» Planescape: Torment, Part 1: From the Tabletop… The Digital Antiquarian

» Planescape: Torment, Part 2: …to the Desktop The Digital Antiquarian

The photographer’s model for the visage of The Nameless One on the now-iconic Planescape: Torment box was actually Guido Henkel, the game’s producer, who was enlisted at the last minute when the planned professional model had a “scheduling conflict.”

» How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint) The Digital Antiquarian

One can learn much about the state of computer gaming in any given period by looking to the metaphors its practitioners are embracing. In the early 1980s, when interfaces were entirely textual and graphics crude or nonexistent, text adventures like those of Infocom were heralded as the vanguard of a new interactive literature destined to augment or entirely supersede non-interactive books. That idea peaked with the mid-decade bookware boom, when just about every entertainment-software publisher (and a few traditional book publishers) were rushing to sign established authors and books to interactive projects. It then proceeded to collapse just as quickly under the weight of its own self-importance when the games proved less compelling and the public less interested than anticipated.

This Gamescom Showcase Did A Lot Of Games Dirty

Sorry to anyone who wasn’t Square Enix or CD Projekt Red

The CRPG Project

I’ve been thinking about computer RPGs a lot recently, and trying to play a bunch. There’s a quality that I’ve always loved about especially older computer RPGs: you really felt t…

Despite Awards, South Of Midnight Studio Becomes Latest Victim Of Microsoft’s Implosion

Compulsion Games could be on the chopping block, months after Xbox hyped up its award wins

Open Gaming Deja Vu

a clear-eyed view of open from 1999

Five studios form developer-led holding Nova Assembly

Group consists of Unfrozen, Sad Cat Studios, VEA Games, Weappy, and Game Garden

» The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings The Digital Antiquarian

For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore Amiga, its Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis brought it to no fewer than 23 other platforms, from natural habitats like MS-DOS and the Apple Macintosh to such refugees of the 8-bit era as the Sinclair Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, from cutting-edge multimedia appliances like the Philips CD-i and the 3DO to handheld gadgets like the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear. In all of its incarnations, it outsold any other game ever to have passed through the hands of Psygnosis by a veritable order of magnitude.

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 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.

» An Ion Storm!, Part 1: The Ascent to Gamer Paradise The Digital Antiquarian

At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls. It was the whole Carmack idea of, “I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair,” instead of, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of money, why not make a really bad-ass office?”

Tengo Project announces side-scrolling shoot ’em up remake Cybernetic Attack: Final Mission

Tengo Project has announced Cybernetic Attack: Final Mission, a 16-bit-style remake of the 8-bit side-scrolling shoot ’em up game S.C.A.T.: Special Cybernetic Attack Team. Platforms and a rel…