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72 episodes with Infocom
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Seriah is joined by Barbara Fisher artist, writer, and host of “Six Degrees of John Keel “podcast, and Jonathan Bartholomew, writer and host of “Strange Stories with the Seeker and Skeptic” podcast. This is a Wandering The Road episode, but with this trio bouncing off each other, it's absolutely fascinating! Topics include upstate New York and other lake-effect snow areas, Barbara's ice storm/tornado experience in Ohio, Jonathan's new novel “Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine”, a dream experiment, sigil work, lucid dreams, John Keel's “The Eighth Tower”, a shadow figure experience, the novel “The Secret Life of D.B. Cooper” by Brian Churilla , trademark and copyright law in music, Jonathan's upcoming book “The Head On The Door”, an unexplainable good smell, Joshua Cutchin's “The Brimstone Deceit”, ghost-like experiences and an apparent connection to old property, the stone tapes theory, Eric Wargo and retro-causality, Seriah and an unexplainable terrible smell, Jonathan's vs Seriah's trips to the Seth house, the Estes Method and various takes on it, a strange “drone” experience, Jonathan's bizarre childhood experiences with apparent MIB, missing time, gifted child testing, Mensa, a Vietnam veteran PTSD father, kids being medicated at school, a weird memory of being tested at his mom's alleged friend's house, and a present day echo in intelligence-testing cards, Barbara's similar IQ-test experience, a strange drug that smelled like mothballs, religious cult experience, church members' experiences with David Koresh's Branch Davidians, rejecting fundamentalist Christianity for materialist atheism, Aleister Crowley, the Equal Rights Amendment and demons, Seriah's gifted and talented experiences, the Netflix series “Altered Carbon”, bizarre experiences in gifted and talented programs, possible military experimentation, addiction experiences, home-schooling experiences, Whitley Streiber's “Secret School” experiences, remote viewing, Stanford experiences, military psychic experiments, the variety of human abilities, dyslexia, Infocom games, adolescent metal culture, Seriah's intense recent dreams and strange sounds, Barbara's cat ghosts, all participants' 'recent weird experiences, Jonathan's tattoo experience, a tragic loss, and so much more! This is an awesome discussion!
Seriah is joined by Barbara Fisher artist, writer, and host of “Six Degrees of John Keel “podcast, and Jonathan Bartholomew, writer and host of “Strange Stories with the Seeker and Skeptic” podcast. This is a Wandering The Road episode, but with this trio bouncing off each other, it's absolutely fascinating! Topics include upstate New York and other lake-effect snow areas, Barbara's ice storm/tornado experience in Ohio, Jonathan's new novel “Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine”, a dream experiment, sigil work, lucid dreams, John Keel's “The Eighth Tower”, a shadow figure experience, the novel “The Secret Life of D.B. Cooper” by Brian Churilla , trademark and copyright law in music, Jonathan's upcoming book “The Head On The Door”, an unexplainable good smell, Joshua Cutchin's “The Brimstone Deceit”, ghost-like experiences and an apparent connection to old property, the stone tapes theory, Eric Wargo and retro-causality, Seriah and an unexplainable terrible smell, Jonathan's vs Seriah's trips to the Seth house, the Estes Method and various takes on it, a strange “drone” experience, Jonathan's bizarre childhood experiences with apparent MIB, missing time, gifted child testing, Mensa, a Vietnam veteran PTSD father, kids being medicated at school, a weird memory of being tested at his mom's alleged friend's house, and a present day echo in intelligence-testing cards, Barbara's similar IQ-test experience, a strange drug that smelled like mothballs, religious cult experience, church members' experiences with David Koresh's Branch Davidians, rejecting fundamentalist Christianity for materialist atheism, Aleister Crowley, the Equal Rights Amendment and demons, Seriah's gifted and talented experiences, the Netflix series “Altered Carbon”, bizarre experiences in gifted and talented programs, possible military experimentation, addiction experiences, home-schooling experiences, Whitley Streiber's “Secret School” experiences, remote viewing, Stanford experiences, military psychic experiments, the variety of human abilities, dyslexia, Infocom games, adolescent metal culture, Seriah's intense recent dreams and strange sounds, Barbara's cat ghosts, all participants' 'recent weird experiences, Jonathan's tattoo experience, a tragic loss, and so much more! This is an awesome discussion!Recap by Vincent Treewell of The Weird Part PodcastOutro Music by Meka Nism with Dance at the End of the World Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series on 1997's Interstate '76. We set the game a bit in its time, talk about Activision (almost as an afterthought), and then start getting into the characters and the vibe, of which there is much. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Early mission or two Issues covered: a game time forgot, playing a sim game genre, a unique take on the sim genre plus car combat, prepping the sim elements vs the actual play, other games from that year, taking a formula and doing something different with it, modern exploitation-inspired games, exploitation cinema, grindhouse, other potential influences and inspirations, why you pick sparse environments, breakable cacti, a huge variety of games, low-cost film-making and democratization, vigilantes, a bland corporation, text adventures, a business and not a game company, seeing the impact of acquisition or mergers, character introductions, fake actors playing characters, character names, Groove Champion vs Stiletto Anyway, stylized and simplified characters, flat shading and seeing every polygon, connecting to the character in the cockpit and via the radio, naturally cinematic, stylized presence, jitteriness and physics, compounding errors, deterministic physics, preserving this game and finding ways to play it, just shipping a game, dealing with a controller vs keyboard. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: TIE Fighter (series), Starfighter, MechWarrior (series), Voltron, Diablo, Resident Evil, The Last Express, Fallout, GoldenEye, Castlevania: SotN, Age of Empires, Outlaws, Curse of Monkey Island, Dark Forces 2, Shadows of the Empire, Wing Commander: Prophecy, Final Fantasy VII, Mario Kart 64, Gran Turismo, PlayStation, Dark Forces, Final Fantasy Tactics, Wet, Kane and Lynch, Suda 51, Grasshopper Interactive, Killer 7, Death Race 2000, Russ Meyers, Death Proof, Mad Max (series), MegaMan 8, Kaeon, Cleopatra Jones, Enter the Dragon, Jim Kelly, Bruce Lee, Game of Death, Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill, Fist of Fury, Starsky and Hutch, River Raid, Pitfall, David Crane, Atari, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Capcom, Blizzard, id Software, Interplay, Infocom, Zork (series), Witness, Enchanter (series), Ballyhoo, Lurking Horror, Electronic Arts, Bobby Kotick, Nintendo, BattleZone, Pac-Man, Jason Schreier, Play Nice: The Rise and Fall of Blizzard Entertainment, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap, Ultima (series), Bioware, Treyarch, Raven Software, Heretic/Hexen, Quake, Battletech/FASA Entertainment, Anachronox, Pam Grier, Chuck Norris, Dungeon Keeper, Half-Life 2, Indiana Jones and the Internal Machine, Video Game History Foundation, Star Wars: Episode I: Racer, Forza (series), Falcon (series), Dark Souls, Minecraft, LostLake86, Mors, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Errata: Lost Treasures of Infocom actually originally came out in 1991. We regret the error. Next time: More I'76! Twitch Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com
Guest: Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision Blizzard; and Bing Gordon, general partner at Kleiner PerkinsIn 2020, when President Trump signed the executive order that would ban TikTok in the U.S., Bobby Kotick called his old friend Steven Mnuchin. The former Secretary of the Treasury told him that, if TikTok's U.S. operations were to be sold to an American company, Microsoft would be the only bidder.A couple calls later, he reached ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming, who said he'd rather sell to Bobby than Microsoft. Concerned about his ability to get the deal done solo, Bobby called Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and offered to make a joint bid. Nadella declined, but added, “ if the deal doesn't get done, we should sit down and talk about us buying Activision.” TikTok currently remains Chinese-owned, but three years later, Microsoft paid $75 billion for Activision Blizzard.Chapters:Mentioned in this episode: Harvard-Westlake School, Alison Ressler, Vivendi, Berkshire Hathaway, Bruce Hack and Arnaud de Puyfontaine, John Riccitiello and EA, Call of Duty, Bizarre Creations, Atari, Apple II, Commodore 64, Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple Lisa, Howard Lincoln, Philips, Magnavox Odyssey, Sutter Hill Ventures, Infocom and Zork, Toys-R-Us, Howard Hughes, E. Parry Thomas, Sun Valley, Thom Weisel, William Morris Endeavor, Guitar Hero, Davidson & Associates, Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, World of Warcraft, Medal of Honor, Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, Chris Roberts, Overwatch, Tencent, Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In, Lina Khan, Samsung, Elon Musk, James L. Jones, UFC, E. Floyd Kvamme, Toy Story 2, Procter & Gamble, Ron Doornik, John Lasseter, Xerox PARC, Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata, Goldeneye 007, James Bond, Barbara Broccoli, Oculus, Apple Vision Pro, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Sam Altman, Mustafa Suleyman, Spotify, Candy Crush Saga, Disney, Phil Spencer, Clarence Avant and Motown Records. Links:Connect with BobbyTwitterLinkedInConnect with BingTwitterLinkedInConnect with JoubinTwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com Learn more about Kleiner PerkinsThis episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
Commodore buys Amiga Jack Tramiel declares war on competition Nintendo announces US NES launch plans These stories and many more on this episode of the VGNRTM! This episode we will look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game industry in August 1984. As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover dates, and those are of course always a bit behind the actual events. Alex Smith of They Create Worlds is our cohost. Check out his podcast here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/ and order his book here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/book Get us on your mobile device: Android: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlb2dhbWVuZXdzcm9vbXRpbWVtYWNoaW5lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz iOS: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/video-game-newsroom-time-machine And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/VGNRTM Send comments on Mastodon @videogamenewsroomtimemachine@oldbytes.space Or twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/vgnrtm Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Links: If you don't see all the links, find them here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121143199 7 Minutes in Heaven: Sabrewulf Video Version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121098237 https://www.mobygames.com/game/14732/sabre-wulf/ Corrections: July 1984 Ep - https://www.patreon.com/posts/july-1994-116535754 Ethan's fine site The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Pong https://gamehistory.org/atari-2600-tarzan/ https://www.giantbomb.com/photon-the-ultimate-game-on-planet-earth/3030-39589/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron https://archive.org/details/book_video_games/page/n77/mode/2up 1974: Atari sells Japanese manufacturing to Namco https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-24.pdf pg. 49 Basketball a hit Cashbox august 3 1974 https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-04.pdf pg. 43 Clean Sweep 1 player https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-10.pdf pg. 50 Track 10 adds oil slick https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-17.pdf pg. 46 https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/2351 Gene Lipken joins Atari https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-24.pdf pg. 49 Medal Games are spreading Game Machine August 10, 1974 pg. 7 Cali SC rules in favor of pinball Cashbox Aug 10 1974 https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-10.pdf pg. 48 Coinop on the Price is Right Cashbox august 3 1974 https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/70s/1974/CB-1974-08-04.pdf pg. 43 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_Is_Right 13 year olds simulate life on computer Two Youths Turn Computers on to 'Life', Hardford Courant, 11 Aug 1974, Page 3 http://www.rearden.com/people.php 1984: Silicon Valley proves resilient Gloom in the Valley . . . But a Silver Lining, Too, U.S. News & World Report, August 20, 1984, Section: Pg. 38, Byline: By JOANNE DAVIDSON Warner second quarter losses are massive Warner Communications reports huge loss, United Press International, August 2, 1984, Thursday, BC cycle Jack slashes prices Atari's Tramiel Gets Tough With Price Cuts, ADWEEK, August 13, 1984, Eastern Edition,Byline: By Gail Belsky Computer Entertainer Vol. 3 Number 5 pg. 1 https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater Commodore to buy Amiga Commodore Deal With Amiga Set,The New York Times, August 17, 1984, Friday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 3, Column 6; Financial Desk Atari sues Amiga ATARI HEAD SUES ALLY THAT DEFECTED TO RIVAL, The New York Times, August 21, 1984, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 1; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER https://www.tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/1984/0822.html Atari to introduce 16 and 32 bit systems Atari To Sell More-Powerful Computers, The Associated Press, August 27, 1984, Monday, AM cycle, Section: Business News, Byline: By STEVE WILSTEIN, Jack declares war on competition Computer Entertainer Vol. 3 Number 5 pg. 1 https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater Jack can't collect Tramiel Reported Seeking $50 Million in Lieu of Atari Debts, The Associated Press, August 31, 1984, Friday, PM cycle, Section: Business News Imagine Megagames up for auction https://archive.org/details/Computer_Video_Games_Issue_034_1984-08_EMAP_Publishing_GB/page/n23/mode/2up Coleco unveils new marketing ploy Coleco will offer scholarships to some computer purchasers, United Press International, August 22, 1984, Wednesday, BC cycle, Section: Financial Advertising;At Coleco, The Adam Is Reborn, The New York Times, August 13, 1984, Monday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 8, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By Pamela G. Hollie https://youtu.be/tklBAzg_cgw?si=rDW-RNgtAqd_7QHl VCRs and Action Figures muscle video games out of retail The Video Revolution, Newsweek, August 6, 1984 UNITED STATES EDITION, Section: BUSINESS; Pg. 50 Media Room, The Associated Press, August 12, 1984, Sunday, BC cycle Video killed the Video Game Star FROM PAC-MAN TO GI JOE, Forbes, August 13, 1984, Section: MONEY AND INVESTMENTS; The Columnists; Psychology & Investing; Pg. 138, Byline: By Srully Blotnick; Toys sales boom, United Press International, August 21, 1984, Tuesday, BC cycle, Section: Financial Playthings, August 1984. Video Game tie-ins come of age Allan Carr keeps bubbling to the top in a heady world, The San Diego Union-Tribune,August 12, 1984 Sunday, Section: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. E-2, Byline: David Elliott, Movie Critic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloak_%26_Dagger_%28video_game%29 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087065/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088395/?ref_=nm_flmg_knf_t_4 ACTIVISION; To develop and market software based on Ghostbusters motion picture, Business Wire, August 28, 1984, Tuesday Gregory Fischbach Part 1 - Activision - Acclaim - https://www.patreon.com/posts/46578120 https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-09/mode/1up?view=theater https://www.mobygames.com/company/6665/dktronics/ https://archive.org/details/OnlineTodayV03N08/page/n9/mode/2up https://www.mobygames.com/game/40828/paul-mccartneys-give-my-regards-to-broad-street/ Jay Balakrishnan - HESWare, Radical, Dynamics, Solid State Software - https://www.patreon.com/posts/jay-balakrishnan-103071267 Nintendo sees coinop sales plummet Nintendo anticipates greater sales, profit, The Japan Economic Journal, August 28, 1984, Section: SECURITIES; Pg. 16 Atari sells distributorship Replay, August 1984, pg. 3 Coin-op computers a bust Campus coin-op computers crash; Good product ahead of its time, United Press International, August 29, 1984, Wednesday, BC cycle, Section: Financial, Byline: By J.B. BLOSSER 3rd parties scrap releases Computer Entertainer Vol. 3 Number 5 pg. 11 IBM tries to save the PCJr I.B.M. RAISES DIVIDEND, OFFERS A FREE KEYBOARD, The New York Times, August 1, 1984, Wednesday, Late City , Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 1; Financial Desk, Byline: By STUART DIAMOND https://www.ebay.com/itm/335702730148 https://archive.org/details/pcjr-magazine-1984-volume-1/PCjr%20Magazine%20-%20198410%20-%20Volume%201%20Number%209/page/58/mode/2up?view=theater&q=512 https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue59/review_lotus_123.php MICROPRO; Greets enhanced PCjr with WordStar, Business Wire, August 13, 1984, Monday IBM announces AT I.B.M.'S. NEW POWERHOUSE A T ;TWICE AS FAST AS OLD PC'S, The New York Times, August 15, 1984, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n9/mode/2up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M24 SHORTAGE OF SEMICONDUCTORS EASES, The New York Times, August 27, 1984, Monday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n11/mode/2up IBM and EC reach agreement WEEK IN BUSINESS;BEST WEEK EVER ON WALL STREET, The New York Times, August 5, 1984, Sunday, Late City , Final Edition, Section: Section 3; Page 14, Column 3; Financial Desk, Byline: By Nathaniel C. Nash IBM announces new business strategy for Europe I.B.M.'S NEW ROLE IN EUROPE, The New York Times, August 13, 1984, Monday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section D; Page 1, Column 4; Financial Desk, Byline: By DAVID E. SANGER MSX to miss XMAS https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-02/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-02/page/n2/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-09/page/n3/mode/1up?view=theater Amstrad pricing very competitive https://archive.org/details/cvg-magazine-034/page/n125/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/cvg-magazine-034/page/n119/mode/1up?view=theater Sinclair launches Speccy bundle https://archive.org/details/home-computer-weekly-magazine-new/HomeComputerWeekly-074/ https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-02/mode/1up?view=theater https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/20540/ZX-Spectrum/Spectrum_Six_Pack_ZX-Spectrum_48K_version Sinclair plans stock flotation https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-09/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater Sinclair wants to get into chip manufacturing https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-16/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-23/page/n2/mode/1up?view=theater Sinclair earnings miss expectations https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-23/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater Dragon goes to Espana! Spanish take over failed Dragon computer maker, Financial Times (London,England), August 15, 1984, Wednesday, Section: SECTION I; Pg. 12, Byline: BY CHARLES BATCHELOR IN LONDON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64#Product_history https://www.amazon.es/Cinco-Duros-HISTORIA-VIDEOJUEGO-ESPA%C3%91A/dp/8410031469 https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episode-755-the-phone-at-the-end-of-the-world Macintosh software still scarce https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n243/mode/2up Michael Dornbrook Part 1 - Infocom - https://www.patreon.com/posts/44335732 MIDI comes to micros https://archive.org/details/cvg-magazine-034/page/n125/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-16/mode/2up Pioneer launchees interactive laser disc https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-3-5/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Creative_Computing_1984-08/page/n11/mode/2up Byte profiles 6502 successor https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n129/mode/2up Great space race budget breaks records https://archive.org/details/home-computer-weekly-magazine-new/HomeComputerWeekly-077/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/190868/the-great-space-race/ Lord British given credit for Questron https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_4.4/page/n30/mode/1up?view=theater Joel Billings - SSI - https://www.patreon.com/posts/36827469 US games flood UK https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-23/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Gold Virgin goes for quality https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/mode/1up?view=theater Domark launches with big contest https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/page/n26/mode/1up?view=theater Sexy Games get activists in a tissy https://archive.org/details/home-computer-weekly-magazine-new/HomeComputerWeekly-076/mode/2up Computer adoption in schools still slow Stumbling into the computer age, Forbes, August 13, 1984, Section: INDUSTRIES; Pg. 35, Byline: By Kathleen R. Wiegner Computers find their purpose Road Warrior' rides again, Computerworld, August 13, 1984, Section: EDITORIAL; LECHT ON SCIENCE; Pg. 47, Byline: By Charles P. Lecht NABU gets software subsidiary "Sets Up Software Subsidiary; WHEELER SAYS HE MISSES 'BULLY PULPIT' BUT ENJOYS PRIVATE INDUSTRY, Communications Daily, August 20, 1984, Monday, Section: Vol. 4, No. 162; Pg. 5" Tech support goes online Telephone hot lines for software problems, Financial Times (London,England), August 29, 1984, Wednesday, Section: SECTION I; Technology; Professional Personal Computing; Pg. 5, Byline: PHILIP MANCHESTER WH Smith profits surge on computer sales RESULTS DUE NEXT WEEK, Financial Times (London,England), August 18, 1984, Saturday, Section: SECTION I; UK Companies; Pg. 17 Radio Shack loses ground TANDY'S SHIFTING SALES STRATEGY, The New York Times, August 19, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section 3; Page 1, Column 3; Financial Desk, Length: 2350 words, Byline: By PETER W. BARNES Drug Store Chain sues Mattel Drug Chain Sues Mattel For Alleged Discrimination Against Retailer, The Associated Press, August 3, 1984, Friday, BC cycle, No Headline In Original, United Press International, August 3, 1984, Friday, BC cycle, Section: Financial, Length: 188 words, Dateline: SYRACUSE, N.Y. Data Age sues Mr. T HE PITIES THE FOOL, United Press International, August 20, 1984, Monday, BC cycle, Section: Domestic News, Byline: By FRANK SANELLO, United Press International Pirates go pro https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1984-08-30/mode/1up?view=theater https://www.olx.pt/d/anuncio/jogos-spectrum-verso-portuguesa-de-coleccionador-da-microbaite-etc-IDICESX.html TVs adapt to the new media landscape HOME VIDEO; TV SETS: NEW FUNCTIONS, NEW FORMS, The New York Times, August 12, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section: Section 2; Page 24, Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk, Byline: By HANS FANTEL Executives get high-tech The all-electronic Executive, Financial Times (London,England), August 4, 1984, Saturday, Section: SECTION I; The Information Revolution; Pg. 12, Byline: By Alan Cane Touch screen system used for tourists Touch computer for tourists boon to advertisers, promoters, United Press International, August 19, 1984, Sunday, BC cycle, Section: Financial, Byline: By JOHN J. SANKO Army introduces joystick controlled rocket Technology Today: Fiber-optic guided missiles -- ultimate video game, United Press International, August 20, 1984, Monday, BC cycle, Section: Domestic News, Byline: By WILLIAM HARWOOD, Gaming Jesus shall bare the mark No Headline In Original, United Press International, August 9, 1984, Thursday, AM cycle, Section: Domestic News Compu-Cruise to set sail https://archive.org/details/HomeComputerMagazine_Vol4_03_1984_Aug/page/n25/mode/2up Recommended Links: The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ Gaming Alexandria: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/ They Create Worlds: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/ Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ The Arcade Blogger: https://arcadeblogger.com/ Retro Asylum: http://retroasylum.com/category/all-posts/ Retro Game Squad: http://retrogamesquad.libsyn.com/ Playthrough Podcast: https://playthroughpod.com/ Retromags.com: https://www.retromags.com/ Games That Weren't - https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/ Sound Effects by Ethan Johnson of History of How We Play. Copyright Karl Kuras
A Large Collection, Stories in a Collection, Capturing Infocom, Financialization, Families and Friends and Grief, Using The Skills You Have, Settling With Your Choices. Someone tried to sell an awful lot of Infocom and Infocom-Related items on auction and is trying again, and I had some related thoughts about collecting, selling, and using opportunities.
