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Category Archives: Modern Times

Social Media

Hi, folks…

I just wanted to give you a very quick heads-up that I’m leaving The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. In the future, you can receive notifications about new articles and the occasional other announcement by following me on either Mastodon or Bluesky. My apologies to anyone who’s inconvenienced by this, but it does feel like the right time to make the jump, what with Bluesky in particular growing so quickly.

I’ll see you all on Friday with some fresh Digital Antiquaria. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

 

1997 Ebooks

Hi, folks…

As I’ve already warned my patrons, I don’t have an article for you this week. I do, however, finally have the 1997 ebook for you, with all of my coverage for that year. I hope it will help to soften the blow.

You can download it, along with all of the earlier volumes, at the usual place on this site. As always, my thanks go to Richard Lindner for providing the tools and advice that let me make these .epub and Kindle editions.

Thank you for continuing to be the best readers in the world. See you next week with a proper article!



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

 

1998 Will Be Great

Hi, folks!

I don’t have an article for you this week, but, rather than leave you hanging with nothing whatsoever to read, I thought I would post a little preview of what’s coming over the next year or so. Note that this “year” of mine applies to both real time and to the historical timeline, which have become largely one and the same these days. I do still have one 1997 article in the pipeline, on Activision’s last two graphical Zork games. I’ve also pushed a couple of topics that were originally earmarked for 1997 into 1998.

So, here’s what’s coming, with some further clarifications wherever it feels appropriate. If you like to be totally surprised by each new article, now is the time to stop reading. If, on the other hand, you played a role in any of the following, or know someone who did, or have any other kind of research tips or inside information to share, by all means get in touch via email, Mastodon, or just in the comments below.

  • The Journeyman Project trilogy. I nearly passed these over, but on a whim I decided to try the 1997 remake of the first game, and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. This prompted me to play Buried in Time and Legacy of Time as well. To whatever extent these can be considered Myst clones, they stand now as my favorites in the sub-genre.
  • Starcraft.
  • Douglas Adams in the 1990s and beyond, including Starship Titanic. He filled quite a lot in the early years of this blog, and, although he wasn’t such a high-profile presence in games and computing after the 1980s, he deserves to have his story finished.
  • Tex Murphy: Overseer.
  • Might and Magic VI.
  • Sanitarium and Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy. Yes, this is an odd couple. These two games are linked only in being early harbingers of where adventure games would go as their AAA commercial heyday faded into the past. The budgets would get smaller, the list prices would decrease, and most of the studios still making them would be located in Europe rather than North America (although this last is only true of one of this particular pair). None of these changes strikes me as necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, they often gave space for design to come to the fore again.
  • The X-Files. As I promised a reader recently in the comments section, this is also a good chance to talk about the television show, one of the most indelibly 1990s of all media creations. (Wasn’t it nice when our most prominent conspiracy theories revolved around aliens from outer space?)
  • The Windows 98 launch.
  • Grim Fandango.
  • The casual-sports-game phenomenon. Did you know that schlocky little Deer Hunter made way, way more money for its creator than Starcraft or Half-Life or any other iconic late-1990s mega-hit you care to name? I’ve always found these incongruities between gaming history as it’s remembered by the hardcore crowd and the reality on the ground at the time to be fascinating.
  • Game shows. Most years, I allow myself one significant departure from the game-by-game brief, and I think this will be this year’s. It’s a topic I’ve been mulling over for a long time now, given that television game shows were the first “video” games of all in a sense. There’s probably two or three articles here, tying in the end back into 1990s CD-ROMs like Jeopardy! and the You Don’t Know Jack series — the latter of which is another of those hidden moneyspinners of the era, that you would barely know existed from reading Computer Gaming World and the like.
  • Interactive fiction. I never intended to stop writing about text adventures; it’s just that I haven’t had quite enough to say about them in the last few years to make a good article. Now, however, we’ve come to the year of Anchorhead, Spider and Web, and Photopia. In terms of seminal works, 1998 is arguably the interactive fiction community’s biggest single year of all.
  • Half-Life.
  • The first two Oddworld games, which I think are best discussed as a unit.
  • Railroad Tycoon II. (My lord, have I gotten addicted to this game…)
  • Fallout 1 and 2. Again, I think this pair can be most profitably discussed together. And waiting until this point lets me better tie them into the CRPG Renaissance that was cemented by Baldur’s Gate.
  • The downfall of TSR and its purchase by Wizards of the Coast. Another long-running story that deserves a proper conclusion, even if it is more computer-game adjacent than specific.
  • The aforementioned Baldur’s Gate.
  • Speaking of conclusions to long-running stories: the strange and rather anticlimactic end of Ken and Roberta Williams’s Sierra, including coverage of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Quest for Glory V.
  • Boulder Dash and its successors. Yes, you read that right. I spent a lot of time with Boulder Dash as a kid on my Commodore 64, and I think it deserves an article, however belated. I don’t know why I didn’t write one back in the day, but better late than never. I already circled back to pick up Lode Runner
  • Thief.

And now to explain why a couple of topics are not on this list. I plan to discuss the two Freespace games as a unit later. And I haven’t forgotten Her Interactive and Nancy Drew; I’m just waiting for the right place to tell that story. I’d like to end it on a triumphant note, and the first Nancy Drew game is still a little rough around the edges.

