for the past few years i've been working to preserve as much of the multimedia era as i can.
brian thomas's If Monks Had Macs is a weird collection of hypercard modules that brian made, and collected them together into a fascinating piece of multimedia. equal parts interactive book, point and click text adventure, journaling software, art analysis, and social commentary - i wouldn't even know how to review it!
there were two editions of the program. the first was all made in Hypercard by brian in black and white in 1988. this one has a special place in my heart because all of the artwork was done in macpaint. you can play it in-browser here: https://archive.org/details/ifmonkshadmacs_1988
the second was remade by brian and his friends in 1995, using Voyager Expanded Books' Toolkit - which was basically a massive re-implementation of hypercard. it is in full colour this time, with some rendered artwork in place of the old macpaint art. disc image here: https://archive.org/details/IfMonksHadMacs
a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.
no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.
thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.
but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.
that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.
the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.
but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.
as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.
recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.
personally, my big score was this game: Otogirisou. it is what was called a "sound novel" at the time, but would be now called a visual novel.
i picked it up for two reasons. first, i'm in love with the box cover artwork. there is something perfectly moody about it - a roughly inked haunted house in the distance, surrounded by briars, which looks like the only shelter during a pummelling rainstorm.
(and this is indeed the plot of the game)
second, it has an incredible soundtrack that was given a full orchestra treatment in the 90s. the album is called "Game Music Concert 2" by Tokyo City Philharmonic.
When it comes to gaming, I don’t hate Microsoft. I don’t exactly love them either, but I don’t hate them.
They’ve done some good things. Because of Xbox Live Arcade, indie gaming found an audience on console platforms. Xbox Game Pass is an excellent way to try AAA titles before you buy them. And because of XInput, using a gamepad on a PC is so much easier nowadays.
Right now, they’re acquiring big AAA studios. However, consolidation has been happening in the video game industry for decades now and the net effect is that new studios spring up. Sure, you can buy IPs, but talent is a different matter entirely.
Nevertheless, if we want truly independent gaming, it behooves us to support platforms like itch.io as well as TIC-80. It’s in those spaces where imagination and creativity really thrive.
Cynics will always say, “I’m not going to support indie studios and platforms because, once they get big, they’ll enshittify”.
Sure, that’s often true to an extent – Epic was once an indie shareware developer – but while you’re waiting for the worst in gaming to happen, you’re also preventing yourself from experiencing the best of gaming that’s happening right now.
DRM, micro-transactions, and seasonal passes are generally a bad thing. So what’s the solution? Don’t play crippled, enshittified games. There’s plenty of developers that don’t engage in that behaviour, including Larian Studios, who developed Baldur’s Gate III, which is the current Game of the Year.
And what’s often not said is that things can improve in the gaming landscape. At one time, if you wanted to game on PC, you needed a Windows PC. But now because of Proton, Windows is becoming less important. Right now, the majority of my PC gaming library is playable on Linux, and I bought these games before Linux gaming was even an option.
I respect Microsoft for giving more consideration to #GamePreservation than SONY and Nintendo combined.
Though their backwards compatibility program is currently halted, it nonetheless has enabled countless gamers to easily access hundreds of titles from the original Xbox and 360 eras. In contrast, the only Gamecube and Wii games you can access on the Switch are a few titles that have been re-released (Okami, Pikmin 1 & 2, Sonic Colours, Super Mario Sunshine in the 3D collection, Zelda: Skyward Sword, etc...) - and the situation with Playstation is similar.
Take the case of certain FROM Software Exclusives: the PS2 Armored Core games as well as King's Field III, are almost inaccessible to anyone without a PS2. Lost Kingdoms 1 & 2 are accessible to Gamecube and Wii owners who can obtain the discs. In contrast, the two Otogi games can be purchased by anyone with an Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X - thus spared oblivion.
That said, this is exactly how all games should be -- always available on current platforms via an up to date engine. The idea that games can only come back via a #remaster or #remake is, I would say, more harmful to preservation than not #halflife#gamepreservation
Who has unpreserved edutainment software from 2001 ready to uploade?
DINO l'Aventurier en Europe, produced by the HobbySoft's Kid's Club marque appears to have been made by a Polish team, based on the directory names.
