Digital Antiquaria – Page 3 – The Retro Gaming Treasury

Star Control II

On December 21, 2018December 23, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

In this vaguely disturbing picture of Toys for Bob from 1994, Paul Reiche is at center and Fred Ford to the right. Ken Ford, who joined shortly after Star Control II was completed, is to the left. There must have been something in the games industry’s water circa 1992 when […]

A Quick Scheduling Update — and Season’s Greetings

On December 16, 2018December 16, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

My apologies to those of you who missed getting a new article on Friday. I’m afraid we have to briefly adopt a biweekly schedule, just for the next month. This is down to a new project I have in the works, about which I’m very excited. More on that soon. […]

Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune

On December 7, 2018December 8, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Brett Sperry and Louis Castle Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file […]

Controlling the Spice, Part 2: Cryo’s Dune

On November 30, 2018December 1, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Philippe Ulrich To hear him tell the story at any rate, Philippe Ulrich had always been destined to make a computer game out of Dune. On July 21, 1980, he was a starving young musician living in an attic closet in Paris without heat or electricity, having just been dropped […]

Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen

On November 23, 2018November 24, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Frank Herbert in 1982. In 1965, two works changed the face of genre publishing forever. Ace Books that year came out with an unauthorized paperback edition of an obscure decade-old fantasy trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, written by a pipe-smoking old Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien, and promptly […]

The Designer’s Designer

On November 16, 2018November 17, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Dan Bunten delivers the keynote at the 1990 Game Developers Conference. Dan Bunten and his little company Ozark Softscape could look back on a tremendous 1984 as that year came to an end. Seven Cities of Gold had been a huge success, Electronic Arts’s biggest game of the year, doing […]

Ten Great Adventure-Game Puzzles

On November 2, 2018November 3, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use […]

Quest for Glory III and IV

On October 26, 2018October 27, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I. By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing. Quest […]

The Sierra Discovery Adventures

On October 19, 2018October 20, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Among the most rewarding hidden gems in Sierra’s voluminous catalog must be the games of the Discovery Series, the company’s brief-lived educational line of the early 1990s. Doubtless because of that dreaded educational label, these games are little-remembered today even by many hardcore Sierra fans, and, unlike most of the […]

The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes

On October 12, 2018October 13, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

In 1989, Trip Hawkins reluctantly decided to shift Electronic Arts’s strategic focus from home computers to videogame consoles, thereby to “reach millions of customers.” That decision was reaching fruition by 1992. For the first time that year, EA’s console games outsold those they published for personal computers. The whole image […]

Whither the Software Artist? (or, How Trip Hawkins Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Consoles)

On October 5, 2018October 6, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

One of the places we ran the “Can a computer make you cry?” [advertisement] was in Scientific American. Scientific American readers weren’t even playing videogames. Why the hell are you wasting any of this really expensive advertising? You’re competing with BMW for that ad. — Trip Hawkins (EA Employee #1) […]

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (or, Of Movies and Games and Whether the Twain Shall Meet)

On September 28, 2018September 29, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

You ask why there are movements in movie history. Why all of a sudden there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films, or whatever. And it’s usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other. — Francis Ford Coppola Over the course […]

The Gateway Games of Legend (Preceded by the Legend of Gateway)

On September 21, 2018September 22, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Frederik Pohl was still a regular speaker at science-fiction conventions in 2008. Frederik Pohl, who died on September 2, 2013, at age 93, had one of the most multifaceted careers in the history of written science fiction. Almost uniquely, he played major roles in all three of the estates that […]

Shades of Gray

On September 14, 2018September 15, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Ladies and gentlemen, come and see. This isn’t a country here but an epic failure factory, an excuse for a place, a weed lot, an abyss for tightrope walkers, blindman’s bluff for the sightless saddled with delusions of grandeur, proud mountains reduced to dust dumped in big helpings into the […]

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

On September 7, 2018September 8, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Is it the actor or the dramaPlaying to the gallery?Or is it but the characterOf any single member of the audienceThat forms the plotof each and every play? — “Hanging in the Gallery” by Dave Cousins I was introduced to the contrast between art as artifact and art as experience […]

The Games of Windows

On August 24, 2018September 4, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

There are two stories to be told about games on Microsoft Windows during the operating environment’s first ten years on the market. One of them is extremely short, the other a bit longer and far more interesting. We’ll dispense with the former first. During the first half of the aforementioned […]

Doing Windows, Part 9: Windows Comes Home

On August 17, 2018September 4, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

This series of articles so far has been a story of business-oriented personal computing. Corporate America had been running for decades on IBM before the IBM PC appeared, so it was only natural that the standard IBM introduced would be embraced as the way to get serious, businesslike things done […]

Doing Windows, Part 8: The Outsiders

On August 10, 2018September 4, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Microsoft Windows 3.0’s conquest of the personal-computer marketplace was bad news for a huge swath of the industry. On the software side, companies like Lotus and WordPerfect, only recently so influential that it was difficult to imagine a world that didn’t include them, would never regain the clout they had […]

Doing Windows, Part 7: Third Time’s the Charm

On August 3, 2018September 4, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

Microsoft entered the last year of the 1980s looking toward a new decade that seemed equally rife with opportunity and danger. On the one hand, profits were up, and Bill Gates and any number of his colleagues could retire as very rich men indeed even if it all ended tomorrow […]

Doing Windows, Part 6: Look and Feel

On July 27, 2018September 9, 2018 By Jimmy Maher

From left, Dan Fylstra of VisiCorp, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Gary Kildall of Digital Research in 1984. As usual, Gates looks rumpled, high-strung, and vaguely tortured, while Kildall looks polished, relaxed, and self-assured. (Which of these men would you rather chat with at a party?) Pictures like these perhaps […]