Richard Moss

@mossrc.bsky.social

1257 Followers 153 Following

Writer/Director: @terrorbytesdoc.bsky.social | @scummdoc.bsky.social Author: *A Tale of Two Halves*, *Shareware Heroes*, *The Secret History of Mac Gaming*, a book on Age of Empires 1 development Australian rich@mossrc.me

A screenshot of Green Balls, level 3, taken just after she lost her final life.

A screenshot of Dawn of Man v.02. This is the earliest version of the game that I've seen (and played!).

A screenshot of Age of Empires showing a huge battle across a river. This moment was featured on the back of the box and in advertising for the game.

A duck, standing mere inches away from the camera.

A huge red and silver banner reading "Age of Empires" hangs on the side of a house, suspended from the roof.

A proposal from an Age of Empires design document to add disasters to the game. Examples include famine, plague, flooding, and mine collapse, with each disaster randomly killing a certain percentage of villagers, animals, or buildings.

Dawn of Man (one of the Age of Empires prototype names) timeline of actual historical events.

A massive R&D technology chart from early in Age of Empires 1 development. This was lead designer Rick Goodman's 13th attempt, but still it was far too complex.

A 3D render of a chariot on a white block. The block is forever rotating while the chariot loops its movement animation.

A milestone schedule document dated October 15, 1996, for the Ensemble Studios project Tribe (later renamed Age of Empires). This was revision 14 to the document, and it includes 7 milestones, with a planned "go date" of March 7th 1997, plus an eighth one that either has the wrong year (May 8th 1996) or that was mistakenly left in the document.

Building art used early in development of Age of Empires 1, provided to me by lead artist Brad Crow (although much of this would have been drawn by David Deen). These were later replaced by 3D renders that got flattened to 2D and touched up by hand.

An internal memo from Rick Goodman to his Ensemble colleagues about the prototype build v.02, in which he shares his notes from playing the build. The key quote is "My principle concern right now is that I spend a lot of time just looking at the game at the start."

A design document discussing visions of a game starting near the end of an ice age, and needing to survive as the ice recedes during the early portions of the campaign. Designer Rick Goodman is critiquing the idea, questioning what it will add to the player's experience and where it might all fall apart.

Dawn of Civilization! Game Design Document, October 13, 1995. Company Confidential, Copyright Ensemble Corporation.
Note: All changes to this Design Document implemented since Sept 1st have been italicized.
[Handwritten] Includes Revisions to Tech Chart

Work-in-progress footage of the C64 fan conversion of Monkey Island 1, with hand drawn pixel art based on the original.

A photo of some videogame books on a library shelf. The yellow cover is my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming.

Figurines/statues of the purple and green tentacles from Day of the Tentacle. Hand-made by Etsy creator Nikonsart.

From Macworld December 1986.
Best Adventure Game:

Deja Vu Let me first confess that I’m a bit jaded by the adventure format. All too often, the puzzle-solving aspect of the game overwhelms the literary possibilities. Deja Vu avoids that shortcoming. Aside from its debt to the fibn noir tradition, it discards verbal pretensions and lets you mouse-and-window your way to a solution to a hard-boiled murder tale. (I’m only assuming there is a solution, because 1 haven’t found it yet.)

By eliminating typed responses in favor of points and clicks, Deja Vu plays into the hands of those who charge that computer games will lead us into the postliterate era. Still, I prefer it to other games in which the adventure lies in guessing which vocabulary words the game understands.

NA
Nate Anderson
To You
2 Dec 2010
...
Richard
We're interested in your two ideas about the history of sim games and the history of graphic adventure games. You still up for doing it? We would need a draft of both in hand by December 29, and we're looking for something around 2,500+ words for each, along with plenty of illustrative screenshots.
We could offer US$1000 for each (so $2,000 total).
Let me know if interested in one or both (I know the time is short), and we can talk about how the articles might take shape.
Nate Anderson
Senior Editor, Ars Technica

Comparing the boxes with the same artwork

The original and new Broken Sword boxes side by side.

A flyer for a Continuum level set, promising "75 of the hardest levels anywhere" if you send a disk and 50 cents (or $3 and no disk) to an address in Oklahoma. The flyer has several different fonts and a few custom graphics.