We are back with another AI update about AI produced podcasts. And this time, we have a special guest joining us, Jill Walker Rettberg. In this episode Jill, Scott, and Jhave will discuss the new feature of Google's NotebookLM, that lets you listen to a podcast conversation about your source documents. References Google. n. d. “NotebookLM”, NotebookLM. retrieved from https://notebooklm.google/. Infocom. 1977. Zork. Personal Software. PDP-10 mainframe computer. https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/game/infocom/zork1/. Montfort, Nick. 2011. Curveship. https://nickm.com/curveship/index.html.
ANTIC Interview 438 - John Carlsen - Atari Summer Employee Hello, and welcome to this interview-only episode of ANTIC, The Atari 8-bit computer podcast. I'm Randy Kindig, your host for this episode. John Carlsen worked at Atari only briefly, as a summer job for 6 weeks in 1987, between his final years of high school. Later, in 1988-1989, he worked for its founding president, Nolan Bushnell when he signed on to Nolan's latest startup, called Bots, Inc. They made pizza delivery robots (and a related customer-facing order entry system) for Little Caesars Pizza. John then worked for Axlon, which was created by former Atari employees to manufacture add-on products for the Atari computer, followed by Aapps Corp., which spun out of Nolan's offices. In 1990-1991, John also worked for Mediagenic (Activision, Infocom, etc.) until a week after its hostile takeover. This interview took place on March 6, 2024. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell
To legender på en gang - sånt blir det Sidequest av! Jeg har nemlig vært så heldig å få snakke med selveste Jon Cato Lorentzen om det som en gang var et av verdens største spilllselskaper: Infocom.Det tekstbaserte eventyrspillselskapet har en stor plass i Jon Catos hjerte, med god grunn! Til Sidequest har han tatt med seg sin personlige liste over de fem beste spillene de lagde, og her er det så mye snacks
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we revisit our series on rotoscoping with a fun chat with Jordan Mechner, of Karateka, Prince of Persia, and The Last Express fame. We also talk about his new graphic memoir: Replay, Memoir of an Uprooted Family. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Podcast breakdown: 00:50 Interview 1:01:50 Break 1:02:03 Outro Issues covered: his history, train trips, caricatures and making stuff, not living up to the greats, improvising into his games, animation not holding up, filming his mother's karate teacher, his father, and his brother, handcrafting for rotoscoping, taking silent film classes, cross-cutting and wipes, the moment it came to live, the power of abstraction vs the uncanny valley, the impact on what we wanted for animation, caricature and capturing someone, finding the essence of a person, specialization and stepping into direction, drawing ten real people and getting into the graphic memoir, caricature and selling the big moments of small animations, abstraction and universality, adapting to higher resolution, breaking the illusion of interactivity, not being photorealistic but still having the nuance of real actors, highly compressible art and fluidity, uncanny valley of interactivity, picking the right constraints, the train's limitations enabling the possibility of depth, the fascination of interactive theater, holding up better, physical recording separated from voice, allowing for improvisation or variability, being attracted to historical fiction, his family's history, drawing the real things into the memoir, experience, technical nuance and caricature, moments of impactful character interactions, committing to a high bar. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Karateka, Prince of Persia, The Last Express, Smoking Car Productions, Disney, Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family, LucasArts, Space Invaders, Apple, Hitchcock, Thief of Baghdad, Sabu, Conrad Veidt, 1001 Nights, MAD Magazine, Al Hirschfeld, Frank Sinatra, Broderbund, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud, MYST, Dragon's Lair, Buster Keaton, Robyn Miller, The 7th Guest, Rebel Assault, GTA, Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot, Deadline, The Witness, Infocom, Sleep No More, Assassin's Creed, Zoetrope Studios, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Seven Samurai, Fathom, Michael Turner, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Templar, Count of Monte Cristo, Emily, Michel Ancel, Eric Chahi, Ubisoft, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: TBA! Links: Jordan Mechner's website Twitch: timlongojr Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com
My guest today is the American video game developer Steve Meretzky. Born and raised in Yonkers, New York, he attended MIT, where he earned a degree in construction management. In 1981, after two years spent working in the construction industry, a friend asked him if he would like to become a tester for Infocom, a publisher that specialised in interactive fiction. He agreed and was soon invited to write a game of his own, the science fiction game Planetfall.After he included a reference to Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the game, my guest was invited to collaborate with Adams in adapting the novel into a best-selling game. In 1988 he wrote A Mind Forever Voyaging, an ambitious and politically charged work that stretched the boundaries of what a video game could do ––and saw him become one of the first interactive fiction writers admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America.After stints working for Blue Fang Games, Playdom and King, he is currently VP of design at the mobile games company PeopleFun.LINKSBBC Documentary from 1985 takes us inside Infocom.Play 30th Anniversary Edition of Hitchhiker's Guide in your browser.Google's AI experiment with Zork...Hire Ed Hawkins to voice your game. Be attitude for gains. https://plus.acast.com/s/my-perfect-console. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A long-form reflection on game design and parser craft theory continues with a discussion of Inform Design Manual 4's version of Graham Nelson's "The Craft of the Adventure." Particular attention is paid to mimesis, challenge, and, as Drew puts it, "cool stuff." Part of a series about Infocom's Trinity. Resources discussed in this episode: Gold Machine: Emily Dickenson and the Wide Middle of Trinity https://golmac.org/narrative-surface-features-of-trinity-part-2/ Top Expert: Let's Make IF Season 2, Episode 1 https://topexpert.blog/2024/07/03/lets-make-if-season-2-episode-1/ DM4 Version of "The Craft of the Adventure" (pdf) https://inform-fiction.org/manual/Chapter8.pdf 50 Years of Text Games https://if50.textories.com/ My own game, Repeat the Ending https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=eueqjtej7bvnfp5a Correction: Photopia was released in 1998.
All Things TechIE Podcast - Episode 102 (#infocomm24)Welcome to the All Things TechIE Podcast! In this episode, we're thrilled to bring you a special highlight from Infocom 2024, live in Las Vegas. Host Justin Dawson is joined by the knowledgeable Mark Knox, who shares his insights from Wyrestorm about the rapidly evolving world of tech in education. Mark delves into the unique challenges and opportunities faced by colleges and universities in North America, offering a glimpse into the innovative solutions being developed to enhance educational technology. From revolutionary hybrid matrix systems to the groundbreaking USB 3.2 extensions, they explore the impactful ways in which technology is transforming the learning environment. Join us as we uncover the exciting updates and engaging conversations from the heart of Infocomm 2024.
AI threads through a set of old and new games that span text based adventures from Infocom's HHG2G to recent examples like Milton is Trapped, along with a conversation on FinalSpark's Neuroplatform for biocomputing.
Das Textadventure Planetfall von Infocom darf als Paradebeispiel für das goldene Zeitalter der Textadventures gelten, es vereinte die von Infocom gewohnte Rätselqualität mit einer interessanten Prämisse, einem humorvollen Background und einer besonderen Innovation: Besonders bemerkenswert ist der virtuelle Begleiter Floyd, ein Roboter, der das Spiel nicht nur auflockert, sondern auch eine gewisse emotionale Tiefe hinzufügt. Chris und Gunnar sprechen über das Gameplay und die Entstehung von Planetfall und seinem Nachfolger Stationfall. OT-Fassung: Diese Folge enthält O-Töne des Entwicklers, die auf Deutsch übersetzt und von Dennis Richtarski neu eingesprochen wurden. Und eine übersetzte Passage aus dem Spiel. Wer das alles lieber auf Englisch hätte, findet die Version mit englischen O-Tönen bei Patreon (ohne Paywall). Interview: Parallel zu dieser Folge ist das Interview (englischsprachig, aber mit deutscher Zusammenfassung am Ende), das wir für diese Folge mit dem Entwickler des Spiels, Steve Meretzky, gemacht haben, erschienen: ohne Paywall auf Patreon und Steady. Infos zum Spiel: Thema: Planetfall Erscheinungstermin: August 1983 (USA) Plattform:MS-DOS, später alle anderen Plattformen der Ära Entwickler: Infocom Publisher: Infocom Genre: Text-Adventure Designer: Steve Meretzky Podcast-Credits: Sprecher: Christian Schmidt, Gunnar Lott - mit Einspielern von Steve Meretzky Audioproduktion: Johannes DuBois, Christian Schmidt Titelgrafik: Paul Schmidt Intro, Outro: Nino Kerl (Ansage); Chris Hülsbeck (Musik) www.stayforever.de
Join Amigo Aaron and THE BRENT this week on the Atari ST Show as we check out the classic game that was both BattleTech's entry into video gaming AND served as Infocom's first shaky steps out of the last of pure text gaming! We'll go over what BATTLETECH is, and then kick back and relax as we hop in our mech's and STOMP SOME SUCKA'S OUT! It's ON in BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception!
“This reckless defiance is intolerable.” Lucasfilm Games teamed up with Infocom's visionary creative Brian Moriarty in 1990 for the fifth of the studio's SCUMM-based point and click adventures, the whimsical and musical Loom. Leon, Chis Worthington, Jesse (who selected this game as his pick for the Volume) and Ryan - along with contributions from the Cane and Rinse community - pick their way stitch-by-stitch through this unusual and accessible yarn. http://media.blubrry.com/caneandrinse/caneandrinse.com/podcast/cane_and_rinse_issue_616.mp3 Music featured in this issue: 1. The Overture by Tchaikovsky/George Sanger/Eric Hammond2. Main Theme by Tchaikovsky/George Sanger/Eric Hammond Edited by Ryan Zhao You can support Cane and Rinse and in return receive an often extended version of the podcast four weeks early, along with exclusive podcasts, if you subscribe to our Patreon for the minimum of $2 per month (+VAT). Do you have an opinion about a game we're covering that you'd like read on the podcast? Then venture over to our forum and check out the list of upcoming games we're covering. Whilst there you can join in the conversations with our friendly community in discussing all things relating to videogames, along with lots of other stuff too. Sound good? Then come and say hello at The Cane and Rinse forum
Our first two installments of the New Wave Game ended in ties, because we were both quite clueless. This week we move even deeper into the Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the 80s CD series, as we attempt to guess each other's favorite songs on each volume. Among the weirder, more obscure stuff (any other fans of "I Eat Cannibals"?), we find plenty of new wave classics from Duran Duran, Thomas Dolby, The Tubes, The Fixx, Scandal, Dexy's Midnight Runners, and lots more. Can we possibly resist an oddity called "Chicken Outlaw"? Do we just wish we were in Tijuana eating barbecued iguana? Hop on the escalator of life with us to find out. The Best Stuff in the World podcast - Infocom text adventure games! And our regular links... The Flopcast website! The ESO Network! The Flopcast on Facebook! The Flopcast on Instagram! The Flopcast on Mastadon! Please rate and review The Flopcast on Apple Podcasts! Email: info@flopcast.net Our music is by The Sponge Awareness Foundation! This week's promo: Tales From Hollywoodland!
Ever wanted to know what it was like to play a text adventure back in the day? Join us as we poke around the edges of the Great Underground Empire and promptly get lost, stumped, and even die a few times.
In this week's episode, we take a look at eight pieces of writing advice from famous writers. I also discuss why I decided to change the name of my SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE series to STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE. To celebrate the release of GHOST IN THE VEILS, let's get caught up with some of Caina's older adventures in the GHOST NIGHT series. This coupon code will get you 25% off any of the GHOST NIGHT ebooks at my Payhip store: SPRINGNIGHT The coupon is valid through April 16th, 2024. So if you're looking for some spring reading, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 194 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 28th, 2024 and today we are talking about eight pieces of writing advice from famous writers and what I think of those pieces of writing advice. So it should be an interesting show. Before we get to our other topics, let's have Coupon of the Week. To celebrate the release of Ghost in the Veils, let's get caught up with some of Caina's older adventures in the Ghost Night series. This coupon code will get you 25% off any of the Ghost Night ebooks at my Payhip Store: SPRINGNIGHT and that is SPRINGNIGHT. And of course that will be in the show notes, along the link to the Ghost Night ebooks on my Payhip store. This coupon code is valid through April 16th, 2024, so if you're looking for some spring reading, we have got you covered. Let's have an update on my current writing projects. As we mentioned with the Coupon of the Week, Ghost in the Veils is done, it is out, and selling briskly. Thank you for that, everyone. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. The reviews so far have been good, and it's been selling briskly. So thank you everyone for that. Now that that is done, my next main project will be Wizard-Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and I am in fact almost done with that. I'm on Chapter 11 of 12 though it might turn out to be 14 chapters in the edit. I would in fact be finishing it tomorrow, but I am taking the weekend off for Easter so hopefully I will get the rough draft wrapped up in the first week of April and the book out and available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited before the end of April. After Wizard-Thief is out, my next two main projects will be Cloak of Titans (I am 17,000 words into that) and then Shield of Darkness, the sequel to of the sequel to Shield of Storms from earlier in the year. In audiobook news, the Half-Elven Thief audiobook is done and I'm pleased to report it was narrated excellently by Leanne Woodward (the first book she has narrated for me). That should be available in the next couple of weeks at all the audiobook stores. Recording will start in a few weeks for the audiobook version of Ghost in the Veils, and that will also be excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. 00:02:20 Question of the Week/Title Change to the Sevenfold Sword Online Series Before we get to our main topic, we will do Question the Week and then an update on my books formerly known as Sevenfold Sword Online. Our Question of the Week was: what is your all-time favorite video game, like the one you keep coming to back play at to play again and again across decades? No wrong answers obviously and we had some good comments on this. Todd said, well, this is an easy one. Diablo and then Lands of Lore. Patrick Stewart really did give the King Richard character gravitas. Sam says Final Fantasy 14, an MMO with an amazing story and an amazing community. Justin says World of Warcraft, though I'm not very good at anything but the Auction House and Conquest of the New World, a DOS turn based strategy game I've played for 30 years now. For myself, I think I might be one of the few people who have played computer games in my generation who never played World of Warcraft. I spent a lot of time supporting it and fixing computers that broke when they tried to run World of Warcraft, but I never actually have played it. Pamela says, I play Lord of the Rings Online every day with my husband. I occasionally go back to Age of Empires. Ross Logan says Morrowind, though TIE Fighter is pretty solid also. For myself, I have played both TIE Fighter and Morrowind and thought they were both great, great games. Jay says XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. John says, played the old Wizardry series in the early ‘80s fanatically. I've played Eve Online since 2006, but lately I just refuel alliance stations. Also used to play a lot of the real time strategy Warcraft and StarCraft games, Age of Empires, Homeward, and also the first Diablo. Becca says the Mass Effect trilogy for me. Michael says, I spent a lot of hours on Skyrim, played it on PS3, 4, and 5, but spent even more time on Final Fantasy 14. They keep adding more DLCs with the newest one and the whole new storyline coming at the end of June. Ultimately, the whole Final Fantasy franchise has been my favorite ever since about 1990. I can relate with Michael there because I have played Skyrim on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, but I've only actually beaten it on Switch and Xbox, never on PC. Brandy says all the Diablo games I don't have the hand eye coordination or computer to play much these days. My partner is much more game-oriented, from tabletop to 40K to Fallout, and Franken Fallout. I read a lot, which I suppose works out. As a writer, I support that! Jason says Dragon Quest 9 on 3DS is my ultimate going back to game. I'm waiting for port remaster, aiming to be able to play it somewhere than other on that tiny 3DS screen. Justin says Elden Ring. Before Elden Ring came out, it was probably Diablo 2. Yogi says Skyrim, can't get enough, want a new version come out. Had to get into New World to satisfy that need. Mike says I have not played as much over the last few years, but I enjoyed the Diablo series. A different Michael says, some epic answers here already. Morrowind is my all-time favorite, but not because I keep going back to it. In fact, the opposite. The game moved and impressed me so much that I've never played it again as to not dim the memory with repetition. Also, the old Infocom text adventures, Zork III in particular. For games I keep going back to, probably Master of Magic, Medieval 2: Total War, and Lord of the Rings Online. Rhion says, Master of Magic. I still have my DOS diskettes for it! For myself, I think it comes down to a toss-up between two titles. The oldest one is Master of Magic from 1994, though I think the remake from 2022 is a worthy successor. Admittedly, the 2022 remake took a bunch of patches to get there, but in the original form from 1994, the game also required many patches, so it's just continuing the legacy of the original game. The newer one is Skyrim, which as I mentioned, I've been playing on and off since 2011 and even though I finally beat the main campaign during COVID in 2020, I still keep coming back to the game. Though if we are measuring by the length of time I've been coming back to the game, Master of Magic wins since I first played that in 1994 and Skyrim was first in 2011. A semi-important announcement: I have decided to rename the Sevenfold Sword Online series to the Stealth and Spells Online series. The motivation for this decision came from the many, many, many emails I have received asking where Sevenfold Sword Online fit in between Dragontiarna, or Sevenfold Sword, or if the Calliande Arban NPC in the books will turn out to be the real Calliande Arban from Frostborn. And the answer to all these questions is no, of course not. Sevenfold Sword Online is something totally different than the Frostborn epic fantasy series. It's a LitRPG series with many science fiction elements. The premise is that 700 years in the future, an evil corporation made a virtual reality MMORPG game based on my Frostborn books and a former developer sets out to expose the evil corporation from within by playing the game. It's not part of Frostborn or the other Andomhaim series, but all this confusion is not the reader's fault. It's my fault. By naming it Sevenfold Sword Online, I think I set the table wrong, so to speak. What do I mean by setting the table wrong? Imagine that you sit down to a meal. The tablecloth is the red and white pattern traditionally associated with Italian restaurants. On the table you see a shaker of garlic salt and another of Parmesan cheese. Next to your plate is a pizza cutter, and in front of it is a basket of garlic breadsticks. Your beverage is in one of those red plastic cups that Pizza Hut had back in the ‘90s. Naturally, you're expecting the waiter to bring out a pizza. Instead, the waiter brings out a plate with carne asada tacos and lime and jalapeno tortilla chips. You're going to be very confused. Why is there a pizza cutter next to your plate if you're having tacos? I mean, they could potentially be the best tacos in the history of Mexican cuisine, but it's still weird because you sat down and everything indicated that you were about to get a pizza. By naming the LitRPG series Sevenfold Sword Online, I think I set the table wrong and created incorrect expectations that it was actually part of the main Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, and the Shield War series. It probably also kneecapped sales for the series, since people assumed it was part of Sevenfold Sword. Therefore, Sevenfold Sword Online has been renamed to the Stealth and Spells Online series. Hopefully this will be a better indicator of what kind of book it really is. Now after talking about all of that, I really want some tacos. 