A couple of chaps in Sydney (one of whom worked on Good Game and Spawn Point) are trying to get a documentary series off the ground about Aussie games history, told by the people who were there, and they need your support. You can back the project on Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/projects/reg...

Region Locked: A Documentary Series on Aussie Video Games

Far from Silicon Valley, the Australian video game industry was forged by risk-takers, innovators and visionaries. This is their story.

kickstarter.com

Region Locked - Documentary@regionlocked-doco.bsky.social · 6d ago

Thanks to everyone who pledged to Region Locked today! We are doing this to have the Australian gaming community involved in the project and cannot wait to create it for you! We still have a long way to go - so please pledge, follow and share! www.kickstarter.com/projects/reg...

Hi, we're a new video game oral histories site. Want to read the story of Shadow of the Colossus, as told by 11 people who worked on it? Or hear what Will Wright has to say about Spore in retrospect? Or see previously unreleased footage of Nintendo's Sound Fantasy? Check us out at designroom.site

Brilliant game. We dedicated a thousand words and a two-page spread just to talking about its excellent Scenario mode, which dropped you into in-progress matches and had you trying to recreate (or change the outcome of) some of the greatest moments in international football history.

Bitmap Books@bitmapbooks.com · last mo.

Are you enjoying the World Cup?🏆⚽️ International Superstar Soccer Deluxe - Featured in our book - A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games ⚽️ Featuring over 400 games! Score a copy: www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/... #bitmapbooks #worldcup #football #soccer #gaming #booksky

The goodreads page for AGE OF EMPIRES by @mossrc.bsky.social is up. To read?? www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...

Age of Empires (Boss Fight Books, #41)

"Tony came in one day, out of the blue, and said to eve…

goodreads.com

Final cover (front and back) for the paperback version of my latest book, coming out as soon as it's printed. The hardcover edition will have photos and dev materials. Both can be preordered via Kickstarter at www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

Age of Empires: How Ensemble Studios Made History

The creation & legacy of the 1997 real-time strategy game, based on interviews w/ 29 former Ensemble & Microsoft staff.

kickstarter.com

Boss Fight Books@bossfightbooks.com · last mo.

First up: Our 41st book, AGE OF EMPIRES, by @mossrc.bsky.social! This is the paperback edition. (We are still finishing the hardcover layout.)

With the #WorldCup just started, what better time to dive back into this beauty from @bitmapbooks.com 😀⚽️

World Cup fever has gripped Bitmap HQ 🏆⚽️ Check out our book - Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games Featuring over 400 games! Who do you think will win the tournament? Score a copy: www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/... #bitmapbooks #worldcup #football #soccer #gaming #booksky

A book so good I bought it twice!

PixelCrib@pixelcrib.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Written by the award winning @mossrc.bsky.social & published by @bitmapbooks.com we are delighted to have several more copies of the Secret History of Mac Gaming available now! Check it out: buff.ly/zr4PWqi

Sold-out for nearly a year, From Ants to Zombies: Six Decades of Video Game Horror is back in stock on June 17, along with several other excellent titles, including The Games that Weren't, I'm Too Young To Die & 50 Indie Games that Changed the World.

Bitmap Books@bitmapbooks.com · 2mo ago

bitmapbooks.com @gamesthatwerent.com @alexanderhad1.bsky.social @aaronpotter.bsky.social @stuartmaine.bsky.social

Written by the award winning @mossrc.bsky.social & published by @bitmapbooks.com we are delighted to have several more copies of the Secret History of Mac Gaming available now! Check it out: buff.ly/zr4PWqi

Mac OS 9 had themes too

~The writing is the point.~ It's a *process*, not a *product*. These are my words and they are precious and I will not have any machine speak for me.

Jonathan Bernstein@jonbern.bsky.social · 2mo ago

this is not true, and this guy doesn't speak for me! nymag.com/intelligence...

Someone was inspired by my Shareware Heroes book to archive their collection of mail-order 5.25" shareware floppies, circa 1990-94, most of which came from a catalogue called Reasonable Solutions. There's a great mix of stuff in here. archive.org/details/525d...

1990-1994 Mail Order 5.25" shareware disk collection : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Hello, welcome to my collection of 5.25” mail order floppy disks circa 1990-1994.  When we were using 386/486 PCs in the first half of the 90s, prior to the...

archive.org

People don't long for "inconvenience." They long for permanence. And though streaming services may be convenient, people are waking up to the fact that we are paying rent-seeking middle men month after month for things we will never actually own.

The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 4mo ago

People are pining for old technologies—CD players, VCRs, Walkmans. What’s behind our longing for inconvenience? www.newyorker.com/culture/essa...

