#gaming history

[oldschoolfrp]

Influential RPG adventure writer, artist, and video game creator Jennell Jaquays has died.

She was a founder of the Dungeoneer zine before it was sold to Judges Guild. Her D&D adventures Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia became classics, often studied as examples of adventure design. She also wrote and illustrated for TSR, Metagaming, Steve Jackson Games, and many other publishers. Her video game career included developing many of Coleco's titles in the 1980s and level design for the Quake sequels at id Software in the 90s, and she co-founded the SMU Guildhall video game program.

She recently was hospitalized for symptoms of Guillain-Barré syndrome, and a GoFundMe to cover her medical expenses is still active.

[prokopetz]

Sometimes I can't help but feel that my experience with old-school point and click adventure games is an impediment to fully appreciating the genre in its modern form. If I'm playing a retro pixel-art adventure game published in the year 2023, and I encounter a restroom with a mirror you can look in and a sink where you can wash your hands and (discreetly off-screen) working stalls complete with an artfully bit-crushed toilet-flush sound effect, but no obvious gameplay challenges present, the part of me that lives in 2023 understands that this is almost certainly just a set-piece with lots of interactive widgets that the developer put together for love of the craft – but the part of me that was playing Sierra On-Line games in 1988 knows with cold certainty that if I don't make very sure that I use that stall before I proceed, ninety minutes and three irrevocable hard-saves later later my character will somehow contrive to piss themselves to death.

[i8sigmapi]

actually, you know what? fuck it.

i'm hoping to collect and archive as many Old As Dirt computer games as i possibly can. specifically, i'm looking at ones from the 70s and 80s that ran on VAX computers. if you are or know someone who might have one on a drive (hard or otherwise) somewhere, PLEASE get in contact with me.

even if you don't, please reblog this so more people can see!

[pixelfireplace]

Computer Gaming World - Vol. 2 No. 3 - 1982

[arconinternet]

Poly-Play (In-browser, Arcade, VEB Polytechnik, 1985/1989)

Soviet East German arcade multi-game cabinets - each of these versions has some games the other doesn't. You can play them in your browser here.

Controls: arrows, Ctrl & 5 (1's unneeded here).

Tip: you can make the screen less wide by pressing Tab, then using arrows and Enter to select Video Options and then Screen #0, and turning Maintain Aspect Ratio on, then leaving the menu with Tab.

[rpgsandbox]

When is Dungeons & Dragons’ birthday? We don’t really know. RPG Historian par excellence Jon Peterson has investigated the issue a few times and come up with the answer that the game was almost certainly printed in January 1974 (though there’s disagreement even on that) and that it almost certainly wasn’t available to most people until February. The copyright registration was made on January 30, 1974 while a few years after the fact, in 1977, TSR claimed that the trademark “Dungeons & Dragons” was used in commerce starting on January 15 of that year. Peterson eventually settled on the last Sunday of January as an appropriate birthday for Dungeons & Dragons, because of Gygax inviting people over to his house to try out D&D on Sundays. This year, the year of the 50th anniversary, that’s January 28th. So happy birthday to Dungeons & Dragons. [continues]

[sablegear0]

STOPKILLINGGAMES.COM

Ross Scott is on the warpath to keep publishers from killing online-only games and you guys can help!

Folks in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the US, France (especially), the UK, and the EU at large can help the most here. Especially if you purchased a copy of Ubisoft's The Crew. Using a multi-pronged initiative to take Ubisoft to task over killing a flagship game, Ross is hoping to get legislature passed to end the bad habit of publishers killing online games altogether.

Be aware that not all the petitions on the site are active right now, and this initiative will need some patient monitoring. But some of the government petitions (the legally binding kind of petitions, the good ones) signature requirements are really low! Australia only needs 50 sigs and Canada only 500! The UK needs 10k, and if we want to be really ambitious, the EU general petition needs 1 million, but the petition runs for a whole year.

PLEASE pass this along if you even remotely care about video games or consumer rights or media preservation. I'm not some big name blog and I don't have a lot of reach but I have faith in Ross's campaign if it gets the attention it deserves.

[katewillaert]

Samus Aran's giant round shoulder pads didn't appear until Metroid II in 1991. When assembling my video essay on Metroid's Hidden Influences, I had a suspicion those shoulder pads were a reference to something, but I couldn't find it.

But just this week, user Matthew Bee posted to the Metroid FB group about a Moebius-inspired anime called Dragon's Heaven, and...I think this is it, folks.

[askagamedev]

Would you happen to know what game established the color-coded rarity for items? What made the industry as a whole accept and adopt universally the white, green, blue, yellow/purple/orange?

This topic actually came up fairly recently on our discord server. Back in 1990, some University of Warwick students built a game named Angband, a LOTR-based roguelike named for the fortress of Morgoth. The items players could find were color-coded based on power. Angband inspired the creators of Diablo (1997) who are generally regarded as the first ones to have different colors indicating quality. Magic the Gathering added rarity colors to its printed cards in its Exodus set shortly after (1998), and Diablo 2 solidified the color-coded quality (e.g. normal, magic, rare, unique, set) in 2000. I believe World of Warcraft conquering the world in 2004 was what solidified the grey > white > green > blue > purple > orange color power progression that everyone knows today.

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[vxmpire-vxlle]

Playstation 2 boot screen.

[titleknown]

Asking for reasons of history + curiosity...

[oldschoolfrp]

Bryan Ansell has passed away at age 68 (11 October 1955 -- 30th December 2023).

Bryan Ansell founded Citadel Miniatures in 1978 in partnership with Games Workshop, and co-wrote the original 1983 Warhammer Fantasy Battles first edition rules with Richard Halliwell and Rick Priestley. He became managing director of Games Workshop in the mid-1980s, and was primary owner of GW until selling his shares in 1991. He also founded Wargames Foundry / Foundry Miniatures, which continues to produce many older Citadel figures among many other ranges.

(Top: Bryan Ansell from Warhammer Armies, 1988; Bottom: Bryan Ansell (Left) with artist Tony Ackland at the 2017 Bring Out Your Lead oldhammer event at Wargames Foundry)

[prokopetz]

For many years, Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi claimed that the name was chosen because he viewed the game as his last chance to make his mark in the gaming industry, and that he'd planned to quit and go back to college if it didn't succeed.

Later, he admitted he made that part up, and that he'd really planned to call it Fighting Fantasy at first; when he found out that the name "Fighting Fantasy" was already trademarked, his main priority was to come up with a new name that still abbreviated to "FF", and any English word starting with "F" would have sufficed.

This in mind, I have to imagine there are any number of alternative universes where the series has a much more interesting title.

[troythecatfish]

[pixelfireplace]

Commodore Amiga 2000HD Brochure - 1989

source: Classic Computer Brochures

[arconinternet]

Neuromancer (C64/DOS, Interplay, 1988/1989)

You can play it in your browser here. Controls for the DOS version include the mouse; keyboard controls can be found in the reviews below the game. C64 controls include numpad 84620 for joystick.