00:08:58 Main Topic: Eight Pieces of Advice from Famous Authors So let's look at eight piece of advice from famous authors and see what I think about them and if I agree with them or not. The first one is from Robert Cormier, who says “the beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” I would definitely agree with that. For instance, when I published Ghost in the Veils, I forgot that in the first book I said that Calliope's eyes were green and in the second book her eyes were suddenly dark and reader Juanna pointed that out. So I made sure to go back and quickly change the color of Calliope's eyes to the correct green color in Ghost in the Veils. But you know, a little annoying to make that mistake. It's not a big deal, whereas if you make a mistake in brain surgery, that is pretty much a one and done situation. Our second piece of writing advice is from George Orwell, who of course wrote 1984 and Animal Farm and other classics of dystopian fiction. He says, “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” I think that applies more to authors who are traditionally published than indies, because I've never found writing a book to be objectively painful. It helps to have perspective. I mean, I used to spend eight hours a day unloading trucks. That got painful, especially when it happened to be 100° out in the summer. By contrast, when I write a book, I'm sitting in my office chair pressing buttons on a keyboard. That is objectively less painful, and I suppose the like the mistake I mentioned earlier about Calliope's eye color would have been more painful if it was traditionally published and I couldn't just change it myself as opposed to if it was traditionally published and then, well, that's it. It's going to be that way forever now. So I think that writing in general is less painful for indies than it is for the traditionally published. Our third piece of writing advice is from Margaret Atwood. She says, “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” That is also very true. As we mentioned earlier, you definitely don't have to worry about your rough draft being perfect. You just got to get it on the page and then I would also suggest you don't have to worry about your final draft being perfect. You have to worry about being good enough and get it to the point where it is good enough because perfection does not exist in this world. Our fourth piece of advice comes from Stephen King, who says, “Good fiction almost always starts with the story and progresses to theme. It almost never starts with the theme and progresses to story.” If you swap out the word story for conflict, I definitely agree with that because I know some writers tend to worry a great deal about what is my book going to be about when I think instead they should be worrying about what's the conflict in my book going to be and how is that conflict get resolved? Our fifth piece of radio advice is from Elmore Leonard. He says, “Cut all the parts people will skip.” I agree with that very much. The tricky part is learning what the parts that people skip are going to be. So overall you want your book to be not boring and you want to cut out as many of the boring parts as is physically possible to do so. Our six piece of advice is from Neil Gaiman, who says simply, “Finish things.” That is very good advice because I've noticed that a trouble many new and starting out face is actually finishing the books and I often say that when a new writer says, do I need to be working on, you know, my website or my mailing list or my social media or all that? I say no, the best thing to learn how to do is to finish a book, because that is a skill that will serve you well for the entirety of your writing career. If you can't finish the book, then there's no point in having the social media and the website and the mailing list and all that. So learning to finish things is the vital skill for any writer. Our seventh piece of writing advice is from Harper Lee, who said, “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” There is also good advice, especially considering she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which when it came out engendered a fair bit of unfair criticism for her. It is definitely important to have a thick hide when you are a writer. We've all seen the news reports of a writer who gets a bad review on Goodreads and flips out and melts down on Twitter. Or, in the worst cases, drives across the country to confront the reviewer in person. That is always a bad idea, do not do that. The trick to deal with any kind of criticism, especially online criticism, is to just not respond to it. The Internet criticism cycle tends to have a very short attention span, and so if you just wait it out, eventually some other bright shiny object will capture people's attention and that will be that. So the best way to cultivate a thick hide in the in the era of the Internet and Twitter and social media and all that is to learn to not to respond to things. Our eighth and final piece of advice comes from Kurt Vonnegut, who says, “No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” That ties in with our earlier talk about conflict and that is how you indeed see what your characters are made of and how you find the bones of your story. What is the conflict and how will the conflict test and put the characters to the trial and how will the characters grow, develop, and change as a result of the trial to which they have been subjected? If you want your characters to have a happy ending, they have to suffer for it first. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to pull together the quotes for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, many with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
The finest minds in video games and beyond contemplate unique input interfaces, classic adventure games, and a return to Violence Island. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Tim Rogers, and Brandon Sheffield. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman. Questions this week: With the recent closing of Rooster Teeth, how has machinima developed over the last 20 years? (03:19) Design a themed video game controller that ties into a particular brand but would also be fun to use. (10:12) What are the most credible depictions of gamers in media? (16:48) How do you convince a studio executive they have a bad idea before it's too late? (23:24) Insert Credit Quick Break: Labyrinth of Cinema (29:55) Irish Carl asks: Rank the corpus of adventure games from Sierra On-Line, Infocom, LucasArts, and Cyan (30:51) What are your favorite broad personality archetypes in video game supporting characters? (38:11) Which video game would benefit most from the “World of Warcraft Classic” treatment? (43:14) How's the future looking right now for emulation? (46:51) LIGHTNING ROUND: Violence Island (55:01) Recommendations and Outro (01:03:24) Discuss this episode in the Insert Credit Forums A SMALL SELECTION OF THINGS REFERENCED: Bob's Burgers Teddy Jimmy Pesto Jay Johnston, ‘Bob's Burgers' Actor, Is Arrested on Jan. 6 Charges Mr. Show with Bob and David SpongeBob SquarePants Mr. Peanutbutter Rooster Teeth Shut Down by Warner Bros. Discovery Rooster Teeth Halo series Machinima Red vs. Blue Minecraft Great Famine (Ireland) Dropkick Murphys Skibidi Toilet RWBY RTX #IDARB Krusty the Clown The Simpsons The Homer Steel Battalion Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel David Cage Wii Remote Katamari Damacy Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 SCUF Envision SCUF Reflex Max Payne series Groove Coaster series Resident Evil series TourBox Existenz (1999) DaVinci Resolve Speed Editor This is the actual face you make when playing Aerial Assault on the Game Gear Bluesky Airheads (1994) Aerial Assault Game Gear Donkey Kong Horizon: Zero Dawn Breaking Bad The Sopranos Mario Kart 64 Doom 3 Adam Sandler Shadow of the Colossus Uncut Gems (2019) Punch-Drunk Love (2002) Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed TimeSplitters Shaun of the Dead (2004) Simon Pegg Hot Fuzz (2007) The World's End (2013) Mission: Impossible Scotty Elon Musk Sierra Entertainment Infocom Lucasfilm Games Cyan Worlds Ron Gilbert Tim Schafer Zork A Mind Forever Voyaging Myst Riven: The Sequel to Myst Final Fantasy series Blade Runner Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Tokimeki Memorial Maniac Mansion Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!! Shadowgate The Space Bar Dennis Hopper Microsoft Office The Witness Barret Wallace Ooblets Musashi Archie Bunker Tifa Lockhart Aerith Gainsborough Judgment series Don Quixote World of Warcraft Classic Final Fantasy XIV Bejeweled 3 Candy Crush Saga Angry Birds Resident Evil 4 Devil May Cry Wii Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will utterly fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit Dolphin Emulator Steam Deck Red Viper The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Truxton Blazing Lazers Rampage Fort Condor Pepper Roni Servbot Domasi “Tommy” Tawodi Morgan Yu Recommendations: Brandon: Johnny's Selected Seeds instead of Baker Creek Seeds if you're a gardening type person who wants to avoid funding bad stuff, Gary Jagels, Zindrew Crunchy Garlic Chili Oil Tim: Xi'an Famous Foods Chili Oil & Crisps Jar Frank: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown This week's Insert Credit Show is brought to you by Labyrinth of Cinema, and patrons like you. Thank you. Subscribe: RSS, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and more!
The finest minds in video games and beyond contemplate unique input interfaces, classic adventure games, and a return to Violence Island. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Tim Rogers, and Brandon Sheffield. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman. Questions this week: With the recent closing of Rooster Teeth, how has machinima developed over the last 20 years? (03:19) Design a themed video game controller that ties into a particular brand but would also be fun to use. (10:12) What are the most credible depictions of gamers in media? (16:48) How do you convince a studio executive they have a bad idea before it's too late? (23:24) Insert Credit Quick Break: Labyrinth of Cinema (29:55) Irish Carl asks: Rank the corpus of adventure games from Sierra On-Line, Infocom, LucasArts, and Cyan (30:51) What are your favorite broad personality archetypes in video game supporting characters? (38:11) Which video game would benefit most from the “World of Warcraft Classic” treatment? (43:14) How's the future looking right now for emulation? (46:51) LIGHTNING ROUND: Violence Island (55:01) Recommendations and Outro (01:03:24) Discuss this episode in the Insert Credit Forums A SMALL SELECTION OF THINGS REFERENCED: Bob's Burgers Teddy Jimmy Pesto Jay Johnston, ‘Bob's Burgers' Actor, Is Arrested on Jan. 6 Charges Mr. Show with Bob and David SpongeBob SquarePants Mr. Peanutbutter Rooster Teeth Shut Down by Warner Bros. Discovery Rooster Teeth Halo series Machinima Red vs. Blue Minecraft Great Famine (Ireland) Dropkick Murphys Skibidi Toilet RWBY RTX #IDARB Krusty the Clown The Simpsons The Homer Steel Battalion Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel David Cage Wii Remote Katamari Damacy Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 SCUF Envision SCUF Reflex Max Payne series Groove Coaster series Resident Evil series TourBox Existenz (1999) DaVinci Resolve Speed Editor This is the actual face you make when playing Aerial Assault on the Game Gear Bluesky Airheads (1994) Aerial Assault Game Gear Donkey Kong Horizon: Zero Dawn Breaking Bad The Sopranos Mario Kart 64 Doom 3 Adam Sandler Shadow of the Colossus Uncut Gems (2019) Punch-Drunk Love (2002) Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed TimeSplitters Shaun of the Dead (2004) Simon Pegg Hot Fuzz (2007) The World's End (2013) Mission: Impossible Scotty Elon Musk Sierra Entertainment Infocom Lucasfilm Games Cyan Worlds Ron Gilbert Tim Schafer Zork A Mind Forever Voyaging Myst Riven: The Sequel to Myst Final Fantasy series Blade Runner Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Tokimeki Memorial Maniac Mansion Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!! Shadowgate The Space Bar Dennis Hopper Microsoft Office The Witness Barret Wallace Ooblets Musashi Archie Bunker Tifa Lockhart Aerith Gainsborough Judgment series Don Quixote World of Warcraft Classic Final Fantasy XIV Bejeweled 3 Candy Crush Saga Angry Birds Resident Evil 4 Devil May Cry Wii Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will utterly fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit Dolphin Emulator Steam Deck Red Viper The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Truxton Blazing Lazers Rampage Fort Condor Pepper Roni Servbot Domasi “Tommy” Tawodi Morgan Yu Recommendations: Brandon: Johnny's Selected Seeds instead of Baker Creek Seeds if you're a gardening type person who wants to avoid funding bad stuff, Gary Jagels, Zindrew Crunchy Garlic Chili Oil Tim: Xi'an Famous Foods Chili Oil & Crisps Jar Frank: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown This week's Insert Credit Show is brought to you by Labyrinth of Cinema, and patrons like you. Thank you. Subscribe: RSS, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and more!
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on rotoscoped games by hopping aboard The Last Express, the graphic adventure from Jordan Mechner and Smoking Car Productions of 1997 via publisher Broderbund. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: To Vienna (Tim) and past Epernay (Brett) Issues covered: our history with the game, playing the game on the iPad, the adventure game at the time, budget and sales, some history of the game, the edutainment industry, critical response, how many discs, cost of goods, the history of Epernay, generic settings vs the highly specific dates in the game, the overwhelm, jumping onto a moving train, photo research, pulling the brake, what to do with a dead body, trial and error, the various ways things can play out from just the first puzzle, rain in Europe in 1914, a digression into multiple speed CD-ROMs, getting into rotoscoping, a 3D modeled train with rotoscoped characters on top, chasing after a character in the hall, walk-boxes with Z values, the screen door effect, a linear game in space vs an open-ended game in time, synchronicity, the sense of a train trip, prioritizing animation vs input, mechanics-forward vs simulation-forward, what players care about and what they see. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Jordan Mechner, Broderbund, GoldenEye 007, Diablo, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Fallout, Curse of Monkey Island, Riven, MYST, Jonathan Ackley, Larry Ahern, Quake, SW: Jedi Knight: DF2, Outlaws, LucasArts, Turok, Shadow Warrior, Hexen II, Duke Nuke'em, Postal, Age of Empires, Final Fantasy VII, Wing Commander: Prophecy, Xwing vs TIE Fighter, Colony Wars, Interstate '76, Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, OddWorld, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Bethesda Game Studios, Bill Tiller, Day of the Tentacle, Sierra, Phantasmagoria, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, Zoetrope Studios, Francis Ford Coppola, Smoking Car Productions, Tomi Pierce, Doug Carlston, Chris Remo, The Learning Company, Another World, Prince of Persia, Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy VII, PlayStation, Sony, Daron Stinnett, Scream (series), Grim Fandango, Quadrilateral Cowboy, Blendo Games, Thirty Flights of Loving, Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, Elle, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Skyrim, Ron Gilbert, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, Deadline, Infocom, Zork, Ben Sarason, Arkham Asylum, Red Dead Redemption (series), RockStar, Tomb Raider (series), Brandon Fernandez, Core Design, Mario (series), Uncharted (series), Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: Finish the game (?)/ Explore further Errata and Extra: The lead animator on CMI was Mark Overney (!), and it was my mistake, I was thinking it had been Charlie Ramos Blendo Games is Brendon Chung Paul Verhoeven is Dutch, and he did direct Basic Instinct Links: The Last Express: Revisiting An Unsung Classic Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @devgameclub Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com
Few developers can boast careers spanning more than 4 decades, but today's guest, William Volk has developed games for virtually every platform released, covering every genre, including strategy, RPG, adventures, educational titles, puzzle games, and more. Sit back and enjoy the insights, memories, and experience of a true legend of the industry! Recorded October 2023 Get us on your mobile device: Android: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlb2dhbWVuZXdzcm9vbXRpbWVtYWNoaW5lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz iOS: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/video-game-newsroom-time-machine And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/VGNRTM Send comments on twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/vgnrtm Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Links: https://www.anagramquest.com/ https://www.mobygames.com/person/3264/william-d-volk/ He Put in a Bar, in the Back of His Car - https://youtu.be/pEQ_VLo4pBY?si=mw5p8i7-dlDo5-Zp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_Hill https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/24/jobs/the-computer-telecommuters-say-theres-no-workplace-like-home.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky https://www.mobygames.com/game/7390/ports-of-call/ https://www.mobygames.com/company/3165/aegis-interactive-entertainment/ https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6195-mac-challenger Infinite Loop - https://youtu.be/clxpPQbj234?si=aN1f215CSDnRmkVj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D https://www.mobygames.com/game/9222/the-manhole/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard https://www.mobygames.com/game/1219/return-to-zork/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/44036/cosmic-osmo/ https://www.mobygames.com/company/434/cyan-worlds-inc/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/39698/rodneys-funscreen/ https://youtu.be/yZbJL5Egyzs?si=abJ5FJ_CS9O-wZju https://www.mobygames.com/company/42078/lightspan-inc/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtime_Associates https://kidscreen.com/2001/10/01/lightspan-20011001/ https://psxdatacenter.com/games/U/L/LSP-010360.html https://www.gamezone.com/news/wayans_brothers_the_dozens_announced_at_e3/ https://www.pgconnects.com/hong-kong/speakers/william-volk/ https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/william-volk-veteran-game-developer-mobile-pioneer https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trump-dump/id1070999857 https://www.apple.com/de/tv-pr/originals/extrapolations/ https://www.theclimatetrail.com/ https://www.calstate.edu/attend/student-services/Pages/esports.aspx https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Oscar-Clark/dp/1138428302 https://www.mobygames.com/game/52384/controller/ https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/why-johnny-can-t-ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act Copyright Karl Kuras
After nearly two years, host Drew Cook returns solo! This reboot episode lays out a framework for future discussions of Infocom's Trinity and Nacon's Vampire: The Masquerade--Swansong. The Craft of Adventure : Graham Nelson Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong on Steam (steampowered.com) Jimmy Maher's Trinity posts Gold Machine - Games as text, text as games (golmac.org) top expert – i am my own ghost Repeat the Ending IFDB page
We're looking at the history of Infocom, and its most successful title, Zork. Our story begins with the development of Zork, and talks about how the gaming community contributed to its development. It continues with the formation of Infocom, talks about its acquisition by Activision, and looks at how the relationship between the two evolved. We'll wrap up with a brief look at the Zork series throughout time. Join us for the next great text adventure on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.