Cuba is out of oil. One of many ongoing, humanitarian crises. I’ve been keeping in touch with a Cuban game developer and it’s very grim. www.nbcnews.com/world/cuba/c...

From solar to charcoal, Cubans look for alternatives amid outages and fuel shortages

Some Cubans who’ve been able to buy solar panels say it’s a game changer, but most rely on other alternatives including charcoal, despite health concerns and the steep cost.

nbcnews.com

I've recently read Zen & the Art of the Macintosh, a 1986 book that mixes new age stuff with the sheer sense of wonder the author felt doing graphical design on a Macintosh... It's weird, but gorgeous! And also nostalgic... a tribute to computers, from a time before we yearned for a Butlerian Jihad

Nel corso di un decennio, Soleau ha pubblicato più di 60 giochi shareware per DOS e circa lo stesso numero di titoli per Windows, Mac e Web. Di @mossrc.bsky.social. [dall'archivio]

Shareware in solitaria

Un estratto dal libro "Shareware Heroes" di Richard Moss.

ludicamag.com

General reminder, as Google continues its lurch to search awfulness, that Kagi is legit brilliant. Its own AI features can be turned off. You can customise your datasets and weightings. Also SlopStop allows you to downweight, or filter out entirely, AI slop results. Legit worth the $10 a month.

Kagi - Reclaim the Web & Restore Your Privacy

Reclaim the web from clutter. Get ad-free search, private browsing, and powerful tools that respect your data.

kagi.com

In nonfic it can be useful to drop in occasional reminders of the fallibility of memory: "I dunno," X added. "I might be getting it wrong. It was a long time ago." Inoculating writer & reader against the illusion that everything is perfectly verifiable, even as we all do our best.

I wrote about how AI is destroying my career and what it means that highly skilled jobs are being deskilled with nothing to replace them Link below 👇

Over the last six months, I've written histories of the 26 games to have reached #1 in the UK charts during 1986: superchartisland.com/timeline/#1986 Here is a thread on what I learned, with links to each post!

If you wanna create an old school website you can still do it. You don't have to use a huge CMS to make a site in 2026. If you tweak a basic page every weekend it'll grow into a cool lair of thoughts. That's all we did in 1997. The web can just be a bunch of weirdo's sharing. We ARE the web, guys

Y'know, this could end very poorly if we have another Y2K bug. Except this time, no one knows enough to be able to fix it in time.

Richard Moss@mossrc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This is an interesting essay on the dangers of knowledge loss and de-skilling in the era of AI coding, using the impact of the Ukraine crisis on missile manufacturing as an example of what lies ahead. The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-f...

This is an interesting essay on the dangers of knowledge loss and de-skilling in the era of AI coding, using the impact of the Ukraine crisis on missile manufacturing as an example of what lies ahead. The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-f...

The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code

The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.

techtrenches.dev

“That’s why the students are booing, I think. They’re experiencing AI in realtime as a forecloser of futures; as the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism, as the prime agent moving a world that’s become a deck stacked against them.” — @bcmerchant.bsky.social really nails it, as usual

AI as the new avatar of American capitalism

Why "AI populism" is just "populism"

bloodinthemachine.com

The Web Design Museum released 44 classic Cartoon Network Flash games from the early 2000s, now playable in the browser. Play them here: www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-game-e...

If I were to write a book about the history, art, and design of the LucasArts and Humongous adventure games, and their underlying SCUMM engine, based on dozens of interviews, would you buy it? My SCUMM documentary is going on hiatus and I need to decide whether to do it as a book instead.

I have a piece about Virtua Striker in this.

Lost In Cult@lostincult.co.uk · 3mo ago

Arcade Adventures is a celebration of the hallowed halls, hardware and software that established the titanic gaming culture we know and love today! Journey through the cabinets that pushed boundaries and introduced immersive new trends. harpercollins.co.uk/products/arc...

"A tragic birth, and death, in a tent – and still our poorest must pay" @amyremeikis.bsky.social thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

A tragic birth, and death, in a tent – and still our poorest must pay

An Indigenous woman, living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, gave birth to twins in a tent last week - because the waiting list for social housing in her area is up to seven years. And...

thepoint.com.au

Just learned of this classic Australian poem *Faces in the Street* that captures much of the mood and lived experience of the moment, across many countries, despite the poem being over 100 years old. https://www.australianculture.org/faces-in-the-street-henry-lawson/

Faces in the Street [poem by Henry Lawson]

[Editor: This poem by Henry Lawson was published in In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses (1896) and The Bulletin Reciter (1901).] Faces in the Street They lie, the men who tell us i…

australianculture.org