Old Ideas, New Blood

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 7, 2012

I will reluctantly admit that I’m as much a sucker for licenses as anybody else. While I probably would have contributed to the Kickstarter anyway, I got a little more glee contributing to  “Wasteland 2” than the same game by any other name. I’m more inclined to buy a game that is named after a […]

Filed Under: Biz, Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

One More Eulogy for the Arcades…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 27, 2012

Now, let’s say this up front: Life is better for gamers now than it was in the 1980s, by almost every conceivable measure. We have far more options, we can play or download games on the Internet without leaving the comfort of our chair (or toilet seat, if that’s your fancy…). The platforms are amazingly […]

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, Retro - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Ultima Underworld is Twenty?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 10, 2012

Ultima Underworld was released in March, 1992. Twenty years ago last month. I missed the landmark, somehow. But now I feel freakin’ old. By comparison, at least, Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t turn the big two-oh (that’s big, for video games) until next month. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, the much-lauded precursor to the entire 3D First […]

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Fallout – Free!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 6, 2012

You’ve got just over 24 hours left to get the original Fallout game for free from GOG.COM If you don’t have it already, you have no excuse. Get it now, play it when you have time. Get a free copy to send to friends. Whatever.  Snag it.  It’s a classic.  Not perfect by any means, […]

Filed Under: Free Games, Retro - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part IX: King of the World

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 3, 2012

(You can catch up on the whole story here.) So the last time I left off, we were knee-deep in the development of Twisted Metal and Warhawk. While massive crunch-mode hours and stuff sounds cool and everything, and I was still thrilled at having the kind of job I’d dreamed about since my first confused […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

What Endings Would YOU Change?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 23, 2012

Okay. So Bioware will be changing Mass Effect 3‘s endings (probably) by popular demand. I jokingly added a new ending to Frayed Knights in response (though I like the new ending better). Apparently some more indies are jumping in and doing the same, now. It’s a silly stunt, but it’s fun, and hey… isn’t that […]

Filed Under: Design, Mainstream Games, Retro - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

How Wizardry Was Made

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 21, 2012

Ever wondered the story behind the making of the original Wizardry game? I eat this stuff up. I really do. I always have – long before I was a game developer.  The behind-the-scenes stories of the people making these games is a big deal for me. I guess I’m weird that way. Of course, I […]

Filed Under: Game Development, Retro - Comments: Read the First Comment

A Game Dev’s Story, Part VII: Wouldn’t It Be Cool If…?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 14, 2012

Okay, I had a short hiatus with this series simply because there were far too many interesting and newsworthy things to post about over the last couple of weeks. I’ve got a small backlog of blog posts to go out, and topics to discuss, which is actually a pleasant change of pace for me.  Usually […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away: The Heyday of the CRPG

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 13, 2012

Joystiq has an article about the year RPGs transitioned into their more “modern” form…. 1995: The Year Role-Playing Games Broke. (H/T to RPGWatch for pointing it out to me). While my knee-jerk reaction was to jump to the defense of earlier-era RPGs, the article is actually pretty straightforward with the facts and not too far-reaching […]

Filed Under: Biz, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Fallout Post-Mortem, and the Fallout that Never Was

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 9, 2012

At times like these, I really, really miss going to GDC. I can only imagine the awesomeness that was Tim Cain’s talk about the development of the original Fallout – and the really weird(er) direction it might have taken: Kotaku: Fallout Could Have Been About Dinosaurs, Time-Travel, and Monkey Murder “You started in the modern […]

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part VI: Indie Before Indie Was Even Uncool

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 27, 2012

My dad had an overdeveloped sense of my skills as a game programmer when I was whipping out adventure games and simple arcade-style clones. He owned a tiny holding company – which are sometimes derogatorily referred to as “shell companies.” Mainly it was there to be a “parent” company to for the entrepreneurial idea of […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Geek Life, Retro - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part V: Language Skills

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 22, 2012

As I attempted to imitate my favorite arcade games on the Commodore 64, I found myself running up against a pretty major limitation: Speed. Specifically, the lack thereof when running my homemade games.  I learned a lot of tricks (most of which I’ve forgotten, now) to making my BASIC programs faster. But while those optimizations […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part IV: Sixty-Four

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 17, 2012

When released, the Commodore 64 was quite simply mass-produced awesomeness. We didn’t really know it at the time… it was just another “home computer” released in a sea of competitors. It came from a company that had specialized in business systems (the name was “Commodore Business Machines,”), with one weak home computer entry (the VIC-20, […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: Read the First Comment

A Game Dev’s Story, Part III: Grand Designs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 15, 2012

In our previous installment, our hero (er, me) was learning how to program on a tiny, super-cheap computer with 1K of memory. Er, the computer, that is. Our hero has slightly more memory, we’d hope. While I was playing on a toy computer, the arcade / video game boom was hitting full swing — the […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part II – The Kilobyte

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 13, 2012

Because of the binary nature of computers, they tend to handle things in twos – especially powers of two. The fundamental states used repeatedly by digital machines to represent everything is “on” (or one), or “off” (zero). Now, by itself, that doesn’t seem to be a lot of information. But then you can combine bits […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story – Part I: Discovering the Future

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 9, 2012

They say that a good dramatic story has the hero set out on his or her journey after “two nudges and a push.”  I don’t know that I’m all that heroic or dramatic, but I guess the beginnings of my story as a game developer also has two nudge and a push. My first significant […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: Read the First Comment



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