IBM introduces the PCJr Coleco ships the Adam Infocom disses graphics These stories and many more on this episode of the VGNRTM This episode we will look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game industry in November 1993. As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover dates, and those are of course always a bit behind the actual events. Alex Smith of They Create Worlds is our cohost. Check out his podcast here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/ and order his book here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/book Get us on your mobile device: Android: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlb2dhbWVuZXdzcm9vbXRpbWVtYWNoaW5lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz iOS: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/video-game-newsroom-time-machine And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/VGNRTM Send comments on Mastodon @videogamenewsroomtimemachine@oldbytes.space Or twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/vgnrtm Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Links: 7 Minutes in Heaven: Beach Head Video Version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/96037276 https://www.mobygames.com/game/19932/beach-head/ Corrections: October 1983 Ep - https://www.patreon.com/posts/october-1983-94392565 Ethan's fine site The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ Chronicles Revisited Podcast 14 — Touch the Screen! Touch the Screen! https://www.smoliva.blog/post/chronicles-revisited-podcast-014/ The Computer Chronicles 40th Anniversary with S.M. Oliva https://www.patreon.com/posts/computer-40th-s-95453094 https://www.cashbox-magazine.com/about https://www.mobygames.com/game/11121/chiller/ 1973 Video Games take center stage at MOA show https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_18/page/51/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_21/page/47/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_19/page/55/mode/1up Atari asks ops to steer clear of copycats https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_19/page/61/mode/1up German arcade owners seeth https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_21/page/48/mode/1up Heathkit offers budget priced calculator kit https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1973/Poptronics-1973-11.pdf pg. 89 Electronic watches on the rise https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1973/Poptronics-1973-11.pdf pg. 5 Video Phone shown at CeBit https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1973/Poptronics-1973-11.pdf pg. 19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzdCKBZP4Jo 1983-11 Williams loses $6 million in fourth quarter Games People, Nov. 19, 1983, pg. 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecVcA3l6v3E Atari is the (coinop) come-back kid RePlay Nov. 1983, pg. 123 Battle of the Cons Replay, Nov. 1983, pg. 15 Tokyo Amusement Machine Show side steps laser craze Replay Nov. 1983, pg. 23 Games People Nov. 28, 1983, pg. 9 Replay Nov. 1983, pg. 86 Monitor maker TSK cuts credit Games People, Nov. 19, 1983, pg. 1 Activision to lay off a quarter of its workforce https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/12/business/activision-sets-layoffs-for-90.html Odyssey2 is no more https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-8/page/120/mode/1up?view=theater Starpath bows out https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-8/page/117/mode/1up?view=theater Fox drops out of games https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/10/business/fox-quitting-video-games.html Milton Bradley expects losses https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/15/business/milton-bradley-expects-deficit.html Vectrex debuts 3D Imager https://archive.org/details/logical_gamer_novdec83/page/5/mode/2up Spectravideo's Compumate gets reviewed Personal Computer News, Nov. 23, 1983 pg. 38 Amiga to release computer/game combo machine https://archive.org/details/Electronic_Fun_with_Computer_Games_Vol_02_No_01_1983-11_Fun_Games_Publishing_US/page/n105/mode/2up Berlin Consumer Trade Show sees micros and video games galore http://www.atarimuseum.de/gamesum.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_MZ https://www.videospielgeschichten.de/die-fans-fragen-klaus-ollmann-antwortet/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_Videopac%2B_G7400 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFA_(Messe)#1970%E2%80%931990 http://www.kultmags.com/mags.php?folder=Q1BVLzE5ODM= https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp7z5j6N5lhyqNEEtxz1bnkhjCTbJ_rqS&si=GVvJ9SIMYkaOO7av TI stock shoots up https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/01/business/a-seesaw-day-for-computers.html IBM Introduces the PC Jr https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/02/business/the-debut-of-ibm-s-junior.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/02/business/ibm-s-speedy-redirection.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/06/business/week-in-business-japan-s-car-makers-are-sent-a-message.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr Small Idaho company to supply PCJr keyboard https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/26/business/advanced-input-s-ibm-coup.html Atari and Coleco hike prices https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/10/business/atari-coleco-raise-computer-prices.html Personal Computer News Nov. 9, 1983, pg. 6 https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/12/business/commodore-corp-reports-earnings-for-qtr-to-sept-30.html?searchResultPosition=1 Atari backs away from home computers https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-8/page/119/mode/1up?view=theater Coleco lowers Adam shipment targets Toy & Hobby World November 1984, pg. S1 https://archive.org/details/Electronic_Fun_with_Computer_Games_Vol_02_No_01_1983-11_Fun_Games_Publishing_US/page/n11/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/logical_gamer_novdec83/page/5/mode/2up JCPenney and KMart pass on Adam https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/15/business/penney-s-holiday-line-omits-adam-computer.html Adam shipments lower than expected https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/24/business/dow-declines-0.20-in-heavy-trading.html Adam review https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/29/science/personal-computers-the-new-adam-arrives-for-a-test.html Cabbage Patch Doll Mania ensues https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/29/us/adoptable-dolls-aren-t-having-any-trouble-finding-homes.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_Patch_Kids https://youtu.be/qR0aVHlXpvM?si=PoN1JgbZkmkA39Hi Aquarius discounted https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1983/11/27/issue.html Commodore teases TED https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1983-11-24/mode/1up?view=theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Plus/4 Comdex to be swamped by PC clones https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/80s/Byte-1983-11.pdf pg. 7 Tandy to enter PC compatible market https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/30/business/tandy-computer-s-hard-test.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000 HP moves to reduce OS options Personal Computer News, Nov. 2, 1983 pg. 3 Reflex launches Hercules Personal Computer News, Nov. 2, 1983 pg. 3 Apple outlook flat https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/08/business/apple-sees-flat-profit-outlook.html Apple funds IBM clone adapter Personal Computer News, Nov. 23, 1983 pg. 2, 5 Personal Computer News, Nov. 30, 1983, pg. 4 Microsoft Debuts Windows https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/13/business/wekk-in-business-more-good-news-about-inflation.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/11/business/microsoft-displays-window-program.html?searchResultPosition=1 Personal Computer News, Nov. 30, 1983, pg. 4, 6 Lightpens, the interface choice of the future https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n33/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/commodore-user-magazine-02/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1983-11-compute-magazine/page/n170/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Info-64_Issue_2_Winter_83-84_1983_Cybertech_US/page/n13/mode/2up Newbrain to return from the dead Personal Computer News, Nov. 2, 1983 pg. 3 Electron deliveries fall short Personal Computer News, Nov. 2, 1983 pg. 2 Personal Computer News, Nov. 30, 1983, pg. 2 Acorn second processor sticker shock Personal Computer News, Nov. 30, 1983, pg. 2 Dynasty Computer corp wants to sell you a computer in your home https://www.retromags.com/files/file/5858-electronic-games-hotline-volume-2-no-7-november-6-1983/ pg. 2 http://www.atariprotos.com/othersystems/sorcerer/hardware/smartalec.htm Broderbund announces partnership with TI https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-8/page/119/mode/1up?view=theater Toy and Hobby World Nov. 1984, pg. S12 https://www.retromags.com/files/file/5858-electronic-games-hotline-volume-2-no-7-november-6-1983/ pg. 8 https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n49/mode/2up Infocom disses graphics https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n23/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n29/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/family-computing-03/page/n15/mode/2up EA brings album cover aesthetics to game software packaging https://archive.org/details/family-computing-03/page/n15/mode/2up Quicksilva arrives in the US https://archive.org/details/1983-11-computegazette/page/n133/mode/2up Mirror Group jumps into software https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1983-11-17/mode/1up?view=theater Computer magazines boom https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/09/business/boom-in-computer-magazines.html Hobby Computer magazine debuts http://www.kultmags.com/mags.php?folder=SGFwcHkgQ29tcHV0ZXIvMTk4Mw== Info64 debuts https://archive.org/details/Info-64_Issue_2_Winter_83-84_1983_Cybertech_US GameLine adds stock info and email https://www.retromags.com/files/file/5858-electronic-games-hotline-volume-2-no-7-november-6-1983/ pg. 2 Time exits Teletext https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/22/business/time-inc-drops-teletext-experiment.html Online education may be the future https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/20/us/from-1500-miles-professor-teaches-his-class-by-computer.html Bond plays games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUc4GkMN1qs RePlay Nov. 1983, pg. 178 https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-8/page/117/mode/1up?view=theater Atari 5200 ad mentioned in Videogaming and computergaming illustrated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS-pingC-xY https://archive.org/details/Videogaming_and_Computer_Gaming_Illustrated_1983-11_Ion_International_US/page/n3/mode/1up https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/09/business/advertising-changes-by-atari-and-ibm.html Japan agrees to loosen restrictions on the Yen https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/13/business/wekk-in-business-more-good-news-about-inflation.html New study finds games designed to be addictive Games People, Nov. 19, 1983, pg. 1 https://archive.org/details/mindatplaypsycho0000loft/page/n9/mode/2up Recommended Links: The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ Gaming Alexandria: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/ They Create Worlds: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/ Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ The Arcade Blogger: https://arcadeblogger.com/ Retro Asylum: http://retroasylum.com/category/all-posts/ Retro Game Squad: http://retrogamesquad.libsyn.com/ Playthrough Podcast: https://playthroughpod.com/ Retromags.com: https://www.retromags.com/ Games That Weren't - https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/ Sound Effects by Ethan Johnson of History of How We Play. Copyright Karl Kuras
Season 5 Episode 25 Episode 161 News: Emulation / hacks / translations / homebrew games Infocom's ingenious code-porting tools for Zork and other games have been found Cozy PS2 title Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 has received a fan translation A collection of shaders to emulate the display of an NTSC signal through a CRT TV Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits Bushido Retsuden (Sam Sho RPG translation patch) Other odd or interesting things 'Atari 50' Is Getting More Games Via Free Updates, 12 Dropping Next Week Game Club Discussion: Double Dribble NBA Action ‘94 New Game Club Games: Chrono Trigger Dr. Mario 64 Game Club Link Tree Retro Game Club Discord server Bumpers: Raftronaut , Inverse Phase Threads, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram managed by: Zach Email us: email@retrogameclub.net ===================================== #retro #retrogames #retrogaming #videogames #classiccomputing #Infocom #Zork #PlayStation #RPGs #Atari #Atari50 #Basketball #DoubleDribble #NES #NBA #NBAAction94 #Genesis
Dragon's Lair takes arcades by storm, Commodore rules the computer roost & Video game makers pivot to micros These stories and many more on this episode of the VGNRTM This episode we will look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game industry in August 1983. As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover dates, and those are of course always a bit behind the actual events. Alex Smith of They Create Worlds is our cohost. Check out his podcast here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/ and order his book here: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/book Get us on your mobile device: Android: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlb2dhbWVuZXdzcm9vbXRpbWVtYWNoaW5lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz iOS: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/video-game-newsroom-time-machine And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/VGNRTM Send comments on Mastodon @videogamenewsroomtimemachine@oldbytes.space Or twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/vgnrtm Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Links: 7 Minutes in Heaven: Decathlon Video Version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/7-minutes-in-89553431 https://www.mobygames.com/game/11537/the-activision-decathlon/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcHeXlhxeX4 Corrections: July 1983 Ep - https://www.patreon.com/posts/july-1983-87998862 Ethan's fine site The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ https://youtu.be/A-6AKe2pvsQ?si=Y86cYPldukmG2V-H The Video Game Crash 40th Anniversary - Part 1: Atari https://www.patreon.com/posts/video-game-crash-75643983 1973 Atari moves into new facilities https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_5/page/n49/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_7/page/47/mode/1up Atari announces new cabinet for Space Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race_(video_game) https://www.old-computers.com/museum/software_detail.asp?id=464 Are pongs slowing down? https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_7/page/48/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_8/page/47/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_8/page/48/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/cashbox35unse_8/page/47/mode/1up 1983 Dragon's Lair gives arcades hope https://www.newspapers.com/article/santa-cruz-sentinel-laserdisc-games-prof/85528743/ https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-charlotte-observer-dragons-lair-in/86477004/ https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/02/arts/hollywood-playing-harder-at-the-video-game.html Replay August 1983 pg. 10 Replay August 1983, pg. 54 Sega sells manufacturing to Bally https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/28/business/barry-diller-s-latest-starring-role.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/30/business/advertisingn-r-kleinfield-computers-take-aim-at-schools.html Bally To Buy Sega's U.S. Coin-Op Game Assets The Associated Press, August 25, 1983, Thursday, AM cycle PR Newswire, August 25, 1983, Thursday PR Newswire, August 11, 1983, Thursday Gregory Fischbach Part 2 - Acclaim https://www.patreon.com/posts/47720122 Coinop returns to its roots Games People August 6, 1983 pg. 1 Off duty cops patrolling arcades Replay August 1983, pg. 81 Mattel lays off 400 in Electronics https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/05/business/mattel-to-lay-off-400-in-electronics-division.html Don Daglow Part 1 - PDP - Mattel - Intellivision - EA https://www.patreon.com/posts/38445119 Amiga buys US Games titles https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-5/page/68/mode/1up http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/powerarcade/powerarcade.htm Telesys anounces budget games https://archive.org/details/logical_gamer_aug83/page/5/mode/1up https://www.mobygames.com/company/4847/telesys/ Mythicon introduces budget 2600 line https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-5/page/72/mode/1up?view=theater https://www.mobygames.com/company/4823/mythicon-inc/ Gammation to support Supercharger https://archive.org/details/logical_gamer_aug83/page/5/mode/1up https://www.mobygames.com/company/11203/gammation/ Game cancellations mount https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-5/page/68/mode/1up Milton Bradley sues Atari over voice unit cancellation Electronic Games Hotline August 28, 1983 pg. 1 Suncom brings physical fitness to the VCS Toy and Hobby World July/August 1983 S31 https://picclick.fr/RARE-AEROBICS-JOYSTICK-exercise-bike-385448488962.html http://www.atarihq.com/museum/2678/hardware/aerobics.html Atari moves to TSX With Multiuser Operating System; Atari Resolves PRogrammer/System Dilemma, Computerworld, August 15, 1983 Bring on the celeb endorsements Toy and Hobby World July/August 1983 S11 C64 hits $199 Playthings August 1983 Commodore reigns supreme in the home computer wars... for now https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/01/business/two-standouts-in-electronics.html TI changes the color of the 994A Toy and Hobby World July/August 1983 S7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A 99/2 is dead... https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-08_OCR/page/n9/mode/1up https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=267 https://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=268&st=1 Adam price announcements deceptive https://archive.org/details/computer-entertainer-2-5/page/68/mode/1up Toy and Hobby World July/August 1983 S12 Electronic Games Hotline August 14, 1983 pg. 1 Adam prototypes are no shows https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/01/business/coleco-strong-in-marketing.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam Romox to bring software teledelivery to MSX Software Teledelivery is planned, The Japan Economic Journal, August 2, 1983 MSX licensing fees come under fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX#Manufacturers https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews023-17Aug1983/page/n5/mode/1up JVC brings laser disc games to MSX https://www.msx.org/wiki/Victor_HC-7 JVC To Produce Personal Computer, Copyright 1983 Jiji Press Ltd.Jiji Press Ticker Service AUGUST 31, 1983, WEDNESDAY https://youtu.be/ShDiFJFoXSg?si=UY6QM_kM_i5JABlX Japan moves to protect against software rentals Consent of copyright holders should be won for renting, The Japan Economic Journal, August 2, 1983 Timex reveals TS2000 details https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews021-03Aug1983/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews025-31Aug1983/page/n6/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews023-17Aug1983/page/n36/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews025-31Aug1983/page/n43/mode/1up Osborne cuts jobs, closes factory https://vgpavilion.com/mags/1983/08/28egh/pages/19830828egh.pdf IBM announces plans to sell Concurrent CPM https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-08_OCR/page/n9/mode/1up Japanese version of CP/M-86 is introduced, The Japan Economic Journal, August 2, 1983 Creative Computing begins publishing price list Commodore sues former employees and Atari over VCS add-on https://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/bagnall_vcs_keyboard.pdf Toy and Hobby World July/August 1983 S7 Commodore announces 70 new software packages https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-08_OCR/page/n9/mode/1up Infocom unleashes Z Machine Electronic Games Hotline August 14, 1983 pg. 2 Activision lands on home computers Electronic Games Hotline August 14, 1983 pg. 7 Epyx announces outside studio Toy and Hobby World July/August 1983 S12 Spectrum Games renamed Ocean https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews022-10Aug1983/page/n12/mode/1up Sony teams up with Data East Sony ties up with Data East in MSX software development, The Japan Economic Journal, August 2, 1983 Stellar 7 debuts https://vgpavilion.com/mags/1983/08/28egh/pages/19830828egh.pdf pg. 7 Park Brothers goes big on ads https://vgpavilion.com/mags/1983/08/28egh/pages/19830828egh.pdf pg. 8 Jon Shirley becomes Microsoft prez https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-08_OCR/page/n9/mode/1up Games Network hits the stock market https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/24/business/briefs-119250.html?searchResultPosition=1 https://archive.org/details/logical_gamer_aug83/page/6/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews025-31Aug1983/page/n8/mode/1up Softyme tests online distribution https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-08_OCR/page/n9/mode/1up BBS's bring out the Pirates Gilded youth, jaded youth , Forbes, August 15, 1983 The "On-Line" Society, Computerworld, August 17, 1983 Microcom licenses MNP https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-08_OCR/page/n9/mode/1up Softwareland wants standardized UPCs https://vgpavilion.com/mags/1983/08/28egh/pages/19830828egh.pdf pg. 4 https://books.google.de/books?id=baj-kGvs1L0C&pg=RA1-PA76&lpg=RA1-PA76&dq=%22softwareland%22+retail+store+taylor+coleman&source=bl&ots=QngUR-drNu&sig=ACfU3U1Iz9L7kenfh8SwIYdbRq9IGafJgw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiwurn2iaWBAxUd_rsIHXI1CaQQ6AF6BAgLEAM#v=onepage&q=%22softwareland%22%20retail%20store%20taylor%20coleman&f=false UK leads in computer adoption Commodore News Vol1 Num3 1983 Gamer begins to enter the vernacular https://vgpavilion.com/mags/1983/08/28egh/pages/19830828egh.pdf pg. 2 Recommended Links: The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ Gaming Alexandria: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/ They Create Worlds: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/ Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ The Arcade Blogger: https://arcadeblogger.com/ Retro Asylum: http://retroasylum.com/category/all-posts/ Retro Game Squad: http://retrogamesquad.libsyn.com/ Playthrough Podcast: https://playthroughpod.com/ Retromags.com: https://www.retromags.com/ Games That Weren't - https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/ Sound Effects by Ethan Johnson of History of How We Play. Copyright Karl Kuras
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on 1991's Eye of the Beholder. We talk quite a bit about adaptation and the things that are not entirely.... fun... about D&D. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Up to level 10 or 11 Issues covered: Discord Game Club, finding the dwarves, the injured dwarf, information as a reward, inconsistent locks, messages you can only read if you have a dwarf, using up keys and not knowing when you should use them, communities below ground, "Xanathar: he's kind of a big deal," history in the built environment, the sewer map, "feelies," wishing the computer would do the rules for us... or not?, translation of D&D, the problems of adaptation, diving into the movie, respawning hellhounds and imagining hell, what's a xorn?, puzzle opacity, good puzzles, holdover concepts that stick around, level connectivity, the pleasures of linking up segments of map, removing useful friction, games where there's not a lot of high hights nor low lows, podcast games, having to learn the world and feeling the mastery, great connections in Dark Souls, landmarking and not wanting a map. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: D&D, Discord Game Club, Artimage, Mark Garcia, BioStats, Final Fantasy IX, Kotaku, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Temple of Elemental Evil, Infocom, Zork (series), Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Republic Commando, Baldur's Gate (series), Diablo, Chris Pine, Ultima Underworld, Richard Garriott, System Shock, King's Quest, Assassin's Creed, World of Warcraft, Dark Souls, Ico, Dragon/Dungeon magazines, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers. Next time: Finish the game! Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @devgameclub Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com
Infocom's classic interactive fiction game that I did not completely understand until I was older and had read the book. Don't Panic! YouTube: https://youtu.be/w4TTCpUQCIg Support […]
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series on 1991's Eye of the Beholder, from Westwood Studios and published by Strategic Simulations Inc. We set the game in its time before exploring its primary mechanics and the feel of being in this world. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: First level or two Issues covered: knowing who the evil is, tactical top down Gold Box, the opening cutscene, being amazed at how much they get into the Game Boy version of a Metroid game, lots of movie tie-ins, a wide variety of machines, lack of automap, being everything one wanted for a Forgotten Realms nerd, one of the ten games, semi real-time, living inside the depths of Waterdeep, a style of play which continues today, having to rest immediately, gaining information through audio, uncovering the whole map vs racing towards the goal, tournament play, losing is fun, the only way out is through, annotating a later map, interacting with the play space, accessibility and the mouse, contextualization and abstraction in game design, having to throw weapons in the world, how cool the audio is, using items to locate yourself, creating a party, crunchy spells, shout-outs to upcoming work, difficulty in the bosses in Metroid games then and now, games influencing games, getting the green light, justifying the game via the sweet spot of trends, why not just make this a Star Wars game, how green lighting changes with bigger franchises, games that changed our perspectives. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Gold Box games, Westwood Studios, Dune 2, A Link to the Past, Super Castlevania IV, SNES, Mega Man 4, Final Fantasy IV, Metroid II: Return of Samus (and Metroid series), Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega Genesis, Battletoads, Rare, Stamper Bros, Civilization, Another World, Space Quest IV, Monkey Island 2, Wing Commander 2, Hudson Hawk, Terminator 2, American Gladiators, Hunt for Red October, The Godfather, Amiga, PC-98, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple ][, Spectrum ZX, Amstrad, Questron, Disney, Legend of Kyrandia, Command and Conquer (series), Electronic Arts, Earth and Beyond, Louis Castle, Brett Sperry, Strategic Simulations Incorporated, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Pool of Radiance, The Ruins of Myth Drannor, Ultima (series), Wizardry (series), A Bard's Tale (series), Ultima Underworld, Dungeon Master, Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest (series), Diablo, Wasteland, Temple of Elemental Evil, Legend of Grimrock, Etrian Odyssey (series), The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, The Tomb of Horrors, Infocom, Ocarina of Time, Rogue, Deluxe Paint, Baldur's Gate, Jarkko Sivula, Single Malt Apocalypse, Sierra, LucasArts, Wierd Tales, Amazing Stories, Tintin, Pippin Barr, David Wolinsky, Game Thing, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, Walker, Dark Souls, Nintendo, Skyrim, Breath of the Wild, Johnny Pockets, Mad Max, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Republic Commando, Sam and Max: Freelance Police, Bounty Hunter, RTX Red Rock, Gladius, PlayStation, Tomb Raider (series), Halo: Infinite, Quake, MYST, Lode Runner, Sabotage, Robotron 2084, Joust, Dark Forces, WoW Classic, Everquest, MUD, Ultima Online, Meridian 59, Adventure, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: more Eye of the Beholder! Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com
This episode of The Week in Green Software, features guest Stani Borisová; Expert Life Cycle Management at IVL and former researcher at RISE Sweden. Host Chris quizzes her on her expertise in data center LCA and they discuss interesting news tidbits to share from a global tour of Singapore, Norway, Germany, and America. They discuss how data centers might be unnecessarily using too much heat to cool themselves down, how Germany's Energy Efficiency Act has perhaps not gone far enough and how Norway's investment into oil and gas affects renewable energy resources for data centers. Finally we have some fantastic opportunities for you to be part of the Green Software Foundation!
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we take a short break from our series on Metroid Prime to catch up on the mail bag. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Issues covered: GoldenEye, Republic Commando influences, tracking data in games, informing your decisions, figuring out what to do with your data, Arecibo radio telescope, feeling like we're in the game, a favorite multiplayer mode, socially playing GoldenEye, choosing weapons for Dead Space, keeping your enemies closer in Dead Space for tension, what's with all the remakes, why you might do a remake, not enjoying older media, training your new generation of creators, likening GoldenEye 007 to a heist, quicktime events, systemic approaches to spectacle, players knowing they are playing a boring game, feedback through animation, "breaking the game," acceptable frame rates, not feeling the 60Hz, picking a goal and sticking with it, taking a village to fix frame rate, finding the frame rate that makes sense for your game, new funding models, GamePass and 150 million monthly active users, hidden objectives in games, the fun of discovering an objective, cost accessibility and game sales. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: GoldenEye 007, gonsalet, DOOM (1993), Quake, MDK, Outlaws, Nintendo 64, Nintendo Switch, Republic Commando, Halo, Rainbox Six: Rogue Spear, SWAT 4, Irrational Games, Ken Levine, Freedom Fighters, IO Interactive, Star Wars, Unreal, Alex Epton, Deus Ex, The Walking Dead, The Art of Live Ops, Maple Story, World of Warcraft, Steve Meretzky, Infocom, Sam Bates, Sean Bean, Contact, Assassin's Creed, Brett Baptist, Blarg42, Dead Space, Capcom, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, System Shock, Callisto Protocol, Ian Milham, Shadow of the Colossus, Medi-evil, Link's Awakening, Call of Duty, Daron Stinnett, Electronic Arts, Michael, Arkham Asylum, God of War, Dark Souls, From Russia With Love, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Warzone, Fortnite, Rare Studios, Grant Kirkhope, mysterydip, Tears of the Kingdom, Skyrim, Eric Johnston, Starfighter, Breath of the Wild, Microsoft, Activision/Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, Artimage, Jedi Starfighter, TimeSplitters 2, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: Back to Metroid Prime Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com
The Code Grenade Episode: A Lost Summer, A Grey Machine, Zork II, A 13 Year Old Engineer, Modules and Rooms and Graph Paper, The Grenade That Finished Me, A Testimony to Long-Lost Data. When I was very young, I tried to make an Infocom-level Adventure Game. It did not go very well at all.
