One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.
» The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 2: The Scandal The Digital Antiquarian
That’s the challenge: giving the public a formula they know and feel comfortable with, but making it different from anything they’ve seen or experienced before.
» The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition The Digital Antiquarian
I feel very comfortable working in a company where you can’t touch anything.
Justified: City Primeval
Having left the hollers of Kentucky 15 years ago, Raylan Givens is now based in Miami, balancing life as a marshal and part-time father of a 15-year-old girl. A chance encounter on a Florida highway sends him to Detroit and he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent sociopath who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and wants to do so again.
» The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 3: The Dog Days of Oakhurst The Digital Antiquarian
If you take the time to dig beneath the surface of any human community, no matter how humble, you’ll be rewarded with a welter of fascinating tales and characters. Certainly this is true of Oakhurst, California. The little town nestled in central California’s Yosemite Valley near the western end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains has attracted more than its fair share of dreamers and chancers over the past 175 years or so.
A Digitized New Haven Police: Investigating Axon’s Draft One
Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity. The first image of a police officer that comes to mind is probably of one in action. Few imagine the cop spending hours behind their desk, writing r…
The Game Dev Tree (Video Game) - TV Tropes
The Game Dev Tree is an Idle Game made in The Modding Tree by The Paper Pilot and released in 2020. In it, you are making your own game, releasing updates …
The Package King of Miami
Matthew Bergwall was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company. He decided to go in another direction.
The Package King of Miami
Matthew Bergwall was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company. He decided to go in another direction.
The Package King of Miami
Matthew Bergwall was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company. He decided to go in another direction.
A forty-year career.
The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains, but either way they are absolutely the protagonists. Working within the industry, I’ve worked with quite a few non-protagonists who experience their time in technology differently: a period of obligatory toil required to pry open the gate to the American Dream.
Josh Miller on Twitter / X
Starting today, Cory Hardman is @browsercompany's new head of security engineering. Cory was previously Head of Security for OpenSea, and a senior security engineer at Google (9 years) & Notion. Whether Arc for Teams or Dia for Consumers, security is a top 2025 priority.— Josh Miller (@joshm) January 8, 2025
» The Journeyman Project The Digital Antiquarian
I find that it’s oddly difficult for me to tell the story of Presto Studios, the maker of the Journeyman Project series of cult-classic adventure games, without drawing a lot of parallels and comparisons to Cyan, Inc., the maker of the multi-million-selling mega-hit Myst. This is not only because Presto won the lottery after making their last Journeyman Project game, when Cyan awarded them a contract to make a single-player Myst III while they themselves pursued an online multi-player adventure game that was to be called Uru. It’s also down to other similarities, the same ones that must have made that choice of Presto as a Myst custodian seem like such an obvious one to Cyan.
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
Aesthetic Deception
» A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 2: A Series of Unfortunate Events The Digital Antiquarian
Coming out of 1998, the folks at Looking Glass Studios believed they had pretty good reason to feel optimistic about their future. With Thief, they had delivered not just their first profitable original game since 1995’s Flight Unlimited but their biggest single commercial success ever. They had no fewer than four more games slated for release within the next fifteen months, a positively blistering pace for them. Yes, all of said games were sequels and iterations on existing brands, but that was just the nature of the industry by now, wasn’t it? As long-running franchises like Ultima had first begun to demonstrate fifteen years ago, there was no reason you couldn’t continue to innovate under a well-known and -loved banner headline. Looking Glass closed their Austin office that had done so much to pay the bills in the past by taking on porting contracts. In the wake of Thief, they felt ready to concentrate entirely on their own games.