I know that there’s a (small) minority of you who would like to see more coverage of Voyager Interactive. I’m afraid I just haven’t found the later discs as compelling as I did the early ones, so I think I’m going to table that topic. I’m sorry!

Of course, I’m always eager to read your thoughts on what you find most (and, if you like, least) appealing from the list above and what other topics you’d like to see covered. I can’t promise to follow up on all of your suggestions — I have to be guided as well by the kinds of games I most enjoy, by what I find most interesting in general, and simply by what I think would yield a readable article — but many of them have led me in the past to subjects I never would have thought to write about on my own. (In fact, a couple of these can be seen on the list above…)

If you’re a regular reader and you haven’t yet become a supporter, please do give it some thought if your financial circumstances permit. I depend on all of you to keep writing and to keep this site ad-free.

Most of all, though, thank you for being the best readers in the world! I’ll have a proper new article for you next week, and the 1997 ebook should be coming along in the relatively near future.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

 

Another Year Down, Many More to Go

This new month of September being a five-Friday month, I’ve decided to take this week as an opportunity to bank an article. That way, I’ll be able to travel back to the United States for the holidays later on this year without missing two weeks of content in a row across my two sites. In lieu of a proper article — which you’ll get next week, I promise — how about if we pause today to take a breath and survey the territory behind and ahead of us?

As the more studious readers among you may already have noticed, we finally moved out of the borderlands between 1996 and 1997 and into the new year proper with my last article. That means it’s ebook time. You can find the 1996 volume of the ever-growing Digital Antiquarian archive, in .epub or .mobi editions and with or without reader comments included, in the usual place. I learned how to make these myself this time, but the tools I used to do so are still those of Richard Lindner. Thanks, Richard! I shouldn’t have to bother you so much going forward…

And speaking of going forward: here’s a taster of what I have tentatively planned in terms of 1997 coverage. Looking at the year as a whole, I must admit that I don’t quite see one bursting with perfectly formed classics. But I do, on the other hand, see a year of important experiments that laid the groundwork for classics to come, as designers continued to wrestle the many new technological affordances they had been granted recently into natural-feeling, playable forms. The flood of undeniable classics would come in 1998, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, some quick notes on what’s in store for the immediate future. Needless to say, if you want to be completely surprised by what appears on this site every fortnight, now is the time to stop reading!

  • I’m currently working on a two-parter about the Magic: The Gathering phenomenon, the first part being about the card game that upended the whole tabletop-gaming industry in the 1990s, the second about its digital adaptation, Sid Meier’s last game for MicroProse.
  • The Last Express
  • This topic is a little more unsettled than most of them, but I’d like to do something with sex. No, not in my personal life — I’m too old and too married for that — but in the context of the digital world of the 1990s. I have a minimalist and a maximalist version in mind. The former would look at games like Voyeur I and II, Psychic Detective, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, Blue Heat, and Tender Loving Care, which attempted to carve out a market for “adult” computer entertainment within the interactive-movie space. The latter would survey these games as well, but expand the story to encompass the emergence of an online pornography industry, the first folks to make real money on the Web. I lean toward going for the Full Monty, so to speak, but I’d love to hear your secret thoughts and innermost desires. Or, um, come to think of it, just the surface ones would be fine.
  • Japanese CRPGs, leading up to and then showcasing Final Fantasy VII. This is foreign territory for me in more ways than one, but the story of how this hugely popular strand of gaming emerged out of the Apple II Wizardry strikes me as under-told, while Final Fantasy VII itself is without a doubt one of the most beloved games of all time. It even fulfills the letter of my law of focusing on computer rather than console games here, since it did get a release on Windows…
  • Ultima Online
  • Age of Empires
  • Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror
  • Developments in the realm of the first-person shooter, especially Unreal and Jedi Knight. (I’ve already had a lot of fun playing Jedi Knight start to finish, a first for me with the genre whilst writing these histories. Maybe I can stop worrying and learn to love to run and gun…)
  • Fallout
  • Riven
  • Blade Runner
  • The Curse of Monkey Island
  • Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor

Feel free to chime in in the comments with suggestions of what you’d like to see. While I can’t promise to deliver on every request — I do have to follow my own muse to some extent in order to give you good articles, and I do have to keep moving so that our progress through history doesn’t start to take even longer than living through the real events did — I do take them all seriously.

And if you’re a regular reader who hasn’t yet taken the Patreon plunge, please do give that some thought as well if your personal finances are up to it. Your pledges are the only reason I can do this.

Last but by no means least, there is one thing that I can’t say enough to those of you who already pitch in: Thank you for your support! That includes not only existing patrons but all of you who take the time to offer up typo reports, factual corrections, and alternative perspectives in the comments and in emails. I remain as honored today that you consider me worth the effort as I was when all of this began twelve years ago. You remain, as ever, the best readers in the world.

See you next week!

 

Mastodon Feed

I’ve set up an account on Mastodon for posting new articles and (very rarely) other newsworthy tidbits. You can access it at https://oldbytes.space/@DigiAntiquarian. For the time being at least, this will exist in addition to rather than instead of my Twitter feed. I’ll only delete the latter if things go completely off the rails on Twitter. Like a lot of people, I’m in wait-and-see mode right now, but it never hurts to be prepared, right?

I’m new to Mastodon and still struggling just a bit to wrap my head around it, so do let me know if I’ve done anything horribly wrong.

 
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Posted by on November 4, 2022 in Interactive Fiction, Modern Times