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If you are going to the big InfoComm pro AV trade show, coming up very soon in Orlando, you'll undoubtedly see a very busy BrightSign stand, and a crowd around CEO Jeff Hastings. I've spoken with Hastings a couple of times now for this podcast, but it had been a while ... and I wanted to catch up and get his perspective on the state of the industry, as well as find out what's new with his company and its little purple boxes. The Silicon Valley company is pretty much its own category in terms of media players - as I hear and read about solutions providers weighing decisions on whether to use PCs, smart displays, set-top boxes ... or Brightsign boxes. The company now ships about 1,200 units a day - based on its reputation for having a range of durable, reliable devices that hit different price points and meet needs from simple to sophisticated and powerful. In this chat, we get into the state of the digital signage market (It's growing across segments, but not at 2022's pace), how the characteristics of end-user buyers has changed, and the role of AI in BrightSign's business, and more broadly, for the industry. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Mr. Hastings, good to chat once again. We've done a couple of podcasts, but you're a big shooter in this industry. I need to talk to you regularly. Jeff Hastings: I don't know if you can call me a big shooter, but I'm definitely hooked on the world and live it seven days a week, but it's good to check in with you, Dave. I'm just sucking up. I'm not sure why, but I am. So where is the industry these days? I'm just curious because when I talk to people, they will uniformly say everything is awesome. While you can say that too, you're different in that you're supplying stuff to all kinds of different companies, so maybe you get a better sense of what's really happening out there. Jeff Hastings: Yeah, I think one of the things that we do that's a little bit different is that BrightSign is really a horizontal platform, as I call it, so we work in pretty much every vertical market that has a display that's used. So we see from the broad market what's going on. Last year was a great year of growth for us with over 20% growth. This year has honestly started off to be a little bit slow, and I think most people are reporting that. It's definitely been a little bit slow at the start of the year. I think a lot of things are going on with the interest rates and people being a little bit cautious about the recession, but overall, the industry is still growing. It's not growing as fast as I think most people predicted after last year. But it's a very solid market. We see more and more what people call digital transformations, I'm not a super fan of that word, but essentially it means people are putting in more digital signage and retail continues to be a great segment. People investing in retail to create better experiences after the whole pandemic of people wanting to get back out and people see the investment in that kind of real-world experience paying off. Yeah, I guess you could call it phygital. Another term that I would be happy if I never saw again. Why do you think retail's growing? Is it just simply that they understand the whole experiential thing and that you have to do more in a store? Jeff Hastings: I think a few points. First, the whole idea that we're going to buy everything online and just stay in our house, I think most people realize, yeah, there's a lot of things that work that way, and I can just have it delivered. But the reality is we are social animals. We want to interact with people, and just being stuck in our house is not what we like to do, and I think most people are now seeing that with the results of the pandemic that, being stuck in your house is we're not built for that. It's almost akin to being in jail. A lot of people comment on that. So getting out is important for us as humans and having that social experiment and getting out and shopping and actually being in retail, part of it is actually physically buying the goods, but a lot of it is social. People just wanna be out in the environment. So now that you take that as a fact that people wanna be out in the environment, if you create a place where it's exciting to be in, and there are other people that are there, guess what? More people's gonna come to your establishment. So we really believe that's the fundamental basis of why people are investing in retail. That's the main reason. If you look at a secondary reason. A lot of the big retailers, their businesses boomed. During the pandemic, a lot of people talked about how online boomed, but actually, a lot of the bigger retailers boomed and they got a lot of new customers. I think you look at folks like Walmart, lots of people come into the stores, but during the pandemic, they had a dramatic increase of people coming into their stores. As we start going back to the normal world, folks like Walmart wanna make sure that they keep those people coming to their stores. Back during the pandemic, maybe they were the only stores that were able to be open so they got new customers, and now what they wanna do is create an environment where they keep those new customers. So I think there's a lot of that going on of stepping up their game. Before it was just about price. “Okay, we'll just go there cuz it's got the best price.” Now people are like, “Hey, I wanna go there and I wanna enjoy my experience.” So that is playing into this investment in digital science and kind of digital experiences in retail. Are you getting a sense from all the companies that work with you, that they're starting to open up new verticals? I've wondered when healthcare was finally gonna start happening. Jeff Hastings: Oh all the verticals are growing. I don't know of any verticals that are not growing right now. They're all growing and some of them are growing faster. I think ironically, which I wouldn't have predicted, the corporate sector is actually growing very rapidly right now. I think people are coming back to the office, maybe not a hundred percent, but they are investing in it the same way that retail is investing in the experience. People are realizing that an office is no longer a place where they have to come work, much like in retail, where you have to go there to buy a product, but you want to get people in that environment for the social aspect of it and the collaboration aspect and if you create a nicer environment, more people come to work. So there's a lot of investment in that going on also. And how does that manifest itself, like what are they doing? Big-ass video walls in the lobby or is it more kind of the operational side of it? Jeff Hastings: It's literally all aspects of it. One, they create an impressive environment. So lots of LEDs, and lots of video walls going into these places to create a more exciting environment versus just a bunch of cubes. Secondly, more communications which are just kind of standard displays, ways of communicating with employees and more, I don't like the word infotainment, but infotainment, where they've got interesting things, are displayed to communicate with employees, but it's also a bit fun. These are things of just celebrating employees. We see a lot of that going on and kind of recognize the employees' communication about what's going on in the company. This whole idea of an intranet I think most people realize that, guess what, when they have an intranet, no one actually goes to that website. So that was a great experiment. I think a lot of money on intranet sites which ended up being a massive failure, so the ability to communicate with employees is very important, and what they're finding is, guess what, if there's a display up there, and it's interesting, people will look at it and now you're getting across a message, and that could be whether it's a benefits program or you name it, you're able to communicate with employees and engage with them in a way, especially with the younger crowd, that the younger crowd doesn't want something kinda forced on them. They want to be able to kinda opt into it and the displays actually allow them to kind of opt-in in this passive fashion. Has the buyer profile changed at all? We were chatting at some trade show or other, and you were saying how your guys are spending a lot more time talking to IT people than perhaps they did in the past. Jeff Hastings: It's very much changed. I would say when I look back 10 years ago, maybe 10% of the deals that we did involved the IT group. I would say today, any large deal, the IT group is involved with, and this has to do with understanding how they're gonna maintain them because it's now moved from whoever was wanting to “buy” the digital signage, whether it's the marketing group or the HR group, that they're quickly realizing that the IT group is gonna own these things in terms of making sure that they're working every day, not putting the content on them. So the IT group is now very much involved in that because they know they're gonna own them, so understanding what the cost of maintaining them is gonna be. And then secondly, security is just an enormous thing today. I mean pretty much every large deployment we do we go through large amounts of security reviews. The great thing for us is that it is kind of the backbone of our product is security, and we've built our own proprietary OS. We have put in the ability that the security is super high. Our devices are used on navy ships on the most secure network in the world. So it's a thing that actually benefits us, but just the interaction with the IT involvement, any large deployment goes through literally months of security review and if you can't pass that, it doesn't matter what the other organization from a content perspective wants to have, it'll never make it. When you're dealing with IT and IS people, when you say it's our own proprietary operating system, does that present a problem or are you able to say it's derivative of Linux or whatever, and it's fine? Jeff Hastings: Yeah, so at first, a decade ago, we would say that, and it would just make the hair stand up on their back rise up. But now what they've realized is there are a lot of these devices really classified as IoT devices, and they now understand how they fit into the environment, and it's not oh my God, we can't maintain it unless it's a Windows device. It's interesting that they now are able to classify these devices as kind of IoT devices with proprietary operating systems and understand how to run them. It's also that the larger corporations have now figured out how to understand the cost of a classic kind of PC. Not that's what everyone uses them, but they now really understand that and most of the companies are now, they use a number of around $300 as the cost to just have a PC in the work environment. They now understand what a cost basis really is for maintaining these and for us, they're giving much lower numbers in terms of being able to have one of these on the network. And a lot of it has to do with the ability of these devices, if you're using Windows or Mac, these things are constantly updated, and each time those operating systems get updated, there's a percent of things that fail, and those are support costs. With our device, we don't do that, so it actually saves them a lot of money operationally at the same time, keeping the security level high. So what happens when you do have a firmware update? Jeff Hastings: So on our system, the first thing you can do is you can test those, and most of our customers do actually test those to make sure that they're not going to get a failure with their system. That's very different from something that gets shoved down the pipe automatically to maintain your security level. So by doing that, it's a very controlled rollout, and typically it's a very rare exception on our platform that something has to go out because a security fix came out immediately. A lot of it is just because of how our operating system is first cryptographically signed, and secondly, that people can't put random applications on our platform. Those two things raised a security bar really high so that when you need an operating system update, a firmware update, you can be controlled about it, you can test it and roll it out, and that really is where a lot of the savings comes in, because most of these operating system updates, it's not that the actual operating system is causing problems, it's the whole ecosystem of applications that people use. And one of those applications breaks, and guess what, they get hundreds of calls coming in to fix it. Each one of those has to be fixed and dealt with, and that's where kind of the burden of cost really comes up, and if you think about digital signage, 99% of those new features in the operating system are never, ever used in digital signage. In fact, most of them are actually being defeated. People don't want them. You don't want a desktop in digital signage. Yeah. Is digital signage with the people you're dealing with now or your business partners are dealing with now, are they seeing it as a mission-critical application now? Jeff Hastings: It's definitely moving towards that. I wouldn't say it's completely there. Some of them are mission-critical. We have folks in the F1 world that use our devices and I will tell you, they view our devices as mission-critical. The Navy uses our devices. They view them as very mission-critical. Some of the marketing folks, maybe they don't view them as mission critical. They view them as very valuable, and anytime there's downtime, it's important to them. I'd say it's moved from a place where people would be like, oh, displays always go down, and they don't worry about it either. Hey, those things should be working all the time, and that plays to our advantage. Ten years ago when the first system-on-chip displays came out from Sony and Samsung and then LG and on, they weren't very powerful, they didn't do a hell of a lot. They could do the basics. They could show a menu, that sort of thing, but they've been around for a decade now. They're pretty powerful. I hear people saying they're pretty darn good. Do these smart commercial displays now present a challenge that perhaps they did in the past? And are you looking at embedded solutions? I know you already do that with Bluefin, and you did a little bit with NEC Sharp back in the day. Jeff Hastings: Yeah. So, the way I look at these is the range of devices that can create this experience. You can look at a $35 raspberry pie that's going to do a bunch of powerful things. So the whole content side of it, I really focus less on that. We have a whole range of players from simple to very complex with the new XC product, and it's interesting to look at the content, but what we see more and more from our customers is the ability to maintain these and control these because the long term cost is really what comes into play. So it's becoming less and less about. “Oh, can this play this piece of content?” Because that's being more and more commoditized over time, and what we're seeing is, as we talked about, like the IT organization, the ability to maintain these, the sustainability. There's a lot in sustainability, what's the power consumption, what's the lifetime of a display? And one of the things that we actually see, which is a vulnerability in the built-in displays, is that their storage is fixed. It's soldered down on the motherboard, flash memory is a consumable, and it has a limited lifespan. So that's one of the things we're seeing with our players, you can replace that media with a display that has it soldered down. Once that memory wears out, which it does, then you have to throw away the whole display. So that means that all of a sudden you're taking, instead of a tiny little SD card that weighs a few grams, now you're going to throw away a whole display that's going to go to a landfill. So we push a lot on sustainability. Clearly, in North America, it's a little bit behind Europe, but in Europe, that is a big deal of sustainability. The bottom line is that the built-in definitely has some advantages. The operational ability to deploy it is simpler, but it's not the panacea. There are still lots of things out there. The manageability of it, the ability to update and control things remotely, and the ability to change the SD card when it wears out are very important. And I love to make jokes about that. If I bought a car that I couldn't change the tires when they wore out, I'd be really bummed to have to throw away my car because I can't replace the tires, and that's the same thing with flash memory. It's the same thing as a tire. It's going to wear out. You'd hate to throw away your car. So with the Bluefin, I know they have a range of displays now, and they're not just little shelf-edge ones. They go up to, I think, 40-inch plus or something. In those cases, when you've got an embedded display that's got a BrightSign inside, is it swappable or upgradeable? Jeff Hastings: Yes. So there are a few things about those displays. So the first is that it uses the same architecture. So we'll use an SD card as the storage mechanism so that you can do that. Secondly, it's actually slotted. You can open up that display and can actually replace the player. So it's like the Sharp NEC ones going back Five years or something? Jeff Hastings: Exactly, and so we standardized on a different kind of connector to really make the form factor very small. So both the media is replaceable, and the player is replaceable. We've even had some customers already do that, upgrading their platform from an earlier one to their next-gen, and they're all backward compatible, so they'll fit into the same slot, and you get the newer performance. So yeah, we see that, as a market there's a class of customers that want to see more and more people, and at every show, if you stop by, we have more and more people who are doing the BrightSign built-in, and you'll see that trend continue. You'll see it continue as more and more people realize that's a really good solution. The platform, the ecosystem, the upgradeability, and the remote management are really important, and they want to add that to their displays. And it's a little thing, but the simple fact that if you can put up a display in an hour instead of 90 minutes or something if you're doing a big rollout, it adds up. Jeff Hastings: It does add up, and like I said there's the upfront and then the ongoing. So yeah, there are absolutely benefits to it, but you have to make sure that you don't end up with a car that you can't change the tires on. What about Apple TVs? There are three or four companies, at least CMS software companies, who heavily market Apple TV as their solution. Is that not a concern, but do you see it as real competition or almost like a novelty? Jeff Hastings: I see it mostly as a novelty. It's on the border of a consumer kind of operating system. It's a little bit different. But still, you're dealing with many of the same things. You're fighting the platform. Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire, they're essentially all very similar. They're built for consumers. They're not built for commercial use, and what that means is that you're kind of fighting the platform. I routinely see people using the Roku TCL TVs, and they have their little digital signage application, and then when it reboots, it comes back to the home screen, and people are trying to beat that. So if you look at large-scale deployments, that's where you get into this manageability and controllability, and those things are not optimized for that. It's not like I'm saying it, they're worthless. It's just in large deployments, it's difficult to deal with the little idiosyncratic consumer devices. It's interesting when you talk about Roku because I don't think that many people know that BrightSign is, in effect, a spin-out of Roku, right? Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the BrightSign business was originally part of Roku, and in 2009, we spun out for them, and actually the core operating system is still very similar between the platforms, although we've taken it in the digital signage direction and added a lot of features and capabilities in digital signage and obviously the Roku guys have taken in their direction of streaming. But yeah, at the core of it, yeah, that's where the technology came from. Is there still any kind of sharing of ideas or anything between the companies, or are they very much different tracks and you share DNA but that's about it? Jeff Hastings: It's really that we share DNA and that's about it. I'm still on the board of Roku, so I actively participate in their business, but yeah, there's no official sharing. But yeah, with me being on the board, we get kind of informal sharing. Yeah, I mean, you're sitting there actively listening and they say, we're developing this, and you're thinking, “Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe I could apply that.” Jeff Hastings: Yeah, and the same thing goes in the other direction. Some of the stuff that we work on is pretty interesting, as we do a lot of out-of-home advertising. Their model is built on a big advertising model in-home. So there are definitely things we share that also. You have high-end players that can go up to 8k. Are there customers using 8k or are they just buying those boxes with the idea of, okay, we're future-proofed? Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the way I think about those players: 8k is a feature. It's not the only thing that you can buy those for. Most of the people are not using 8k, and honestly, it's just a marketing thing because very few people actually use 8k. Most people buy them for the power of the experience. So very high-end experiences that people would've classically used PCs, for now, can get our device with the reliability of our operating system and maintainability, yet the power of a PC. So that's kind of what we see most people buy 8k for. The applications that we're seeing right now are kind in two sectors. One is people with consumer manufacturers of consumer TVs that wanna create an 8k experience that has all this interactive and all the great features they use. They're using our products and that, and then LEDs. So LEDs are probably the biggest area where we've seen the 8k as a single output. Those are very interesting cases because as the density of LEDs has come out and, folks like Nova Star now have 8k sending units, we can now plug in ak and instead of having multiple boxes of content rolling in, they can just have one big 8k pallet that they can split out to anywhere they want on the screen. That's a big market. Then the last segment that we see AK being used in is having content that spans over video walls. So if you think about a four-screen, 4k LED wall, right? 8k is perfect for that, and with the hiring unit, it's got four HDMI outputs. So you can just plug four TVs and adjust the bezel compensation, and now you've dramatically simplified having a video wall. So those are the areas we see people using our XC product which does 8k. I can't open an email list or go to any kind of technology site without seeing a couple of stories or a couple of pitches about AI. How do you see AI fitting within what you guys do? Jeff Hastings: o first, AI is super interesting, and especially with ChatGPT coming out, I think there are a lot of areas that you're going to see AI, at least in our world. So I see it as one, on the internal side, so helping our developers become more efficient. When you're writing software, there's a lot of what I would call mundane writing software that is done, whereas now, that can be automated. Actually, there's GitHub CoPilot that generates a lot of software inside Visual Studio for doing simple things. Then using ChatGPT to do some of the basic frameworks that work really well. So those are tools that I can see, and maybe on the support side, being able to use AI to get a much better quality first-level support request. So I see those things as on the operational side of the business. And then, when I look at the digital signage side, what are things that are going to be changing the world on the outside of digital signage? I think the biggest one that I see is content generation. I don't know if you've played with any of the tools on content generation. Let's be real. Many people need just kind of simple videos and imagery, and with these new content tools, you can tell it what you want. I was playing with one the other day and said, “Hey, I want an image with a hamburger in a retro look”, and it generates an image for me. If you think about what that would've cost to have a graphic designer, do that., I think the package I've paid for, it's 10 bucks a month. That one image would've probably cost a few hundred dollars for a graphic artist to do. So I think the content side is coming up there, and then the last part, which we're working on a little bit, it's still early, is for our integrators to be able to describe the experience they want and create a presentation out of it. So that is one that I think is, it's the same way that you think about, giving our programmers and our software engineers a big head start, I think this is going to be the next step. So an integrator, instead of having to say, how do I use which tool to create this? They basically put this into an AI and say, here's what I want it to do, and it gives me the experience back. And at the simplest level, it's already working, which is, for doing some simple presentations, not that it's an enormous amount of work, it's just the learning curve. We've got it working where you can just tell it for a simple presentation, it'll put it together for you. So I think, and we're just at the early stages of AI, so I think it's going to have, over time, a profound impact on basically making digital signage easier and lower cost to do a lot of things. Yeah, I've been saying to people that, yeah, the generative AI stuff is cool, and the ability to generate images from prompts, as you were describing, is really interesting. But I think where this is really going to get used is behind the scenes for things like you were saying with coding, generating marketing materials, doing smarter monitoring, all that stuff that an end-user customer may never see, but is going to, as you say, make doing this business easier. Jeff Hastings: When you just look at it, all of these things lower the barrier to entry to having a deployment, which is just good for our industry, and I think the AI tools are just at the early stage of creating these experiences and content that just lowers the cost of doing it. So all of them are exciting for us. So you're going to be at Infocom, which by the time this runs will be imminent. It already is, but what are you going to be showing? I know you've got new players, new Series 5 players. Jeff Hastings: Yeah, we'll have the whole lineup of Series 5 players. They've been dribbling out since the end of the year. So yeah, we'll show the new XT5 for the first time in our booth, which will complete our whole Series 5 lineup. So all of them will be on display. We'll have more of the, as we talked about, BrightSign built-in displays in different form factors. Some interesting ones will be there. If anyone's out there, stop by our booth, the new XT product will be out there, and it will be exciting, and more of these built-in displays will be there. That kind of plays in that segment of the market. What's your booth number? Jeff Hastings: I don't know our booth number. I knew you wouldn't, but I had to ask. Jeff Hastings: Those things are not on the top of my list. We're in the digital signage section, and you'll see the power of purple being out there. Just look for the crowd? Jeff Hastings: Exactly. All right. Thanks, Jeff. Jeff Hastings: Dave, thanks so much, and good chatting with you.
