“Through this be madness… yet there is method”
Memories of the Great Video Game Crash & Toys ‘R' Us
While gamers today are aware of the Great (American) Video Game Crash of the 1980’s, those who did not live through it or remember it, don’t really have any sense or context of what it was like. This is partly because while the the technical facts of what happened been preserved, we have done a terrible job documenting and preserving …
Happy 30th Anniversary to DuckTales!
What a difference 5 years can make!
Exactly 5 years ago, I released the quintessential DuckTales 25th Anniversary Retrospective. It was the quintessential because it was the only one :P. Disney couldn’t even be bothered to put out more than a two paragraph text statement. …
An Informal History of Video Game Music
I gave a talk for the South Bay Game Dev meetup on the History of Video Game Music.
Official Talk Description:
This is an informal look at music in video games from the early days of video games, starting from the 1970’s, but particularly focused on the MIDI and tracker (MOD) decade of music (1988-1998).
…
Spring 2017 blog update summaries
It has been a long time since I posted anything. It has been a very tough year for me personally. But I need to announce some things, so I’m doing a simultaneous dump. This is a short summary to each of the new entries.
Most publically, was the death of my mentor, friend, and former co-founder Carlos Icaza. …
Thank you for all the supportive responses for “Why We Loved Sierra Games” & follow-up
I wanted to say thank you to all of you who have sent me supportive responses for Why We Loved Sierra Games.
A personal high point is that I got to correspond with some of the Sierra designers, who are like personal heroes to me. I won’t post any private correspondence here, but here are the public posts some of them did. …
Blurrr SDK (soft) Launch
I finally publicly announced Blurrr SDK during my Swift on Android talk at try! Swift Tokyo. It is a new SDK focusing on making native cross-platform development easier. It features a common foundation of solid open source cross-platform libraries, such as SDL, while additionally providing a sane way to uniformly manage all different native build system processes. …
"Dance of the Fairies” Quest for Glory inspired demo & In memory of Carlos Icaza
What does a fairy dance look like when there are no clumsy, smelly humans around?
For Sierra fans everywhere: This is inspired from the Quest for Glory series. It is also in memory to my friend, mentor, and former co-founder, Carlos Icaza who passed away unexpectedly this summer.
…
Swift on Android at try! Swift Tokyo
I was invited to speak at the try! Swift Tokyo conference about Swift on Android. Since I’m something like only 1 of 4 people in the world who know anything about this, I eventually got asked.
The talk went extremely well. Even though it was by far the longest talk of the conference (slotted for 45 minutes instead of the usual 20), attendees told me it went by fast. …