Our discussion caused me to look back at the game code and realize there was a subtlety in the original implementation I had missed. The game didn't JUST implement a simple priority system for sounds. For certain sounds it also had the priority "decay" over time, meaning every screen refresh the priority would drop a little. Why? This allowed later sounds with lower priority to interrupt them IF the original sound had been playing for a while. There are a couple places this enhances the experience
1. If you kill a bunker and then another bunker shoots, which normally has lower priority, if you are very near the end of the original bunker explosion it will be allowed to interrupt because the priority has "faded".
This is probably what Randy/Brian meant when they told you there was a "fade" system.
2. When bunkers shoot very rapidly you get a cool rapid fire effect because the later shot can interrupt the earlier. Level 9 is a good example of this. It's pretty cool and I'm glad to have that working.

A screenshot of the beginning of the first level of Continuum.

Screenshot of a transcript that keeps repeating the line "Come and talk to me, I just wanna have that conversation with you" over and over again.

results for an image search of inflatable bubble chairs

Kasparov: Are you sure, Gary? I mean, let's be realistic. So I hate pouring cold water in your concept of our hot resistance. But do you seem to think that people today—I mean it starts with students will stop using ChatGPT.
Marcus: I think it's very unlikely. But the reality is that the students, by adding to the revenue streams and user numbers— massively, like students are a huge part of it-they're adding to the valuations of the companies.
They're giving companies power-and what the companies are trying to do is to keep those students from ever getting jobs. And the companies probably are gonna succeed in that, right? The people who are losing their jobs first are students.
The students graduating are entering this

AUSSIE, 18-YEAR-OLD AUTISTIC FOUNDER OF KAIKO FIDGETS FINALIST IN GLOBAL YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR AWARDS
# KAIKO FIDGETS WAS STARTED BY 11-
YEAR-OLD KAI SEYMON IN 2017
# KAI IS NOW A FINALIST IN THE
GLOBAL STUDENT ENTRAPRENEUR AWARDS, WITH THE WINNER TO BE ANNOUNCED LATER IN JULY
# SEE THE FINAL INTERVIEWS FROM
COMPETITION FINALISTS HERE: START
IT UP GSEA AWARDS 2025
# NOW JUST 18, KAI'S COMPANY HAS
GONE GLOBAL, SELLING 250,0000
PRODUCTS A YEAR
# SENSORY PRODUCTS ASSIST IN
MANAGING ANXIETY, SUPPORT FOCUS, & PROVIDE 'SAFE OUCH' TO REDUCE HARMFUL BEHAVIOURS
# PRODUCTS ARE DESIGNED
TO PROVIDE PRACTICAL SUPPORT TO THE NEURODIVERGENT COMMUNITY & HELP TO REPLACE HABITS THAT USERS WOULD PREFER TO HALT

A photo of me taken by my daughter to show my hair, as styled by her.

Again, thank you for your time and making a documentary that basically explained my childhood inspirations. You matter so much
Corey Occhiato

During a later visit to a Picasso exhibit in Milan, I came across a famous informational diagram by the art historian Alfred Barr, mapping how modernist movements like Cubism evolved from earlier artistic traditions.
Picasso is often held up as one of modern art's most original and influential figures, but Barr's chart made plain the many artists he drew from-Goya, El Greco, Cézanne, African sculptors. This made me wonder: If a generative Al model had been fed all those inputs, might it have produced Cubism? Could it have generated the next great artistic
"breakthrough"?

If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go.
"Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then, we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don't think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them."
• Elilla
Even back then, Google knew full well that what they were doing and working towards was deeply problematic and ethically dubious, at best, and reading about how young, impressionable Google engineers at the time figured that out by themselves is kind of heartbreaking. In those days, Google tried really hard to cultivate an image of being different than Apple or Microsoft, a place...

A photo of the Sensible World of Soccer entry from A Tale of Two Halves

The first minute of the "Desolate" segment from Episode 4 of TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming.

The metal fish theme

Screenshot of my Episode 4 WaveLab project with separate tracks for B-Roll, dialogue, music, and SFX, and loads of volume automation points to adjust the mix.

The original photo. It's hard to tell here, but note that I have blue eyes.

Screenshot of TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming Episode 3's title card. The episode is called "Narrative Nightmares".

Episode 5 - Cursed and Controversial. Night Trap comes around again, along with looks at the controversy and reality of Doom, Rule of Rose, Manhunt, Thrill Kill, and more.