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT AVI-SPL is one of the largest pro AV integrators on the planet, but for the longest time, if I was asked if I knew anyone at that company specifically on the digital signage file, I'd say "Nope." As far as I knew, and the same for a lot of people involved in digital signage, AVI-SPL was much more focused on traditional pro AV work like unified communications and control rooms. While AVI-SPL delivered some digital signage projects, it wasn't a real focus. But that started to change a few years ago when the Tampa-based company spun up a new business unit called the Experience Technology Group, or XTG. Now it has some 30 people working on projects driven by the impact of visuals, and directly involving other architects, designers and creative shops. Now, that's 30 people in a company that has 3,700 other staff, but the group works with some 300 customer-facing sales people, and gets pulled in to opportunities and projects when clients start expressing interests or needs that are about more than just function, like whiteboards and conferencing systems. I had a great, very thoughtful talk with Mark Coxon, an industry veteran who joined the company about a year ago and is one of XTG's business development directors. We get into both the science and emotional sides of experiential projects, and how these kinds of projects work when they're guided by ideas and desired outcomes, and not just the Wow Factor of big screens. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Mark, what is your role at AVI-SPL? Mark Coxon: I am a business development director in our XTG division, which is our Experience Technology Group, so what I do is work with our regional account managers as well as our partner ecosystem to identify opportunities to build amazing experiences. So your regional people would come across an opportunity, let's say, it's a corporate workplace that says, “We want to put a big ass LED display in our lobby. We don't know what to do or what to put on or anything else. What do we do?” And your regional person might have a kind of deer-in-the-headlights sort of reaction and call you or somebody on your team and say, okay, I need help here. Mark Coxon: Yeah. So a lot of our opportunities do arise within the regions themselves, right? Because AVI-SPL is a huge corporation. We have, I think, 300+ sellers out in the marketplace, across the world, talking to clients, managing accounts where they might do a lot more of the typical AV that you see out in the space: conference rooms and auditoriums, et cetera, and they'll come across customers saying, “Oh, I think we want to add a wow factor to this lobby” or “We're thinking about building an experience center to show off some of the new innovation that we came out with this year.” And so they'll engage our group, which is an overlay to the whole company, and bring us in, and we can really start to give, I guess, some form to that process and make sure they get what they want at the end of it. So you have a BizDev role, but it sounds like there's a fair amount of sales, engineering, and front-end consulting involved in it. Mark Coxon: Yeah, it's funny. AVI-SPL isn't really known in the market for experiential work, but we've done a lot of it. We've done a lot of it in pockets over the years for these customers, but it was never really organized under a division, and so that's why XTG exists. We've organized this portfolio of work in this division and assigned it to a team of people. We have about 30 people on our team now that overlay the country, and that team consists of people like me, business development directors, and we come from different backgrounds, some come from fabrication, some come from the consulting world, some like me come from all over the place within the industry from an integration perspective, and then we also have technologists on the team whose job is really exactly what you said to be those people who are thinking about the art of the possible. “All right, this customer's asked for this outcome. They have these people coming to their building. They want them to feel this. They want this actionable insight out of the space.” And they're the ones who actually come up with the ideas on what kind of technology could we use to execute this and if we were to pull this off, what would it take for us to do that? And then they start to come up with rough sketches of what the technology would be to execute on that outcome. Yeah, it's interesting. Through the years, I've been asked who do you know over at AVI-SPL and I'll say nobody from the context of digital signage, and the company's been known as a very large company, and it's very active. But doing more, if this is the right term, traditional AV work in the corporate workplace, that sort of thing, and as you said, pockets of activity in digital signage, but nothing organized. So was it recognized within the company that we need to aggregate this and put ourselves forward as being directly in this as opposed to people discovering that, oh, you do that too? Mark Coxon: Correct. XTG's definitely a targeted branding effort at consolidating this work and this expertise we have in things like executive briefing centers, museums, welcome centers, visitors centers, hall of fame experiences, et cetera, that we've done over the years for enterprise, higher-ed, and really creating some emphasis around that type of work that we do, for sure. Is there some cross-pollination happening when you do that? What I mean is, if you do some sort of immersive, experiential environment for a corporate workplace. Do they then two years later say, oh, by the way, we need new video conferencing capabilities or new meeting room signs, that sort of thing. Do you do that? Also, vice versa where you're already in there doing collaboration work, and they say, we want to do something in our lobby with Wow Factory. Can you do that? Mark Coxon: Yeah, obviously, we see both of those happen. Places where we're brought in maybe to do some specialty work, and of course, the other work at that point seems like more low-hanging fruit because it's work that we excel at already and have a huge portfolio of as far as auditoriums, meeting spaces, et cetera, and then, yeah, like you said, vice versa. We're coming in, and we're doing a lot of work, and you walk through this amazing lobby where people are going to come in their first experience before they come there to meet. So let's say somebody's bringing a customer into their building, and they're going to pitch a multimillion dollar sale with this customer that they have. How are they defining what that experience is gonna be within the building and just asking that question sometimes, who's doing this space? This looks like a customer-facing, marketing-driven space, and a lot of times they don't know that we do that work, and yeah, we stumble upon it that way as well. Do you guys go into prospective customers or existing customers pitching the idea of experiential spaces, or are you really operating off of their interest and initiative when they're saying we're interested in this? I suspect it would be hard to pitch somebody saying, “You should have a big-ass LED video wall in your lobby.” Mark Coxon: Yeah. I call that technology in search of an application, and that's definitely not what we do. There's a great quote by Cedric Price, who was a mid-century architect, that says, “Technology is the answer, but what's the question?” And that's really what my job is within the team, and the business development team's job is (we have a few business development managers), but our job is really what are you trying to accomplish in this space? What business outcomes are you trying to achieve when you're looking at building this space? We're in this weird mode, right? Where a lot of companies are re-evaluating what it means to have an office in general, what it means to have physical space, whether that be retail, we just saw Bed, Bath & Beyond looking at closing up and citing online competition as one of the reasons, so what does it mean to have place-based retail today? And if we are going to build a space, what should it be? And really starting at that level. So I try to start with that level with people all the time, even in the enterprise. The question isn't what do we do with the lease that we have or this space that we have? That's part, but that's the bridge. The real question is, if I had nothing, what would I build? And that's really the end goal of what you should be moving towards, and so many times we really start breaking down the problem of: what are the impacts that you hope to make by having a physical office or a physical retail location? And then how do we move backward from that into how does that now affect what we design into space, including the technology that will go into there? It's really reversing that. If we go in and just start telling people how cool it is to have an LED wall in their lobby, we're selling from the wrong perspective. But if somebody says, you know what, when people come in here, they come in here, and they sit, and they go into their phone. So they're waiting for a meeting. They come and sit in our lobby. They start looking at their phone, and suddenly they're stuck in their email. They're thinking about the seven things they have to do when they get back to the office, and they're already moving past our meeting. We want to create something that actually creates some anticipation, some foreshadowing that tilts them into the anticipation of the meeting they're about to have and not pull them out of our space and back into their workday. How do we accomplish that? And those types of conversations are much, much more fun to have and that could result at the end in having a 400-inch video while in the lobby, or it could result in maybe taking physical objects that the company's made if they're an aerospace company taking some of the innovations they have like rocket nozzles and things, and putting them on a shelf and letting people pick them up and play with them. And as they do, content launches, ambiently, around the room as they interface with these objects or whatever that happens to be. But really starting with who is here, why are they here? What are they interested in, and how do we engage them more? So that when they leave, they remember being here, and they actually take the actions we want them to take. So it's a much different approach than screens first, right? Yeah. As you might expect, I get bombarded with emails and pitches and everything else every day talking about different projects and capabilities of companies, and I see the words experience and immersive overused and abused quite a bit, and I'm curious how you define immersive and how experience is defined because I get a sense that there's this idea that experiential and immersive means that, you have to have a video wall that's got gesture recognition and you're going to wave your arms in front of it, and all these things are going to happen, or they're synchronized lighting, or God knows what. But from my point of view, there are times when an experience is just something that tells you if you're confused about which way to go, things like that, something that just makes the space better. Mark Coxon: A hundred percent. So it's funny that you mentioned that because although I'm on an experience team, I'm a big fan of the calm movement. How are we decreasing the technology we use for mundane tasks or throughout the day to create these analog, tactile, calm moments. I agree that the best definition of experience I've heard, and one I tried to adhere to was by Brian Solis. He used to be at Salesforce, I think he's now at Service Now, but he's written a lot of books on the experience economy. And he said, an experience is an emotional reaction to a moment in time, and as you said, that doesn't have to be an overwhelming jaw-dropping experience. It could be a relief like you said, that now I know where to go, or it could be a silent pause that allows you to reflect. I think there are a lot of ways that you can create an experience for a company. For me, immersive just means that it's drawing the person in. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing. Are there ways to do that? Yeah. I've given, and I'm going to give a course this year at Infocom on creating the new connection center. I've given some talks before on utilizing biology to give a deeper connection to your message. So things like engaging peripheral vision work because more of your brain turns on when your fight or flight response is activated when your peripheral vision is being activated. And so are there ways that we can use, potentially waves of light to focus people inward on a screen or on a position in a room. Are there ways to draw people through space to a place where we want them to dwell? How do we create experiences where we don't, I guess, create congestion, right? Like putting a screen in the middle of a hallway, it could be a good idea as long as you're not encouraging people to stand there for 15 minutes, as long as the dwell time there is 15-20 seconds, et cetera. So I think experience is also just how people interact with the space themselves, and immersion is a combination of all of those things. So engaging more senses always creates more memory, but that doesn't have to be an active participation either. I think the things that are often overlooked in experience are opportunities to create, if it's a movement of air, if it's gentle waves, if it's mechanical movement in a ceiling, if it's an ambient soundscape that fills the space instead of white noise, all of these things can lend to experience, but they're nothing that somebody stops and focuses on. They're things that happen in the background that enhance what's going on, without the person experiencing it really focusing on it, if that makes sense. Yeah, I'm listening to that, and I'm wondering how the people on the other side of the table are responding to that. I suspect some of them are leaning forward and very interested, and other ones are going, that sounds expensive! Mark Coxon: You do get that. You can definitely get that, and I think that's why the co-design process is so important and not coming in with an idea of what you want to sell. Like earlier, you talked about me coming in and telling somebody why this experience is going to be important for them. Again, that's me pushing something upstream that I've got an idea about. I always say my best tool in a meeting is a blank piece of paper. Because if I sit down and really listen to what people do in this space, what they're trying to accomplish, all of those things, I'll pick up little notes. I had a customer the other day who, the architect, had put together a mood board of what this space wanted to feel and look like. They built a lot of these common spaces that they're talking about in architecture, We and Us spaces is what they're calling them where they're building these cafes with a lot of biophilia and wood and stone, and all of these things, and they're like we want to do sound masking in here, and you're like, okay, that's great. So obviously, you want to keep the sound from moving back and forth, but what you've really created here is almost an urban park or a community park type feel in this space so instead of just flooding this with white noise or paint noise, why not create a nature scape or something like that'll also keep the noise transfer down but really reinforce this idea that you're outside in this natural environment as opposed to the hush of a quiet office or the hush of a pink noise or white noise air chiller or something that a lot of times you put in a office space where maybe you're trying to focus on deep work and not on connection, right? So it's just really listening to those things. When you start to identify those, when people start to, I guess self align with certain ideas as you're walking through what the different pieces are, they're more invested in that. Then when you come into that space where the cost comes, they really then weigh that against the impact as opposed to comparing it to what four speakers playing white noise would cost in the space. Is it like that book about a village in terms of these kinds of projects where it's super important to have the architect involved, the engineers involved, all the different players who collaborate on a finished project as opposed to just the AV team coming in and executing this part of it? Mark Coxon: A thousand percent. So many times, when we are brought in, what we end up doing and what I do with clients when they ask for an experience like this is one of the first things we want to do is almost a gap in overlaps kind of analysis with them. There is an ecosystem of partners that is necessary to create an experience. You're going to have somebody that's creating custom content. You may have two or three companies creating custom content. You may have to have a company specializing in video and live-action, live actors, et cetera, maybe somebody specializing in creating interactive user interfaces for touchscreens and all of those things. So you have these content creators. You do typically have somebody as an architect in this space that's obviously defining what the space looks like. Many times you have an experiential design firm doing the story, right? What's the strategy, what's the story? How are we walking people through this space? That's working with the marketing team in the company. Then you have custom fabricators building all this set work that the audiovisual goes into to create the look and feel that everybody has drawn down on the paper. So it does take a village, and many times that's part of what we do, is we educate what it is that players are involved in a successful experience. Who are the stakeholders that you have involved with now? Do we need to get more stakeholders involved? Many times it might come through IT because they see it as a technology buying exercise and you really find out that marketing and the C-suite and human resources need to be involved because this is a system that's meant to reconnect the employees of the company to the mission of what they're doing every single day in space. And now all of a sudden that becomes a much higher strategy-level conversation on how it's executed, and so it does take a village and it takes a great ecosystem of partners. I know that word's overused too. I've used it twice. But it takes this great array of partners, which is one of our core strengths is that we have a partnership manager that works specifically on making sure that we have a broad array of partners that we can introduce into these projects with our customers to make sure that none of these gaps are left untouched and that the experience we deliver at the end is not just a piece of technology installed on a wall because the technology itself, you don't get the value out of it when it's installed in the building, you extract the value out of the system. The ROI comes from the use of the system over time to drive the outcomes that you were looking for and thinking of this as a construction project where I delivered the 400-inch LED screen, so we're done, and the customer got what they paid for, they haven't actually extracted any value out of that piece of equipment yet. It's a depreciating asset until they play something on it that gets them the result that they want. So we really try to focus on that instead of just our one part, and our, as I said earlier, we have our team. Our team, from a business development perspective, we walk through those things. Our technologists design the technology, but we also, when we take on a project, we have a program manager. And they're involved from the beginning, they listen to the intent, and just like in the programming phase of architecture, when you talk about what is the intent of the space and what are the ways that we're going to actually make some design decisions to facilitate that, the program manager really carries that spirit of the job and make sure that those partner handoffs, et cetera, are all going well and that everybody's involved in delivering the final result and so we built a process by which we deliver that, and we believe in it, so yeah, it does take a village for sure. What is the breadth of services? I'm thinking of one company much smaller than AVI-SPL, but they can do the full experience including metal fabrication and creative design, all that. So they can pretty much go from inception to delivery out of the same shop as opposed to using partners, but for a large company with a whole bunch of partners in play, how much do you want to own and how much do you want to cross-pollinate and work together on things? Mark Coxon: We've doubled down on partnership when it comes to that. Our core strength is delivering technology. That's why our business was built, and that's what we do best, so we focus on the design and implementation of those technology systems, and for the other pieces, we partner. So you know, w don't build a lot of content. We do have a division called Video Link that does some content for video production for meetings, et cetera. But are we going to create computer animations for how our power plant works? No. We're going to bring in a partner that knows how to do that every day to do that. Are we going to define for the company what their story should be based on their seven customer personas? No, we're going to work with their marketing department, and if they need some help really coming up with a storyline, we're going to bring in one of our branding and creative strategy partners to help with that because that's what their core skill set is. So we try to focus on what our operational excellence is, and that is delivering technology systems. But from the standpoint of the way that we approach the sales group, we're not engaging in a process that's designed to sell a particular technology. So it's the difference between focusing on what we're really good at and letting the cart dry the horse. I love the Maslow quote, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We try not to approach this, well, we need to sell 600 extra square meters of LED this quarter so this customer will get a video wall. That's not the way that we approach this. We don't approach this from a technology-centric lens, but we know where we play well and what we deliver value in the market with, and that's the technology portion. I wrote recently about a company that was, maybe not pivoting, but evolving into doing AV as a service, with the argument being that a lot of end-user customers would rather just have the whole project done as an operating line item as opposed to all the upfront costs of capital, and they don't want to worry about recurring support and all that. They'd just rather pay a number and let somebody else do it. Is that something that comes up and that you offer? Mark Coxon: Yeah, it comes up all the time. I think customers are always looking for ways to understand how much of this you want to own from a content update perspective, from how you manage refreshes, from even how you buy a system, as you said. Is it an operational cost, or is it a capital expenditure? Is it a construction project, or is it an ongoing cost month over month? One place that we see this very specifically right now is we're doing some virtual production and XR opportunities for clients, especially in the corporate space where they're wanting to elevate their all-hands meetings or their product launches or any of those types of things. They're often already buying those services in an operational cost format where. They're going out and renting a studio, or they're hiring a production company to come in and do these meetings for them. So they don't want to take on a capital expenditure. They want that to continue to be an operational cost. So yeah, through things like creating a plan for leasing equipment by having a breadth of services onsite, like we have onsite managed services where we can embed an AVI-SPL employee in one of our businesses to run a center per se, or to run a virtual production studio for the customer so that they just come in, the stakeholders come in, they talk about the product they want to talk about, and somebody's running all the front house, back house doing the streaming out to the other participants, et cetera. Yeah, we offer all of that, and that's one of the great things about working with somebody like us is because we do have such a large footprint, we do have such a presence, we have 4,000 employees across the world, and we have onsite managed services available. We have the ability to buy things on the customer's behalf and lease them, et cetera. That's one of the great advantages of someone with a big footprint like us is we have the ability to do those things. What are the reference projects that you bring up? So you're sitting in a meeting, and they say, “What have you guys done? Impress me!” What do you come back with? Mark Coxon: Yeah. There are always a few that we show. The Museum of the Future in Dubai is an amazing project that we did, and people were like, you guys did that project? I'm like, yeah, we did that project and delivered it through our Dubai office, which is an amazing office. That team is, hands down, an awesome team. But we show projects like that because that's a space where people pretty much ride an elevator, like a space capsule, up into a space station and then come back to Earth in a future state, and the museum architecturally is beautiful, it's an oval with a hole in the middle of it. You even wonder how it suspends itself, as well as just all the different things that are in there. There's a touch interface where a half globe, a half spear actually swells up out of a flat table, and you can use it to articulate the earth. Who's ever seen an interface like that before? So obviously, there were some great creative partners involved in the content and in that fabrication. But that's obviously a showcase project that we talk about a lot, and then we have visitor centers and executive briefing centers. A lot of our executive briefing centers are very impressive, Honeywell and Charlotte is a beautiful center with everything from transparent LED to kiosks to volumetric displays with physical artifacts to a full four-wall cave immersion room with a touch interface in the middle to navigate through 3D environments. And so we show a lot of those pieces. We try to show projects that have, I guess, a variety of execution styles because not everything needs to be a touchscreen. It's to show someone that you could have 3D printed objects on a table, and as you pick up those objects, the video changes, and as you articulate that object, you can actually affect different parts of the video to launch. Those kinds of things are really cool and just show people that it doesn't just have to be a touch screen on a wall. We're not looking to put a big black rectangle on the finish you spent six months working on with the architect. We're going to make sure that's integrated into the space in the proper way. Yeah, I'm a big fan of subtlety and just little things like present sensors that cost a few bucks to incorporate into a design. But you walk within a certain range, and it changes what's on a screen, and “Oh, how'd that happen?” It's great, but it's not fancy, you're not issuing a press release about it. Mark Coxon: Yeah. We've been working on some projects where they're talking about using real-time location services as people walk through the building. So they get badged in, or they get a card, and that card has a profile that maybe they've entered in, and as they walk through the space, the experience is personalized slightly to them, based on their profile or using things like data generated art. Humans are great at pattern recognition, and so if you're putting audio/visual in a space that people work in every day, or people go into the office every day with these screens are in the background, you don't want them to be counting down 15 seconds to read and then 32 seconds until the screen goes blue with white text and then: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, cue the video of the kid running through the park. That almost becomes like water torture at some point, right? It's just the constant dripping of this repetitive content that goes on in the background. So how do we use things like occupancy sensors, and time of day weather outside, all of which create effects on these screens that are more ambient in times that they're not being actively used for customer communication or employee communication? A lot of those things are really cool. So what you said, that subtlety, and really thinking of just the different moments. These are canvases that we can use for multiple things. Sometimes they need to be quiet and soothing for people to do their work. Other times they need to be loud and inspiring to get somebody's attention and be able to design something that does that and know who to partner with on the backend from a hardware perspective for something like a content management system that can be on a schedule or can use sensor-based inputs to trigger different modes is really important. Are you sensing or seeing any kind of a shift in the marketplace in terms of rising interest in a particular thing? I know you mentioned experience centers, but those have been around for a while, that's an area where I get a sense because of the pandemic and everything, they're elevating in importance because you don't have as many people in the offices. Mark Coxon: Yeah, I think experience centers are becoming more and more prominent. Companies are seeing if they can bring their customers in and create a memorable, relevant experience around their value story, that pays dividends for them. I think we're seeing more and more interest, as I said, in virtual and extended reality, virtual production, and extended reality stages for elevating corporate communications. Suppose every single one of your communications goes out in 16 squares on a VTC call. How do you punctuate those meetings so that the important ones are elevated and look different, feel different, and actually engage people differently? We're seeing more and more of that. I will say, honestly, the big push is this: The challenge of physical space in a world that becomes more and more online, we have to get away from the idea of just utility because utility is going to be provided more conveniently, virtually. I can easily join a meeting from my kitchen table. I can easily buy a pair of pants on Amazon. So if we're just looking for the utility of work or the utility of shopping or whatever that place is built to do, if we're focusing on utility, we're always going to lose to the online experience because it's more convenient and the utility is the same. So we really have to focus on the personal experience. Gensler did an experience index on public space a few years back, pre-pandemic, but people are in multiple modes when they go shopping, right? People are in the task-based mode of finding something to buy, but they're also in a mode of exploration. They're in a mode of connection. They're in a mode of aspiration. Who do I want to be? What do I want to be? I want to be inspired. They're looking for cultural connection. There are all these other motivations at play, and it's the same when people come to interact in an office, when they join their team, when they go to a movie theater versus watching something on Netflix. There's a reason the movie theaters haven't died. It feels different to watch a movie in a movie theater, not just because of the scale of the screen or the audio, but because it feels different being in a room, having a shared experience with other people, hearing their reaction to something, hearing when they go silent, when they laugh and when they cheer. Those are things that we can really build an experience around, and I always say technology has advanced to a space where technology is usually not the limiting factor, so technology's no longer a huge challenge, space isn't a huge challenge, to design a space or to be able to build a space that facilitates these things. So really, now we are in the challenge of getting somebody back to the office, getting somebody in a mall, it is a human-centric problem. That's a human-centric exercise, and if we don't start with experience design that addresses the human motivation of why they would go somewhere, and we just address the utility of how big a store need to be and how big a screen need to be for somebody to read the text? We're never going to solve a human-based problem on why space is relevant, and so I think companies and customers are starting to see this more and more if we can start talking about: what is the human experience, and then how do we use space and technology to facilitate that? It's just a different way to solve the problem. We have to flip the model in its head. We can't start with a square building, add technology, and then hope people come and use it in the way that we designed it. That's not experience design. All right, Mark, thank you very much—very interesting chat. Mark Coxon: Hey, thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Plundered Hearts, the pirate romance text adventure, and also turning to a short bonus discussion about Twine games. We mostly discuss our takeaways before turning to the bonus discussion. