game history

  • Recommended posts, 2017-2025

    Hours Categories Game talk

    It’s been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due.

    As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just think of it as “my take on what the best stuff to look at on the site is.”

    Previous collections of recommended posts can be found under the Blog heading on the menu bar or at these links:

    Game design overviews

    All of these posts are about game design in general and tend to cover big swaths of similar territory.

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  • POSTMORTEMS is out

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing

    My new book Postmortems is now shipping. If you pre-ordered the Kindle version, it should be there for reading now.

    You should be able to get it from pretty much any bookstore. I get a little bit extra if you order it through this link on Amazon:

    It’s a hefty 700 pages. Early reviews are pretty flattering, and make me happy; I am looking forward to seeing what readers think! If you read it, please leave a review on Amazon; they matter a lot.

    Also, if you are an academic who might be interested in using the book in your classes, reach out to the publisher here to request a review copy.

    Here’s a sampling of press reviews, in case you aren’t sold on it yet: Read More “POSTMORTEMS is out”

  • New book POSTMORTEMS

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking, Writing
    Comments 3 Comments

    POSTMORTEMS book coverMy new book Postmortems is now available at various booksellers. The print edition ships on the 26th. Various sites may have the ebook already, some may not just yet.

    This is the first volume of a projected three that gather together many of the essays and writings that I have been sharing on this blog over the last several decades. This book focuses specifically on games I have worked on, from LegendMUD up through social games, and is a book of design history, lessons learned, and anecdotes. Richard Garriott was kind enough to write a foreword for the book.

    It’s not a memoir or tell-all; the focus is on game design and game history. There’s still nowhere near enough material out there in print covering things like the history and evolution of online worlds (MUDs especially), in-depth dives into decisions made in games by the people who made them, and detailed breakdowns of how they worked. So I hope that this will be useful to scholars and designers, and that players might find it a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. Just don’t expect salacious stories and secrets.

    Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while will find much in there that is familiar; if you have ever wanted the SWG postmortem series in book form, here it is in expanded form. If you have ever wished that the various articles on the UO design were gathered together, here they are, along with new chapters covering things like all the things we tried doing to curb excessive playerkilling. If you ever wondered what happened with Metaplace, this is how you find out, as there’s a new and extensive postmortem. Many blog commenters make cameos in footnotes.

    The contents: Read More “New book POSTMORTEMS”

  • The cost of games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 32 Comments

    Yesterday I was in Anaheim giving a talk called “Industry Lifecycles.” (click here for slides and video).

    It was intended to be a brief summary of the blog post of the same title, with a dash of material from my recent post on game economics.

    Now, that latter post resonated quite a lot. There was lengthy discussion on more Internet forums than I can count, but it came accompanied by skepticism regarding the data and conclusions. If you recall, the post was originally replies to various comment threads on different sites, glued together into a sort of Q&A format. It wasn’t based on solid research.

    As many pointed out, getting hard data on game costs is difficult. When I did my talk “Moore’s Wall” in 2005, I did some basic research using mostly publicly available data on costs, and extrapolated out an exponential curve for game costs, and warned that the trendlines looked somewhat inescapable to me. But much has changed, not least of which is the advent of at least two whole new business models in the intervening time.

    So the Casual Connect talk ended up being an updated Moore’s Wall. Using industry contacts and a bunch of web research, I assembled a data set of over 250 games covering the last several decades. This post is going to show you what I found, and in rather more detail than the talk since the talk was only 25 minutes. (You can follow this link to see the full slides, but this post is really a deeper dive on the same data.)

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  • Microvision emulator release

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    I’ve been working for a while–five years!–on my emulation arcade cabinet, entitled Press Start: Emulating Videogame History. I started with a stock cabinet and control panel, and have been gradually modding it with stuff, like a robotics-driven auto-rotating monitor, LED lighting that matches whatever game is launched, and additional controls. I’ve been slowly working on getting emulation set up on it for everything historically important from Tennis for Two on forward.

    But that’s another story. I mention it only because it led me to this little project.

    The very first handheld console that supported cartridges was called the Microvision, and it was made by Milton Bradley in 1979. It had a 16×16 pixel LCD screen, and of course the only color it supported on that screen was black. Only a dozen or so games were ever made for it, and it was pulled from the market only two years later, losing the popularity contest to Nintendo’s Game and Watch series as well as the myriad other handhelds that emerged around the same time. It would take until 1989 before someone else gave the handheld cartridge idea a shot — that device was called the Gameboy. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the Microvision helped inspire the Game and Watch series.

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