out his site.

 

[Gauldur's Bait]

C-VG issue 114 had a review of EOTB that I used to read over and over just waiting to get my hands on the game. When my friend got it from his dad when returned from a business trip, it was madness! :D

The review can be found archived here:

https://archive.org/details/computer-video-games-magazine-114

and boy is that a nostalgia trip.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I own a copy of that very magazine, so I know all about that review. I also own the issue with the review for EotB 2.

But I wasn't aware (or was aware and have forgotten since) that archive.org had links to gaming mags - need to check that out further. Thanks for that.

 

[Gauldur's Bait]

I own a copy of that very magazine, so I know all about that review. I also own the issue with the review for EotB 2.

But I wasn't aware (or was aware and have forgotten since) that archive.org had links to gaming mags - need to check that out further. Thanks for that.

You're welcome. I didn't know myself until google. I have lost my copies of C-VG a long time ago, sadly. I knew I should have saved them. However, Thank You for mentioning the EOTB 2 review - I need to find that one immediately.

 

[octavius]

# A man being confirmed for a Guinness World Record for 'Largest game ported to the Spectrum ZX81', for his work on the Laserdisc version of Dragon's Lair.