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Podcast breakdown: 0:18 Takeaways 51:02 Break 51:12 Bonus Discussion Issues covered: text adventure length, an introductory adventure and the audience it sought, being unable to market, a diversion to Rogue Legacy 2, finding a parser bug, game pack-ins, losing a thing to the parser, a garter on a crocodile, waiting and responding to player choice, playtesting internally, not knowing to wait, inventory combination vs revisiting every location you've missed, failure-driven games, piecing clues together through trial and error, choosing your verbs carefully, whether there are multiple solutions, the hostility of a trial-and-error design, subverting your genre through mechanics, Tim's life as a series of flow charts, a structure still used today, flow charts for puzzle steps, working back from a problem to the solution, responding to your players, using good writing to provide a rich experience, interesting work coming from diverse sources, being playful with text, Twine as an environment, what you can do with good writing and simple tools, text effects, the approachability of the tools, personal games, an experimental game and interpretation, the structure of "howling dogs," simulation aspects, commentary on games, the default response and the "that's interesting," poetic/evocative/allusive tone, being in a browser and the affordances, a commentary on the games industry, the anxiety-provoking games, feeling seen, being exactly spot-on, a learning tool, the value of constraints. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Dark Souls, Zork, Infocom, Byte, Nibble, EGM, Nintendo Power, Rogue Legacy 2, Halo, LucasArts, Day of the Tentacle, Emily Short, Counterfeit Monkey, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Dungeons & Dragons, MYST, Space Quest, King's Quest, Reed Knight, Ron Gilbert, Peter Pan, Errol Flynn, Geena Davis, Cutthroat Island, Matthew Modine, Activision, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chris Klimas, Hypercard, howling dogs, Porpentine, The Writer Will Do Something, Matthew Seiji Burns, Tom Bissell, Game Developer magazine, Magical Wasteland, IF Comp, Andrew Plotkin, Meg Jayanth, Richard Hofmeier, Papers Please, Hot Pockets, Mountain Dew, Warhammer, Frog Fractions, Universal Paperclips, Frank Lantz, HP Lovecraft, Melville, Shakespeare, Mark Laidlaw, Eliza, Zachtronics, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Errors! It was not Papers, Please (which is also excellent and by Lucas Pope), but Cart Life that was by Richard Hofmeier Links: When You Say One Thing and Mean Your Motherboard Next time: ...?! Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub DevGameClub@gmail.com
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our mini theme of the flexibility of text. We examine the Infocom era by playing a late title, Plundered Hearts. We discuss some of the rougher aspects of the game and the mechanics of text adventures, including the facilities of the language and some of its modern descendants. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Tim (all), Brett (the first section) Issues covered: setting the game in its time, graphic adventures in the time, the death of Infocom, the variety of Infocom's game, Tim pulling his hair out, the cinematic nature of the game, some digressions on Deadline, extending the play through difficulty, saving the game, puzzles and wordplay, exploring the parser, accommodating the player, playing with tropes, Tim misses the boat, a bit of description of the parser and virtual machine, rooms and inventory, fore and aft vs north and south, abstraction and flexibility, restrictions, great graphics via visualization, the perfect run and the perfect score, the modern text adventure market, trigger warning for adult themes, a female protagonist, failure states, "a fate worse than death," a commentary about the dangers for women in the world, a game that she wanted to play, the context of the medium and the inherent danger of the world, having an impactful victory, Vermin's SL1 of Dark Souls, Pippin Barr and experimental games, Break Out and performance art, from Rogue to Diablo. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Rogue, Calamity Nolan, Reed Knight, TIE Fighter, Aaron Reed, Maniac Mansion, Sierra Online, Space Quest 2, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Nintendo/NES, Punch-Out, Final Fantasy, Sid Meier's Pirates!, Metroid, Legend of Zelda, Day of the Tentacle, Cornerstone, Zork, Deadline, Deathloop, The Lurking Horror, Ballyhoo, Moonmist, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Activision, Sea of Thieves, Amy Briggs, Agatha Christie, Murder She Wrote, Sleep No More, Colossal Cave Adventure, Apple ][, Volkswagon, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Dark Souls, Tomb Raider, Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Sir Ian Livingstone, Ink/Inkle, Around the World in 80 Days, Sorcery (series), Heaven's Vault, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Suspended, Brian Moriarty, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Dark Souls, Emily Short, Elsinore, Pirates of the Caribbean, verminthewepper, Pippin Barr, David Wolinsky, Marina Abramovich, The Artist Is Present, Kill.Screen, GameThing, Breakout, don't die, Father Beast, Diablo, Ragnarok Valhalla, Glenn Wichman, The Eggplant Show, Dave Brevik, Moria, Nethack, Oliver Uv, Brogue, Caves of Qud, Cogmind, Rogue Legacy 2, Mark Garcia, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers. Next time: A bit of a bonus and takeaways! Errata: It's a babelfish, I can't believe I couldn't remember that Brett confused Astrologaster with Heaven's Vault (he was referring to the latter) Links: Interactive Fiction Database GameThing podcast! Pippin Barr's site Don't Die by David Wolinsky Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub DevGameClub@gmail.com
Zork was an amazing text adventure, but back before we had laptops and smartphones, the only way to play this Infocom computer game on the […]
Reach Media Network has been around the digital signage ecosystem since 2005, and like many of the companies in this sector, its focus and strategy has evolved a lot based on customer needs and marketplace conditions. The Minneapolis-area company got its start as a place-based media network, putting screens in venues on its own dollar, and making that investment back through ad sales. As pretty much anyone who's done a Digital Out Of Home network will confirm, ad sales is hard work, no matter the environment and audience. Reach was generating real money from ad sales, but with a business focused first on screens in community ice hockey rinks, the network's growth potential was finite. For the last several years Reach has been going to market instead as an end-to-end digital signage solutions provider, building up a pile of clients in sectors like corporate and health care ... and realizing reliable, recurring revenues from SaaS licenses. Reach is seeing a lot of success, despite operating pretty quietly, by servicing the hell out of its customer base, and putting a lot of investment into software integrations. I spoke with CEO Darren Wercinski and Kiersten Gibson, the company's EVP for Sales and Marketing. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Darren and Kiersten, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the summary that you would rattle off when someone asked you what your company's all about? Darren Wercinski: Sure. Thank you for having us on the podcast today. We're excited to finally get to talk to you and share a little bit more about Reach. We actually started in 2005 and I feel really old as I tell stories today, thinking about sort of the company in general, but right now we have over 6,000 clients, and we manage around 30,000 screens. We really run the gamut, from large Fortune 500 clients, we do signage for Hormel, Caterpillar, and a lot of the big companies that you might be familiar with on a lot of college campuses so Northwestern, UCLA, and USC are all of our partners, and then likewise, I guess we've expanded a lot in the healthcare and Mass General and just a lot of industries and verticals. If you've been in the industry as long as we have, you definitely get customers for every vertical, but the company has about 50 team members right now, we actually have 10 open positions. So we're really growing and we tell this to a lot of our clients that we feel like we're in a sweet spot of just big enough to provide a robust digital signage solution with a budget that we can afford to invest in things, but at the same time, kinda that small focus on customer service and support. Quite honestly, we've been in the industry so long, we've seen lots of things change. Dave, especially you'd know companies have come and gone. Business models have changed. Our own business model has changed and evolved. There's been consolidation in the industry, but as a whole, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a really great ride. So where do you start and stop in terms of your services? You've got a software platform. Do you do managed services, aftercare, or that sort of thing as well? Darren Wercinski: We would consider ourselves a full-service solution and what I mean by that is there are some signage companies or CMSs, and that's really what we are, that really focus on just downloading the software and you're good to go and go off and running. Ours is a little bit different because we do provide the end-to-end solution. So our clients may say, Hey, we want screens, players, the signage, we'll sell them all that and then in addition, we'll actually use install cords to get them up and running and trained. We'll use our own creative team to build all their layouts and assets and really get them up and running from that perspective, along with technical support that's unlimited and account managers help them along the way. That's the way we look at the business of providing that end-to-end solution, which is a little bit different than other people as well. Is that an ask that you're seeing quite a bit in the marketplace? I get a sense and have for a few years now, that large companies are interested in digital science. They see the benefits and everything else, but they don't wanna fully manage it and they would really prefer to have an outsourced solution that says, “This is what we want, you guys to do it”? Darren Wercinski: I wouldn't say we're an outsource solution. I think that our tool is so easy to use in terms of our content management platform. We try to make it so that clients can easily go in there and update and publish their content. Really, at the end of the day, that's all they really wanna do. So that's why we build the layouts for them, all the integrations, everything, and they can come in and easily manage the content. Kiersten, what are your thoughts on that? You deal most with the clients. Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I would say, it boils down to the service and what the client's looking for. As Darren said, we'll be as hands-on or hands-off as needed in terms of that implementation, getting them up and running, building out everything for them. In terms of the ongoing managed services, we're not necessarily creating the day-to-day content for them, but we are providing them with the support that they need. So for example, six months down the road, they might have a rebrand, or they might have a whole new group of users, or maybe their content is going stale and they want to get some automated applications into the signage, just so then maybe there's safety messaging or health tips or something like that that we can really assist with and provide that automated content. So I would say it just runs the gamut of what the client's use case is and who they have managing it. I think that's one of the things we've learned, especially with these larger projects. If they don't have that from the beginning, it might be something that they implement in six months and that's where we come in. That's where that support continues to be unlimited and ongoing, and we provide that whole service solution. Darren Wercinski: I would say that reaches a very hands-on customer focused, client-focused company. We are here to help them. We're here to be flexible with their needs and I think that's really been part of our secret sauce in terms of adding a lot of clients across many industries. Kiersten Gibson: Just the one thing to add to that, with really the shift from our business model, we are SaaS-based and that service at the end is really the thing that we focus on. As Darren said, it's the software, but it's also the service and we provide, both end-to-end solutions that way. Yeah, I was gonna say that I've certainly run into companies through the years, software companies that are very good at sales, but it falls apart in aftercare. They close the deal and they're onto the next one, and they're not really paying much attention to their clients and as a result, you see a lot of attrition, a lot of churn, where end users have a contract with one company for three years, and as soon as that contract is lapsing, they're moving to somebody else because they're not seeing the kind of service they want. Darren Wercinski: Yeah, I mean we love the fact that these companies keep getting bought up by private equity firms and the first thing they cut out is their support. Even though I know you got bought out by a private equity firm, our secret. I'm on our support team, so… Darren Wercinski: But I mean that for us is good news because it's just that model, which is when consolidation happens, usually support is one of the things to go, and that's where we can differentiate ourselves against bigger competitors and say, listen, they might do some things. They might be bigger, but we're certainly gonna be better on the support side, and we've seen a lot of new customers come over from companies that have and industries that have been left out there and we've swooped in and one I can think of, we just took over Texas A&M from a competitor that was for a number of years and now it's a network of over 400 licenses and they seem really happy with the service and excited to keep expanding. I'm curious about that one in particular. We don't have to dig into it very much and cause any trouble, but I'm curious when they're making a switch, it's more about service and that sort of thing, as opposed to price, which used to be, and I guess still in the case in some situations where the reason why people switch is that they just wanna trim their budget. Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and I definitely think that and I'll just say the names, I don't care, it doesn't matter. When we go do RFPs against Four Winds or AppSpace or even Spectrio to some degree, it does come down to price and we try to add both the value component and our software, the service component and the price component, we're certainly gonna be under those three in particular, and we try to bring that value equation and lots of references from our other partners who may have used those guys or others in the past, who say, Reach is a great option and they're a little bit less expensive and they frankly do a better job. I've been aware of Reach for many years now. It's been a little bit confusing because there's a whole bunch of companies out there that use the term ‘reach' if they're associated with media in some way and of course, there's RMG Networks, which confuses things for me. Darren Wercinski: We actually, at one time, this is very long ago, I think his name was Gary McGuire, correct me if I'm wrong, and so that's how long we've been around. And so we were actually working with Lifetime Fitness and Lifetime Fitness was both working with our Reach and Reach Media Network and RMG and we had even a legal at Lifetime Fitnesses send us each individual contract for the wrong company, so that's how confusing it was and stuff. So we've just been around a long time in space, but really in our roots and I think that's maybe where some people don't know as much about Reach or just our story. So we actually started out with Mark Klein, my business partner, and co-founder, this was years and years ago, so I think in 2005, we were thinking about a business model that could really attract in sort of the youth sports space and so I was working at Best Buy Corporate at the time in the strategy group, the one thing I realized was going to be a real challenge for Best Buy was the price of Plasma screens, if you can think that far back were gonna collapse. They knew this capacity was coming on in China. We knew the cost of screens was going down and so a $3,000 screen for 50-inch plasma was gonna go to $250 in two years or whatever the number was. I was thinking about that space. Mark really liked to use Sports space and we decided to actually go with an ad-based model where we would give, in this case, ice arenas, which are big in Minnesota, by the way, in Canada, as you know. We would provide them with the software and the technology that could show their locker rooms, and that was really their pain point because they used to have those white easel boards out that would show you like they'd write on them the locker room assignments. So we actually started and integrated with some software companies that would show the locker room assignments and we'd go out and sell basically local ads to really fund it and so that's how the company grew and grew. Outside of Minnesota and Canada and a little bit on the East coast ice arenas just aren't really that big of a deal, and that's how we started expanding into other verticals, really more fitness-centric, so YMCAs, community centers et cetera, and we grew this ad-based market, and if you know anything about ads, and I think you do, especially in the digital signage, ads are certainly not bought, they're sold and it is a very grinding business. You're cold calling, you're relying on reps to really mow some commission base to go out and sell every year. There's not a huge high renewal rate on ads renewing every year. So that means you're going back into these same locations and trying to resell ads, and I'd say Reach has been a startup twice. So we actually built that business model just through ads and I'll say we think we had about a network of about 500 screens at the time. We built it to about a 5 million local ad business, which in that space is pretty amazing. So I'm always indebted to our ad team who helped build that out. But really at that time, I could see the writing on the wall that, in terms of trying to scale that business, which is next to impossible and actually there were some other companies doing that as well, and about that time, we either got to the point that our good locations or ad locations, they didn't want ads, they just wanted to use our software, and they said, “Hey, we really love your software. We don't want the ads on the screen. Can we just pay you a fee?” And I started thinking, yeah, that sounds great because it's that recurring fee, and at other times, we had ad locations that were terrible and in a bad part of town, or we couldn't sell ads, so we went to them and said, listen, we're gonna close this thing down unless you want to pay a fee and they said, sure, we'd love to, and so we slowly started transitioning our business model and we started getting into more colleges and just using our entire application to solve many of the use cases that we still have today. Do you do any digital out-of-home stuff now? Darren Wercinski: We do a little bit just because I'm so damn loyal to all those reps who've helped build the company. So we do still have a little bit of that business, but primarily it's almost everything is geared toward software as a service. At one time, I'll say eight years ago for the platform we had about 20 reps, one IT guy, maybe one other support guy, and the rest were just grinding through ads, and so now we have almost 20 developers and IT people, we have a variety of different teams. Kiersten, you could probably tell me more about how the company's changed over those years. Kiersten Gibson: Starting out with what Beer Pong lunches on Wednesdays with a group of 10 of us? Darren Wercinski: Those were the good days. Those were the fun days, Dave, where you could just relax at lunch and play some Beer Pong and sometimes the problem was a Beer Pong extended from lunch into the afternoon, into the evening. Kiersten Gibson: There's a lot more structure. Darren Wercinski: No, there are maybe some good stories. Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I was gonna say, definitely 10 years ago, that's when I started with the company, I sat next to our one developer. There was one support guy who also installed too. So we still installed the screens for these ad-based facilities, but, the one thing I would say, as Darren said, is we have 20 developers now from the one when I started, but then also just our customer success teams. We always knew that support obviously was a big component. We've always had at least one support person when the company started. But now we have just different customer success teams that we continue to build on. As Darren said, our install coordinators are more or fewer project managers for that implementation. We have an account management team, we have a support team, we have a design team. We're building our marketing. So one of the things that are really exciting, especially what I've been involved in, is not only expanding our clients but building our partnerships, not only with our hardware providers but some of our integrator partners. Like Darren was mentioning with the locker room schedules and everything, just really expanding on that because at the end of the day, building their confidence with us is only gonna help build our client portfolio as well. I found it interesting when you were talking about the locker room schedules, Darren. Going back to the mid-2000s doing data integration like that, and that's fundamentally what it was, was pretty rare. You would see it in airports on departure screens and so on. But that was pretty much it. So you were doing what I call boring signage, but boring being a good term, going way, way back. Is that still a substantial amount of what you do? Darren Wercinski: The integrations are the key to our entire business, and that's how we also differentiate ourselves in terms of our integration. So it's a skillset and a capability that we built early on, and you're right, you have to think of a way that makes the signage actually useful to your end users and creates value to not only the people seeing your screens, but into the locations, and so they have something that people actually wanna see, and so in our case, our first hook was really around pulling and scheduling information, and we've expanded that into so many different areas. So our capabilities around the integrations are really key. And I know Dave, I've seen in some of your other podcasts, or you even mentioned a little bit about the way you think that some CMSs are too generic in nature and that they should be industry-focused, and I agree with you in one respect, but I think on the other, you have to have a capability that's really meaningful to clients over time, that actually does give you some stickiness and the other thing I was thinking about and why you don't know as much about Reach is I think we took a little bit different path in terms of our own marketing and how we grew a lot of our clients, whereas some other CMSs may have just focused on going to the sort of the industry trade shows, which we went to as well, we would go heavy into a vertical trade show. So we would find a vertical we like, maybe it's churches or car washes, and we'd start hitting all these industry-specific shows. So we would be the only digital signage company that would be setting up a booth at these kinds of random verticals and it started to really grow because we'd be the only ones there, and you'd start to take on 10, 20, 40, 50 customers. So you develop some capabilities within these industries. So you'd become the car wash guy or you become the church guy, or you become this variety of verticals, and I think that really helped in our growth. Now that we've expanded with so many clients, we don't do quite as much of that anymore, but it's really the way in which we navigated our client growth and our go-to-market strategy. Yeah, and I think that's really smart. I've written about that a few times, about companies that don't put all of their marketing eggs in the Infocom or the DSE basket. They show up at these weird little shows like airport technology or airport security conference. Yeah, and like you say, you're the one pretty girl at the dance. Darren Wercinski: Yeah, it's made a huge difference in terms of that, and I think that kinda gets back to our support too. When you start to build these relationships and people refer you and you grow your market space there. You mentioned, you're doing more work in hospitals and corporate, is that because you've focused on it, or is it just an area