If there's a manual, I'm sadly missing it, but I do have the complete and unused colouring book set that occupies most of the steelbook case (early example of that case type, too).
You know, without Web3 NFT bullshit, there was a lost era of decentralized gaming back when it wasn't cost effective to have massive servers for users. Old games which used the host/join system. Hell, just games where one client in a LAN also acted as the server computer. I get it, it's just easier to run all your online interactions through Nintendo, but like... Those old games can still go online, whereas everything else just died. That's sad and we should make that a consideration again.
back when the world was just getting its feet wet with MMOs in 1996, owo.com ("Origin Worlds Online" - pronounced oh-whoa) was going to be the central station for all of Origin's future MMO projects.
a year later, EA re-launched owo.com as #UltimaOnline's new home. the site was bright, cheerful, used extensive IE4-only function calls, and heralded the arrival of the graphical MMO.
this is the 1997 beta site's splash page, rendered with IE4.
back in the early 90s, several companies like sierra had painters render art on paper, and then scanned them in (and after reduction, re-palettizing, and retouching), used them as in-game assets.
during this process, a massive amount of painterly detail was lost, and we ended up with low-res art that was often more functional than beautiful. worse, the paper originals were often tossed afterwards.
by the mid-90s, this production process was almost completely replaced digitally. art was now drawn in photoshop, at the desired resolution, without additional detail.
one of the last to use the original process was @asharp for King of Dragon Pass in the late 90s. artwork was painstakingly painted on watercolour paper, then scanned and reduced to 16-bit colour @640x480 for Windows 95/98/Mac.
the originals were archived, mercifully, and then re-scanned at high res, and used in the KoDP iOS remake/remaster. they were then sold at a very reasonable price via the company site a few years later.
i'd always been enamoured by the artwork, and bought up as many as i could afford. these are three of the original paintings used in the game. i'm always blown away by the incredible detail in each piece. you can see some of the pencilled marginalia used by the artists to guide the intent of the scene.
earlier this year, i had a brief chance to work with @radiofreelunch on Six Ages 2 and realize a little development dream of mine 🙏 😁
back in winter 1999, origin systems released #Ultima 9 in a massive rush to beat a christmas deadline after years of delay.
the game was all but unplayable due to massive performance issues, showstopping bugs and no direct3d support. it was a PR disaster for OSI and EA.
after the team had been disbanded and re-assigned, a skeleton crew of a couple of programmers were permitted to release patches.
fans and players got loud about the bugs, and origin listened. on dec 15th, Jack Heistand - OSI's General Manager - announced that “every single one of you who have purchased and registered a copy of Ascension should have easy access to [the patches]” and promised to mail out a replacement CD.
(source: https://web.archive.org/web/20000303210641/http://www.ultima9.com/main.html)
sure enough, origin sent out replacement discs to all customers in march of 2000.
the patched install disc came in a white dual-disc mailer, with an apology letter, and a copy of Ultima Online: The Second Age - and a code for a free month of UO.
to my knowledge, it is the only mass-physical-mailout of a patch for thousands of customers in gamedev history.
back in 1997, there was no such thing as a subscription system for MMOs that didn't require a credit card. the UO team came up with the "Game Time Card" system, which allowed people to buy 30 & 90 day subscriptions from brick & mortar game stores. every MMO afterward, like EQ, WoW and SWG would replicate that system.
since the cards were single-use disposables, 99.99% of gamers tossed these cards out when they were done with them. they were impossible to find after a few years. it took me 15 years to find a couple of these cards, mercifully saved by a gamer in Germany, which just arrived today
a 90-day card was included in the Charter Edition of the game (only available by special order prior to launch), pictured below. it is now back in its rightful place in the box 😅
For work-adjacent reasons, I was recently looking into basically preserving a Flash game to run on Endless OS—well, ideally any Linux-based OS as a Flatpak since that’s what Endless OS uses.
I was pointed towards Ruffle, a Rust reimplementation of Flash player, which seems really cool.
While I could probably wrap it up as an HTML page in an Electron app using the client-side library, I would prefer using the native Ruffle client if possible.
It's still kinda sad that the only legal, accessible way we can experience even a handful of #game&watch games is when #nintendo decides to make a couple of #gameboy games available again.