over the summer i read Richard Moss's Shareware Heroes book, and it seemed like shareware basically died once you hit the 2000s; interesting to read this manifesto and how it's trying to imagine / push for what will basically become online retail stores like Steam but also trying to think of how to bridge a dying distribution model (shareware) into that. feels like the death of shareware probably felt pretty bleak to indie devs. but also i guess the internet provided a lot of hope, so maybe they didn't care

it's interesting to me (and surprising!) how much this manifesto emphasizes team size. would have expected more of an aesthetic emphasis. i wonder if just team sizes were starting to balloon around this time, and this is reacting to that explicitly?

it's interesting, the melos han-tani article linked above makes this exact same comparison. i wonder if he's read this? (seems very possible)

yeah sort of funny to read all of this and then see what i view as sort of conservative criticisms / outlooks of videogame design get wielded at the bottom. to me, one-time-through linear games are totally exciting and valuable and fit the spirit of this manifesto perfectly! think it's just that games as a medium have evolved a lot in the intervening years; new modes of play have been proven possible (or maybe they existed already and these writers didn't play them?)

sort of funny -- i feel this definition is now realized by the "III" games (just big indie games), which actually feel pretty "corporate" to me still. like, i don't think the reality of this vision matches the spirit of the manifesto, at least in the modern games scene

i actually really like the term scratchware...kinda want to revive it

this whole section is kinda sad in retrospect :( haha

interesting how much Daikatana comes up in this. def sounds like Romero deserves all the hate if he crunched his team this hard (sounds like the ad campaign for Daikatana originally wanted to release in 1997, which means maybe they crunched hard for 3 years??). it also released in May of 2000, and this manifesto released in on 9/5/2000 (or maybe 5/9/2000? not sure lol); so maybe it's just recency bias too. had never heard of this game at all, so interesting to see how much conversation seemed to be around it!

i was really confused by this lol so i looked into it, and it seems to be a reference to a marketing campaign for Daikatana, which was supposed to be Romero's first game post-id software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Storm#Legacy

link's broken, but seems to be this guy: https://blood-wiki.org/index.php/Jason_Hall

(he's referred to as "King of the Monstars" here, and it's the same guy: https://www.shacknews.com/article/9670/nolf-interview)

:'(

do we think greg costikyan still calls himself a gamer

i really like this :)

????????????

this is really interesting i think. i feel like these days, with consoles pretty unthinkingly accepted as the dominant / defacto mode of videogames, that their controllers have sort of become accepted as: "this is what a videogame controller is." but i can see how in 2000, when big-budget PC exclusives were still a thing, and not too far from arcade dominance (or at least close enough to have devs who would have like worked through that transition, maybe), maybe there was a lot more talk about controllers? and resistance over consoles settling into a singular controller setup?

i do feel Costikyan is maybe too doe-eyed with videogames? this feels....unnecessarily hopeful

this is such a good word omg

https://www.google.com/search?q=brobdignabian+define&client=firefox-b-1-d&sxsrf=AJOqlzWv8n0WAlQPKnRoUPdGu_KQmbyi5A%3A1675111501606&ei=TSzYY_rRJPSgptQPi9SdMA&ved=0ahUKEwi6rIzQlPD8AhV0kIkEHQtqBwYQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=brobdignabian+define&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIHCAAQDRCABDIKCAAQCBAeEA0QCjIFCAAQhgMyBQgAEIYDMgUIABCGAzIFCAAQhgM6CggAEEcQ1gQQsAM6DAgAEA0QgAQQRhD5AToGCAAQHhANOggIABAeEA0QDzoKCAAQCBAeEA0QDzoGCAAQFhAeOggIABAWEB4QDzoICAAQFhAeEApKBAhBGABKBAhGGABQgBdYvx9g2iBoAXABeACAAW6IAawFkgEDNC4zmAEAoAEByAEIwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

had never heard of Vivendi before. i guess they owned a bunch of companies, including Sierra and Blizzard, before they sold to Activision in 2008 (which then became Activision Blizzard).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivendi_Games

i guess one thing got better :)

i would like to believe this but i don't think it's really true :( think you can make a boatload of money off of me-too products!

okay well this seems like perhaps a slightly low asking price, but i agree with the sentiment that AAA is constantly obsessed with throwing financial-life-of-the-studio-threatening amounts of money at every single game they make. you can just...spend $400,000 on one small game that takes 2 hours to play....life could be better....hadn't really realized that this critique existed so long ago (i guess i thought games were cheaper to make then for some reason. or maybe they were but not in proportion to the money they could recoup)

this paragraph :') it rankles me probably too much when people constantly insist that gamedev is inherently a collaborative medium. it really isn't!! it certainly can be collaborative, but there isn't anything like, immoral lol, about someone doodling out a videogame by themselves, which many a twitter thread would have you believe. anyways not really an important point lol

reminds me of the more recent blog on this from melos han-tani on "Deadgames and Alivegames" https://melodicambient.neocities.org/posts/2021-01-10%20Deadgames%20and%20Alivegames

i feel like this is a bit of an exaggeration...in undergrad i played through a bunch of 80s games, and like, there were a LOT of just crass imitations haha. the early 80s Atari stuff is notorious for being just loaded with cynical cash grabs (most infamous of the lot being the ET game); so much so that the North American games market literally just crashed because it was so overstuffed with garbage. and imo even the golden age Nintendo stuff began as a burst of interesting ideas (original Mario, Zelda, Metroid) that each in turn slowly devolved towards more and more conservative iterations of those ideas (this might be a controversial opinion though haha not sure)

I feel like this is still pretty much true. More than 40 games now, but it's just the smallest selection of the latest releases. There is no history at all in videogames stores and it's terrible!! The closest we have is the used games bin, which has its own charm but is not at all a reliable historical tool :(

link is dead but guessing it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Data