The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer – Holy Ghost Stories
In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.
triumph of the nerds
Collections: Teaching Paradox, Imperator, Part IIa: Pops and Chains
This is the first half of the second part of our three part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactive’s Hellenistic-era grand strategy game Imperator: Rome. I had hoped to do this…
In an Ancient Game, Computing's Future (Published 2002)
Go is game of such depth and complexity that no computer has yet been able to achieve level of skill beyond that of casual player; game described; programmers see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting ways in which human mind works, and challenge of programming computer to mimic human process goes to core of artificial intelligence; developments in analyzing game and programming it discussed; photos (M)
Computer Plant Life
"Thе Commodore РЕТ offers you а safe passage through the primeval swamр of computerization," says the ad copy accompanying this uncredited illustration in a June 1981 issue of Personal Computer World: That image and ad copy offers a perfect example of how most retro tech illustration works: Visualize the hell
» Zork on the PDP-10 The Digital Antiquarian
One distinguishing trait of hackers is the way they never see any program as completely, definitively done; there are always additions to be made, rough edges to be smoothed. Certainly Adventure, impressive as it was, left plenty of room for improvement. On top of all that, though, one also has to consider that Adventure came to MIT from Don Woods of Stanford’s AI Lab, perhaps the only computer-science program in the country with a stature remotely comparable to that of MIT. MIT students are fiercely proud of their alma mater. If Stanford had done the adventure game first, MIT’s Dynamic Modeling Group could still do it better. And it didn’t hurt that the heritage of Project MAC and the Laboratory for Computer Science, not to mention the DMG itself, gifted them with quite some tools to bring to bear on the problem.
Collections: Teaching Paradox, Imperator, Part IIb: Built in a Day
This is the second half of the second part of our three part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactive’s ancient grand strategy game Imperator: Rome which covers the broader Medit…
Scientists Are Discovering Long-Lost Rules for Ancient Board Games
You can play reconstructions of ancient board games thanks to these scientists and their algorithms.
Collections: Teaching Paradox, Imperator, Part IIIa: De Re Publica
This is the first half of the third part of our three-part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactive’s ancient grand strategy game Imperator: Rome, running from the late fourth through …
Collections: Teaching Paradox, Imperator, Part IIIb: Imperator Interrupted
This is the second half of the third and final part of our three-part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactives ancient grand strategy game, Imperator: Rome, which covers (inter alia) …
Elite: "The game that couldn't be written"
How ‘Baldur’s Gate’ Saved the Computer RPG
The genre-stretching game broke new narrative, technical, and gameplay ground and established the identity of one of the past two decades’ most storied video game studios
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500
Explore how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries in this large-scale research visualization.
GameSpot's SIMply Divine: The Story of Maxis Software
GameSpot action adventure driving puzzle role-playing simulation sports strategy hardware
META II: Digital Vellum in the Digital Scriptorium: Revisiting Schorre’s 1962 compiler-compiler: Queue: Vol 13, No 1
Some people do living history -- reviving older skills and material culture by reenacting Waterloo or knapping flint knives. One pleasant rainy weekend in 2012, I set my sights a little more recently and settled in for a little meditative retro-computing,...