Episode 4 - The Indie Revolution. Loads of games squeeze into this one, thanks to a broader thematic discussion. Iron Lung, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Lone Survivor, Outlast, Five Nights at Freddy's, Exmortis, FAITH, The Missing, Slay the Princess, Lost in Vivo, and many more.

Episode 3 - Narrative Nightmares. Here you'll find Night Trap, The 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria, Gabriel Knight, Her Story, Until Dawn, and more.

Episode 2 - Lethal Licenses. Games in this one include The Thing, Alien Isolation, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Dead By Daylight, The Walking Dead, and Deadly Premonition, among others.

Episode 1 - Enter the Survival Horror. Beneath the text you can see box art for various games covered in the episode, including a few Silent Hill and Resident Evil titles as well as Clock Tower, Alone in the Dark, Sweet Home, Fatal Frame, and Eternal Darkness.

A short 58-second clip excerpted from the new documentary TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming in which DUSK and Iron Lung developer David Szymanski and Her Story, Immortality, and Silent Hill Shattered Memories writer/designer Sam Barlow discuss the horror elements of Thief: The Dark Project.

The 7th Guest co-creator Graeme Devine gets emotional remembering what a key moment in the game's development meant to him.

Most people I know play games or enjoy movies/television. It's a no brainer to recommend they watch it but what I would tell those that normally prefer one or the other or for those that have significant others like me who aren't into games l'd ask that they watch it with them. I say that because the episode shows the real adult humans who wrote narrative/created art/designed levels/composed music and that passion shines through in this documentary. Games are awesome but rarely do we get to see the people who create them. For years game companies made people use
pseudonyms so only the publisher got credit or other companies couldn't poach talent. But now we live in a world where much like movies and TV we know who directed a game or composed the music and we might buy...

Every Day the Same Dream by Molleindustria

A page spread from the book Country on what we need to do to transition to fire management policies based on indigenous learnings.

FIRST KNOWLEDGES
Edited by MARGO NEALE
COUNTRY: Future Fire, Future Farming
BILL GAMMAGE & BRUCE PASCOE

What, for example, to do about windows?
Doubly enraging to the ruling obsessives, in that they offer female slaves the pleasure of daylight as well as allowing non-residents occasional evidence of their existence, these openings do, on the other hand, benefit the women's male owners and their sons.
To immure or not to immure? Solomon-like, the Taliban's supreme leader has now banned windows only on walls that overlook areas where women are still, by domestic necessity, allowed outside. Until such time as Afghan women can be kept - for sex, breeding and housework - perpetually underground, the latest edict stipulates that new buildings should not have windows from which "the courtyard, kitchen, neighbour's well and other places usually used by women" are visible.
Last week the Taliban government's spokesman confirmed on X that, to men like himself, even a fully covered woman with, say, an erect mop, is a sexual stimulus too far. "Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts."

Cover for Lonely Planet HIDDEN LIBRARIES: The World's Most Unusual
Book Depositories

Cover art and basic information for the song "Learning to Drive with Dad" from the album "Dangerous Day to be a Cold One" by a band called Dartz. (I have never heard of them before, so I don't know how she found it.)

The front cover of ISS Pro Evolution 2 for PlayStation. A press quote at the bottom says "the finest football game ever made"

An old Xiaomi Android phone showing a multi-coloured homescreen with various icons and a Gmail widget with two unread messages dated 20 Dec 2017.

Man-eating spider coming to get me

And last Monday, there was global outrage at the killing of two Gazan footballers, Eyad Abu-Khater and Hisham Al-Thaltini, in Israeli air strikes.
Obviously I'm joking about the last one.
Nobody gave a shit about that. Or any of the 344 Palestinian footballers killed by Israel since last October, or the fact that teams from Israel's West Bank settlements play in their domestic league in violation of Fifa rules, or that the Palestinian West Bank league has been suspended indefinitely.
In the face of this, inaction begins to feel like its own conscious choice. It's six months since Fifa promised a prompt ruling on whether or not to impose sanctions on Israel's national team for the actions of its government, and we're still waiting. It's four months since Israeli athletes competed at the Olympic Games after the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, declared: "We are not in the political business." It's two months since a major Israeli assault on Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, destroyed the town's main football stadium.