Back in 1994, with the ink still dry on my degree in Computer Science, I got a job in the video games industry working for a new startup called SingleTrac. I was Employee #16. Most of the people there were engineers and artists from a simulation company called Evans & Sutherland. My salary was pathetic, and we were working on tables people had brought from home and cardboard boxes. I had to wait three days before my computer arrived (a hot new Pentium computer!). In the meantime, I filled out the paperwork and was introduced to the team, project, and the development station called “PSX” th ..read more

Yeah, a lot of my posts are VR-related these days. It’s how I roll, now. Not that all (or even most) of my gaming is in VR. I’m still retro-gaming regularly and I am really looking forward to the PC release of Persona 5 next month. But… VR is a wild and exciting frontier, and I’m still nowhere near jaded. While a lot of approaches and conventions have solidified for certain genres of games, there’s still nothing set in stone, especially as the tech keeps improving. One of the things that still amuses me is how different VR gaming turned out to be from what I anticipated back in the 1990s when ..read more

As a long-time fan of the dice-and-paper RPG for Cyberpunk, designed by Mike Pondsmith, I was absolutely thrilled to learn that CD Projekt Red was tacking that game universe. That was back in 2013 or something when they did this absolutely amazing concept video. They nailed the “feel” of the game world… which of course borrowed liberally from genre stories by authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams, and George Alec Effinger. When the game finally released, I enjoyed it a great deal. While the consoles struggled and nobody denies that the game was released a bit earlie ..read more

I’ve been playing around in Virtual Reality for several years now, and it’s not gotten old for me yet. I’m a little too busy to call myself a hardcore player, but I have fun slicing up blocks with lightsabers, exploring truly immersive dungeons, and flying in my F-16. All good stuff. At this point, in spite of the major speed bump caused by the pandemic, just about everyone interested in it has at least tried it out, so the mind-blowing first-time experience has given way to the realities of the medium. Virtual Reality is still in its adolescent phase, and unfortunately it has hit that stage r ..read more

Hey, more Steampunk! I’ve got a story in the fourth “Mormon Steampunk” anthology, A Mighty Fortress, which releases on February 18th and is available for pre-order now. We’ve got some short video trailers for some of the stories. This one is for my story, “The Tunnel.” The Tunnel is loosely inspired by a legend circulating around Britain and parts of Europe from the late 1800s (but surviving until at least the middle of the 20th century) about the “Mormons” having build a tunnel from England to Salt Lake City – terminating beneath the Salt Lake Temple. The rumor stated the Mormons were abducti ..read more

I didn’t think it was possible to feel the kind of grief I did from the death of a man I never met, but Friday’s news hit me kinda hard. Neil Peart, drummer and primary lyricist for my favorite band, Rush, died of brain cancer. Rush was effectively retired…  we expected that when we attended their R40 concert in Salt Lake City, and it felt very much like a swan song. But this was the death of someone whose work I had admired since Junior High. It marked the true end of Rush, and the loss of one of the greatest poets and musical virtuosos in Rock. Not that I agreed with everything he suggested ..read more

“Bring back the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas!” “You know what this Christmas party needs? Ghost stories.” “Why does Nightmare Before Christmas have to be a Halloween or Christmas movie? Why can’t it be both?” Immortal Works has heard your pleas and we are excited to announce our latest anthology, A Haunted Yuletide, slated for publication December 2020. And we need your submissions! We’re looking for stories that send shivers up and down your spine and make you want to check under your bed for monsters. We want stories that will make you afraid to to go sleep on Christmas ..read more

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet of late. At least I can say that this summer hasn’t been boring. Anyway… I wanted to pass this along. Din’s Legacy has been released as a full on 1.0 version. I’ve played the Early Access a little bit, and I’m looking forward to playing this final version. I’ve been a fan of Soldak’s RPGs for a long time, and Din’s Curse is an old favorite of mine. I didn’t play around much with the mutation system to really get a good feel for it, but everything else looked like a more refined, cooler, more exciting game in a series that has always been ahead of the mainstream comp ..read more