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 ..read more

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 tha ..read more

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 Politi ..read more

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 view ..read more

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 ori ..read more

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 ori ..read more

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 ..read more

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 Ama ..read more

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 Sand ..read more

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 22 ..read more