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Friends of the Wasteland: The Legacy of Flying Buffalo
Two advances, one technical and one conceptual, led to computerized adventure and RPG games as we came to know them in the 1980s. The technical advance was of course the PC revolution, dating from,...
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Wasteland
We can mark the formal beginning of the Wasteland project to the day in December of 1985 when Brian Fargo, head of Interplay, flew out to Arizona with his employee Alan Pavlish to meet with Michael...
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Turning on, Booting up, and Jacking into Neuromancer
When a novel becomes notably successful, Hollywood generally comes calling to secure the film rights. Many an author naively assumes that the acquisition of films rights means an actual film will get...
View ArticleThe View from the Trenches (or, Some Deadly Sins of CRPG Design)
From the beginning of this project, I’ve worked to remove the nostalgia factor from my writing about old games, to evaluate each game strictly on its own merits and demerits. I like to think that this...
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Another World
The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so...
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Interplay Takes on Trek
Original-series Star Trek is the only version I’ve ever been able to bring myself to care about. Yet this Star Trek I once cared about a great deal. Doubtless like many of you of a similar age, I grew...
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Alone in the Dark
Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t...
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Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space (and Space-Program Games in General)
“Demography is destiny,” wrote the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. That truism has been taken to heart by many in the time since — not least by our political classes. Yet...
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Normality
Sometimes these articles come from the strangest places. When I was writing a little while back about The Pandora Directive, the second of the Tex Murphy interactive movies, I lavished with praise its...
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Realms of the Haunting
I like to imagine that Realms of the Haunting, Gremlin Interactive’s bizarre 1996 mélange of first-person shooter, point-and-click adventure, and interactive movie, was the brainchild of Ian and Nigel,...
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