that seems to be growing? Darren Wercinski: Kiersten is our EVP of Sales and Marketing, and she is the one that's really talking to the customers and has the most insight. I'm just the one that watches the sales come in, and smiles at the end of the month, hopefully. And yells at people if they don't come in! Darren Wercinski: Yeah, that's right. I do that. Thank you, Dave. I like that. Kiersten Gibson: I would say in terms of hospitals and our corporate clients, it wasn't like we were going after that industry by any means. I always think of it as a use case. We could provide the same exact use case for a corporate company that we provide for a hospital, that we provide for education, and my examples always go back to say break rooms. So employee communications, it really doesn't matter which vertical you're in, that use case is pertinent to any type of industry. I think with Covid, that's where we saw the biggest uptick in corporate and healthcare for us, Mass General was one of the biggest ones that came to us pre-Covid and really working with their Head of IT to build the network within Partners Healthcare, which that's what Mass Journal is a part of. So that's just one example. But in terms of our corporate and employee communications, where we really started seeing it taking off again, going back to those integrations, we really focused on the integrations that were most common amongst our entire client portfolio. So one example is Power BI. We were one of the first CMSs to build a Power BI app that was easily authenticated by pulling their reports and dashboards, we built a OneDrive integration. We built Zoom, WebEx, and Teams integration. So all these are small integrations that they don't have to pay extra for, they can easily do it themselves. That is something, I think that's where we saw our corporate footprint really start to grow. Darren Wercinski: The other thing that's funny about that, because I was on some of those calls, and I was thinking about the Power BI one in particular with the client and they're still our client, they've been with us for five or six years and they've grown quite a bit. We were on the call, and they said, can you do this? And I'm eyeing my Head of IT. His name is Nate Davis. He's outstanding, our chief technology officer, and Nate's always great cuz he says there is definitely a way we can build this, how much it's gonna cost and how much time it's gonna take might be a different thing. But we ended up building this and I committed to the customer at the time, we're gonna get this Power BI app built and we built it in, I'll say four weeks or whatever. But it's a great application and that's kind of the way in which we go to market in terms of if our clients are asking for something and we think we can build it for them and then, and obviously leverage it to other clients as well, that is certainly something we will do to help win some deals and show that flexibility and our willingness to partner with our clients over time. Is that why you have 20 developers? Because it seems like a lot of people for a relatively small company to be focused on development, but there's a lot of work to do those integrations, right? Darren Wercinski: There is, but that is twofold. One, we have a goal of doubling our revenue in the next two, basically two years. So we feel like we're in a really good spot. We're really aggressive now in hiring people and coming out of Covid and realizing the success that we've had and we'll continue to have. We really wanna hit the accelerator. So I've been spending a ton of money on the team. We're doing a giant CMS rewrite that we're spending almost $2 million on and we're all in to try and take the company to the next level, and I don't even mind telling people this, because it's just part of our vision, a year ago we were at $5 million in recurring revenue and. We had a great year last year and we expect to be at $10 million by the end of 2024. So those are some big aspirational jumps, but that's what we're going for.. And how is this being funded? Is it just out of your own revenues, or are you docked? Darren Wercinski: I guess I had some original investors. Thank you, mom, my uncle, and my cousins, but it's all been I just raised a little bit of seed money when I first started, this is 2005. We haven't raised money in, I don't know, 10 years, and I bought out a lot of the investors along the way. They literally put in $10,000-$20,000 bucks. It's a lot of money, but relatively speaking, it was small, but I've always focused on making money. So that's the one thing. I never wanted to be beholden to investors or banks or anybody else. I've never taken VC money because I had a vision for the company. I wanted to control it, and I was perfectly fine by the way, running on a path that was different from others, I was fine with incremental or continuous growth and making a profit at the same time and maybe that's why we didn't grow as fast as we could have because I had a budget and I stuck to it. But at the same time, I think it puts you in a much better position. When you're scrappy all the time, it forces you to do different things, and I'm not saying Kiersten and the team would call me cheap, would you ? Don't answer that! But I was very prudent, and I really wanted to invest in the things that I thought added the most were the most meaningful for our clients so support and, being flexible with them and trying to, provide free services, like creative and all these things that, that really add value over time. To answer your question, I think our paths have been a little bit different but certainly one, I won't go back on. Are you getting the phone calls and the emails and, how are you doing from private equity and VC people? Darren Wercinski: I do, but I don't respond, and it's been nonstop, and actually, so there are different stages in the SaaS company: if you can get to $1 million, you can grind out and do that. If you can get to the $2 to $3 million, that's a win, and when you get to $5 million, it's an interesting thing because private equity and some VCs, start to come hard because they like the model and it's working. They have a lot of cash available too, that's in the industry. So they're trying to make investments and do things. But for me, it was never really about the money or trying to sell. Obviously, we have had the company for almost 20 years, I love the employees. I love what we're doing. I think for me, resetting our goals of trying to double our revenue was really exciting because we also had to redo, we had to add staff. We're adding some new leadership right now in terms of a Customer Success Director to really manage the team and hopefully take our customer success to the next level, and so to me, the challenge is trying to grow that revenue and really redo things in a company and build in new processes that are gonna make us scalable to that $10 million bogey. Put it this way, I'm not gonna be sitting on a beach and Nova Scotia with you, Dave, counting all the cash that you made. That's right. You wouldn't want to today anyways. It's snowing, although not as bad as it does in Minnesota. I was curious, about one thing you said where you are doing a complete software rewrite, and is that kind of a nod to web services and everything that's emerging with technology right now where you can't just continually build out something, traces back in some respects to 2005. I know a company in the UK that built their platform in I think 2015 and by 2019 or so, they said, you know what, we're tearing it up and we're gonna rebuild just because they could see all the new capabilities out there. Darren Wercinski: There are two answers to your question. One is: we were getting customer feedback which may have been great by the way. Our NPS score is super and we love that stuff they give great feedback every time that we can really use, and some of it was: It's a little hard to use now. It's a little clunky. It's a little this thing. We love your stuff, and we really needed to just take a look at our c m s and make it easier to use the challenge. So going back when you try and please every customer, you end up building a lot of one-off stuff along the way, and all of a sudden you look at your application, and yeah it's robust, but it's not exactly intuitive because you have to do X, Y, and Z. And we built a lot of this stuff quickly to try and get those deals closed and build it out. So one first part was just, you know what? We need to refresh and reset and get more customer feedback and more UI and UX capabilities into our platform. So that was the trigger number one. The second was: the industry's changing too, by the way. It's not just signage on a screen anymore. You have to be able to reach people outside of your traditional office setting or facilities, and so we've spent more time trying to make our application flexible so people from home can see our digital signage on their computers through teams or through websites digital signage, or just a more flexible approach to meet people because they're not always coming into the office anymore. And the communications team still wants to reach people. We just wanna be a more flexible platform to do that. Kiersten, do you have any additional thoughts on that? I know you talked to the clients quite a bit. Kiersten Gibson: I was gonna say, going back to when I started too, one thing you might not know about me, Dave, but Darren hired me as our project manager for our mobile application that he thought was really gonna take off Darren Wercinski: You test and you'll learn, okay, Dave, you test and you learn and you evolve. I have no problem making mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and learning from them. Kiersten Gibson: So learning how to code without having a degree in coding was very interesting. But we did it. But no, I would say, one thing I've learned over the years is, we tried to add on all these additional solutions. What we learned was we can't be everything to everyone and really focus on what we're good at, which again goes back to that digital signage. But we do have these additional solutions we still support. The mobile app still brings us a decent amount of revenue. So our mobile application that employees can download to view more information, it can be, again, going back to those fitness centers, maybe they're viewing schedules, things like that. But what we've really tried to push people towards is, like Darren said, the website digital signage, where it's say, embedded in their intranet. So they can push the same messaging from their digital signage into the website. So remote employees can view the same messaging and it's right there too. So you're not expected to say it's a screensaver. It's not something that a particular employee can disable. It's something that they're forced to see because they have to go on their intranet every day. So I'd say that's what we've seen. It's just kind of an add-on to their digital signage network if you will. Are you finding that the average customer is more equipped with knowing what they want and how they're going to use it than in the past when, I'm sure, 10 years ago the conversations you had were just explaining what the hell digital signage was and I assume now that they know exactly what it is and they know how they wanna use it? Darren Wercinski: Yeah, if you think about it, I'll say even five years ago, we used to sell a hell of a lot more hardware in this all-in-one solution where we would sell them the screen, the media player, the installation, the mounts, we'd sell all because that's all they knew, and so over the last couple years, our hardware has gone way down, which is awesome because that's one industry we don't want to be in, and we're repurposing a lot of stuff. So we repurpose some competitors' players at times, we start to just sell more software and it's already set up as well where we're just replacing stuff that they have. I am also curious about AI and how that plays a role in future development, or does it? Darren Wercinski: For us? Not really. I can't say that's been a question, I know there are other companies out there that actually do that. They may be more retail-centric or whatever. I wouldn't say retail's a huge industry for us because there are certain things that other companies do better than us. We have not spent any time really thinking about AI. We're really trying to focus on trying to expand our “reach” outside of the traditional office setting through those applications that Kiersten had just mentioned. Yeah, I know all the AI stuff for digital science to date has been focused on computer vision, but I could imagine all kinds of capabilities around content production, smart scheduling, smart triggering, and all that sort of stuff down the road. But it's still just evolving right now. Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and it's just a capability. As Kiersten mentioned, we can't be everything to everybody, and we're really trying sort of stick to that. Reach has been notoriously famous for creating applications that were about 80% done, we would get them to work, but we never really got that full implementation, and communication out to the client. So that's actually the one thing that I changed last year in terms of the beginning of 2022, maybe it's all my fault, but it was a direction we set where we really were trying to always, and now it's like no, let's just hit the pause button, let's do things that are meaningful, let's say things that are purposeful that our clients are asking for, and that we can communicate back out. And so that was one of the big shifts that we made at the beginning of last year, and to get user feedback, we would build stuff sometimes with basically never talking to our clients or assuming what they wanted, and then it would sometimes be right but sometimes be wrong, and so we really hit the pause button and changed our strategy around real development, and that's also why I think we added seven developers last year and just changed some processes. As I said, these are big investments in space. All right. This has been great. If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online? Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, you can find us on our website. There is a contact us form that they can fill out to learn more. So our website is reachmedianetwork.com As opposed to the four or five other Reach Medias that you'll find if you Google it? Kiersten Gibson: Reach Media Network Digital signage. Darren Wercinski: You know what's funny? One last thing is we were actually BroadSign's second or third customer, just to give you a sense of how long we've actually been in the space. RIP Brian Deseo because I was sorry to hear that. But I remember working with Brian and they were actually out in Idaho at the time, that's how long ago it was. But I just thought about it, thinking about the company and our journey over the years to see Broadsign where they're at and where we're at. But we actually were the second or third customer way back in 2000. Back in the day, yeah. All right. Thanks again for taking the time with me. Darren Wercinski: Appreciate it, Dave. We look forward to seeing you at your next party. Kiersten Gibson: Thanks, Dave.
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we complete our brief series on Rogue, though admittedly if you want the full experience, cut up the two episodes into one minute pieces and randomly select fifty to eighty of those pieces and play them in random order. This week we talk about strategies, life lessons from Rogue, and of course give our takeaways. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: A few more hours (Tim) and way too many (Brett) Issues covered: a visit by June, meeting a griffin, lack of physical damage in creatures, desirable item assessment, changing how you play by what you find, combinatorics, not knowing how many good wands there are, Brett's many strategies, traps and their impact later, the importance and pressure of food, inventory management, having to level up as you go, invisible creatures, regeneration, information is power, constraints dictating the design, treasure rooms and teleportation, the anecdote factory, whether items are weighted, iterating the design, monsters carrying items, fearing the kryptonite ring, the loot factory naming scheme, your first cursed item, life lessons learned from Rogue, resting too long, throwing potions, confusion, multiple dice games and scalability, the profound impact of constraints, someone oughta make a genre out of this, efficient for development, finding my exit strategy, simple objects creating depth, making the most of mechanics, yes and, the power of iteration, grinding as a failed strategy, always having a chance you might win, signing up for the experience, the supreme flexibility of text, comedy and the roguelike, retention and the roguelike, incorporating RPG elements, resetting a space. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Valheim, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls, Colossal Cave Adventure, Infocom, Space Quest, King's Quest, MYST, Spelunky, Diablo, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Trek, Storyteller, Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, Shadowrun, Solitaire, Hunt the Wumpus, mysterydip, Ron Gilbert, Goat Simulator, Zach Gage, Deus Ex, Prey, Dishonored (series), Deathloop, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: Bonus game! Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub DevGameClub@gmail.com
Steve Meretzky is an American video game developer best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the hit interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the comically titled Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment. His keen wit, prose, and coding skill made him one of the first interactive fiction writers admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America. He has been involved in almost every aspect of casual game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design.
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we begin a new series on 1980's seminal and genre-naming title, Rogue. We set the game in time and talk about what constitutes the genre before diving into some particulars. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: A few runs Issues covered: buying the game in a box, being disappointed in the ASCII, being turned off by procedural games, the differences in later games, the lore of the game, playing on a mainframe, the roots of so many games in text format, a top 50 achievement in games, the elements of the Rogue-like, procedural generation, inventory, randomized items, permadeath, getting over the hurdles in types of games, a chain reaction of bad things, clicking with a specific experience, simulating the rogue-like, a long shadow, playing to get a feel, being terrified of letters, trying things at random, a voyage of discovery, knowledge, renaming everything, consistent descriptions, thinking about strategy, the cumbersome bow mechanics, more depth than expected, the possibilities of emergence, anecdote factory, "wait, there are bear traps?" Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Adventure, Atari 2600, Colossal Cave Adventure, Dungeons & Dragons, Egghead Software, Moria, Nethack, Jamie Fristrom, ADOM, Angband, Zork, Infocom, Mystery House, On-Line Systems, Sierra Online, Ken and Roberta Williams, Hunt the Wumpus, Star Trek, Pac-Man, Battlezone, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Activision, Taito, LucasArts, Space Quest/King's Quest, Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, Ken Arnold, DARPANET, World of Warcraft, Mario (series), Dark Souls, Rogue Legacy, Epyx, Spelunky, Oblivion, Morrowind, PSP/Vita, Andy Nealen, Diablo, Calamity Nolan, Dead Cells, Eggplant (podcast), mysterydip, Clint Hocking, Patrick Redding, Mark Garcia, Artimage, LostLevels, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers. Next time: Get that Amulet of Yendor! Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub Discord: https://t.co/YVZOe7ZygI DevGameClub@gmail.com
In the first of our epic 2 part interview, we go deep inside the world of Infocom with Mike Dornbrook. Infocom were one of the earliest video games companies, starting on university mainframes, their text adventures like Zork and Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy soon became cult classics on home micros. The Space Bar 25th anniversary re-release: https://www.zoom-platform.com/product/the-space-bar Please visit our amazing sponsors and help to support the show: Bitmap Books https://www.bitmapbooks.com/ We need your help to ensure the future of the podcast, if you'd like to help us with running costs, equipment and hosting, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://theretrohour.com/support/ https://www.patreon.com/retrohour Get your Retro Hour merchandise: https://bit.ly/33OWBKd Join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/GQw8qp8 Website: http://theretrohour.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theretrohour/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/retrohouruk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retrohouruk/ Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/theretrohour Upcoming events: Notts VGA Festival - https://www.nottsvge.com/ - 17th & 18th December 2022 Show notes: Spectrum Quake: https://bit.ly/3DWCXQR Every US PS2 manual scanned: https://bit.ly/3Wxh6XC Oregon Trail comes to Switch: https://bit.ly/3UqZlra The Samurai collection: https://bit.ly/3UH1Be3 C64 accordian: https://bit.ly/3UsjRYu
Point & Click adventure games are going through a major revival at the moment, and we chat to Dave Gilbert from indie studio Wadjet Eye Games. Inspired by classics from Sierra and Infocom, they specialise in the adventure genre, with some stunning pixel art and stories. Wadjet Eye Games: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/ Please visit our amazing sponsors and help to support the show: Bitmap Books https://www.bitmapbooks.com/ Check out PCBWay at pcbway.com for all your PCB needs Thanks to our latest Patreon backers, in the Hall of Fame this week: Dave Moyle, Paul Wilcock We need your help to ensure the future of the podcast, if you'd like to help us with running costs, equipment and hosting, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://theretrohour.com/support/ https://www.patreon.com/retrohour Get your Retro Hour merchandise: https://bit.ly/33OWBKd Join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/GQw8qp8 Website: http://theretrohour.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theretrohour/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/retrohouruk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retrohouruk/ Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/theretrohour Upcoming events: Amiga 37 - 15th and 16th October Notts VGA Festival - https://www.nottsvge.com/ - 17th & 18th December 2022 Show notes: Guy completes every N64 game: https://bit.ly/3QJS7Mt Portable Amstrad CPC464: https://bit.ly/3dmb8Hh Wolfenstein 3D on Sega Master System: https://bit.ly/3DstMaW Gargoyles remaster: https://bit.ly/3qFKpbG Intellivision Amico non-exclusives: https://bit.ly/3ROOs1n
Gil and Sen sit down with game designer and chronicler Aaron A. Reed to talk about his project 50 Years of Text Games, in which he covered one important game for each year between 1971 and 2020. The project will be made into a book. SHOW NOTES 2m21s: The Oregon Trail 3m13s: Gil mentions a bunch of games that Aaron wrote about: Adventure, Hunt the Wumpus, games made with Inform and Twine, 80 Days, Fallen London. 9m22s: Sen's childhood PET computer, Gil's childhood Panasonic computer 10m24s: The game Adventure, the company Infocom, and the rise of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). 14m16s: You can probably add board games like Gloomhaven to this list too! 17m28s: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, with the infamous Babel Fish puzzle. Here is the text of the Infocom hint guide for that puzzle. Click "Next Answer" for the next step. Each step has spoilers, obviously! Also, Gil was wrong, it was "only" 30 steps. 18m33s: Myst 20m07s: Infocom's "feelies." Several fan sites have information on them; this is one. 20m38s: Infocom's game Suspended had a ridiculously cool cover; a plastic injection-molded face with cut-outs for the eyes. The eyes you see on the cover are printed on cardboard beneath the face. Because the images for the eyes are recessed, they will seem to follow you if you walk past the game on the shelf. 22m54s: Robert Lafore's "Interactive Fiction" 26m46s: St. Bride's School 30m45s: The Oz Project 33m09s: The digital game Façade. 36m00s: Adventuron, Choice of Games' ChoiceScript, Inkle 37m00s: So Far, Photopia, Galatea, Trinity 42m01s: The harrowing dramatic film The Sweet Hereafter, which was an inspiration for Photopia. 44m46s: The seminal ARG The Beast, created to promote the film AI 49m47s: Here's the article Gil was talking about. Also, Porpentine's game With Those We Love Alive 52m35s: PixelBerry's interactive romances Choices, of which The Freshman is a story in the game. 56m10s: Ludology 151, where Geoff and Gil discuss what a game actually is. 57m57s: Aaron's book Subcutanean, which is different for everyone who buys it. 58m51s: Sen is likely thinking of Cain's Jawbone, a puzzle released in 1934 by Edward Mathers, under the pseudonym Torquemada. 1h01m27s: Archives of the Sky 1h03m03s: The short IF game 9:05. It's really quick; play it if you can! 1h04m10s: Star Saga One: Beyond the Boundary. 1h05m05s: Above & Below, Near & Far, Tales of the Arabian Nights 1h06m02s: Aaron's 50 Years of Text Games book
Eaten By A Grue: Infocom, Text Adventures, and Interactive Fiction
The guys from Grue tackle another pair of modern Interactive Fiction games, or at least try to. First up is Everybody Dies, by Jim Munroe, in which ... well, everybody dies. Until they don't. And maybe there are ghosts. Next is Bee, by Emily Short, about going to a spelling bee. Except the only version of the game available doesn't include the spelling bee. Infocom games were never this complicated.
TCW Podcast Episode 160 - The 100,000 Part 1 We want to thank everyone for helping us to reach 100,000 downloads of the podcast! We started in September 2015 and are amazed at the love & support we have received. To celebrate, we are looking at the list of the SPA's highest sellers of computer software in the 1980s. We start off in part one looking at the three 500k sellers and then move on to the 250k sellers. We get a view of the computer software market during this time, and have a little fun too! Kent Brockman Welcoming out Insect Overlords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4jWAwUb63c TCW 028 - Picking up the Pieces: The US Arcade Industry After the Crash: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/picking-up-the-pieces-the-us-arcade-industry-after-the-crash/ TCW 041 - Beating Them All Up: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/beating-them-all-up/ The Print Shop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxL7-XLGfDg TCW 071 -A Story of Brøderbund!: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/a-story-of%c2%a0br%c3%b8derbund/ TCW 061 - Where in the Game is Carmen Sandiego?: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/where-in-the-game-is-carmen-sandiego/ TCW 094 - Epyx not Epic: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/epyx-not-epic/ TCW 058 - EA Sports: It's in the Game!: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/ea-sports-its-in-the-game/ C64 Jingle Disk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q8spzHvY1Q CGA Jingle Disk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBOBhZXAXNU TCW 006 - The Early History of Electronic Arts: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/the-early-history-of-electronic-arts%c2%a0/ TCW 101 - Infocom: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/infocom/ Why Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego: https://gamehistory.org/where-in-north-dakota-is-carmen-sandiego/ New episodes on the 1st and 15th of every month! TCW Email: feedback@theycreateworlds.com Twitter: @tcwpodcast Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theycreateworlds Alex's Video Game History Blog: http://videogamehistorian.wordpress.com Alex's book is available for preorder and should be released through CRC Press in December 2019: http://bit.ly/TCWBOOK1 Intro Music: Josh Woodward - Airplane Mode - Music - "Airplane Mode" by Josh Woodward. Free download:http://joshwoodward.com/song/AirplaneMode Outro Music: RolemMusic - Bacterial Love - http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic/Pop_Singles_Compilation_2014/01_rolemusic_-_bacterial_love Copyright: Attribution: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Eaten By A Grue: Infocom, Text Adventures, and Interactive Fiction
Kay and Carrington leave behind the world of Infocom and venture into the future! (By which we mean the 1990s.) In this episode they tackle the two winners of the First Annual IF Competition: A Change in the Weather by Andrew Plotkin, and Uncle Zebulon's Will by Magnus Olsson.
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