As a game designer, you have ultimate power. And with this ultimate power comes very little responsibility.
» The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization The Digital Antiquarian
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
» Starcraft (A History in Two Acts) The Digital Antiquarian
Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.
» Choose Your Own Adventure The Digital Antiquarian
The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games.
» Half-Life The Digital Antiquarian
Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite work out of the game — was a kind of ideological stake in the ground: we really did want the game and the story to be the same thing. It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.
Anti AI? Be Pro Human! - Sylvia’s Studio
This is the fifth post in my 'hitting the digital brakes'-series. These are the previous posts in this series: 1. the joys of imperfection 2. Do we really need the...
» The Last Adventures of Legend The Digital Antiquarian
The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.
» Outcast The Digital Antiquarian
The Outcast box was styled to look like a movie poster. Riffing on the same theme, Infogrames’s head Bruno Bonnell called it “the first videogame that really tries to be an interactive movie,” leaving one to wonder whether he had somehow missed the first nine years of the 1990s, during which countless games tried desperately to be just that. Ironically, Outcast actually has very few of the characteristics that had become associated with the phrase: no rigidly linear plot, no digitized human actors, no out-of-engine cutscenes after the obligatory opening one. It’s a game rather than a movie through and through, and all the better for it.
» Ultima, Part 1 The Digital Antiquarian
When we left Richard Garriott, California Pacific had just released his first game, Akalabeth, a substantial windfall for the 19-year-old university student. In between classes and SCA events, he spent his sophomore year at the University of Texas writing a new, much more ambitious game, which CP published just as the spring semester of 1981 was wrapping up. I think we can best proceed by just diving right into the game that retroactively came to be known as Ultima I.
Temporarily Offline
A slightly unerving game on technological violence induced by pseudosimplicity and increasingly awful UI.
» The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything The Digital Antiquarian
I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.
Digital Eugenics and the Extinction of Humanity
If we are to combat the AI industry’s push to build digital gods, we have to understand the ideology of the antihumanist project, writes Dr. Émile P. Torres.
Aesthetic Deception
» Riven The Digital Antiquarian
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
Game Dev Tree | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
The Legacy of No Man’s Sky in Game Design
Two years ago, No Man’s Sky, a sci-fi space exploration game boasting powerful procedural generation, released to a flurry of negative…
