[Archive] Wizardry – The Most Influential Game I Never Played

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 22, 2015

This is an archived post from 2009, with a few modern edits. To this day, I’ve still never played Wizardry 1 to completion – although I’ve delved a little deeper than I had at the time I wrote this. Still, the post isn’t really about Wizardry. It’s about another game that only existed in my mind. The original […]

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Matt Chat Asks if Wizardry was a “Rip-Off” of Oubliette

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 28, 2015

“Rip off” is a pretty strong term, as is “plagiarism” suggested by the Chester “the CRPG Addict” Bolingbroke based on his experiences playing Oubliette on a PLATO system.  Chester makes a pretty compelling argument and lays out evidence that Greenberg and Woodhead perhaps drew a bit more than just “inspiration” from the game. However, Oubliette […]

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How the first console adventure game came to be

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 13, 2015

Warren Robinett was the guy who brought forth the first (?) console-based adventure game… still something of a rarity… as well as the first known “Easter Egg” in a video game. I wish I could have attended this long-overdue post-mortem on Atari’s “Adventure,” but this article’s highlights of the session fill me with warm fuzzies: […]

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The “Totally True” Story of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 10, 2015

Mega64 did their traditional roast of this year’s winner of the lifetime achievement award at GDC. This time, it was Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series. He gamely played along. I guess if you are totally unfamiliar with the Final Fantasy games (and their big-screen movie… um, attempt), then this […]

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Daggerfall in Unity?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 27, 2015

There have been several projects to remake Daggerfall. But this is… different. Although I know it can’t be as good as I imagine, I am excited about the potential of this toolset. I guess that’s how I know I am a game developer at heart. I see something like this, and I don’t think, “Ooh, I […]

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The Era of Enhanced Game Re-Releases

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 21, 2015

I remember in the “good old days” (which were neither that good nor that old…) how we’d wish that somebody would remake an old classic game with no changes except improved technology for modern (at the time) systems. Of course, nobody ever did that. If you got a “remake,” it was a complete reboot. There […]

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The Game Biz is the Same All Over

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 23, 2014

I am happily back from Japan. I had enough time to wash my clothes and turn in an expense report, and now I’m heading off to Cedar City, Utah to spend Christmas with the in-laws. It is in months like these when my laptop becomes my primary development platform. Le sigh… But hey, this was […]

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Making Money Make Games – Part 2 (More History)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 10, 2014

Continued from Part 1… The 1980s Okay, this is the part of the story where I personally started paying attention and getting involved, if only as a consumer. At this point, especially as things were starting out the decade, there was still a huge question of what kind of industry “video games” were going to […]

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Making Money Making Games – Part 1 (History)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 9, 2014

I gave a presentation at BYU for their game development club a few weeks ago called “Making Money Making Games – a Historical Perspective.” I didn’t do my best job ever on it, and ran out of time for the “important stuff” at the end, so I kinda breezed through the end. So I thought […]

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Twenty Years of Kicking Butt and Making Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 4, 2014

The original Sony Playstation is twenty years old now. At least if you count its Japanese release. I suddenly feel old. I got my first professional game development job in October 1994. My studio, SingleTrac, was a new startup (I was employee #16!) under contract with Sony to produce a couple of new games for […]

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Why did the Avatar of Virtue screw up everything s/he touched?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 2, 2014

I was amused by PC Gamer’s article by Richard Cobbett, “Ultima: The Legacy of the Avatar.” (Hat tip to RPGWatch for the link). He doesn’t present anything all that new, although he does drive home the idea that the Avatar’s efforts to save Britannia ultimately led to its doom. Actually, not even saving Britannia. Just […]

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Ultima IV and Rational Worlds

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 18, 2014

I’m gonna take a break for the weekend on the Frayed Knights posts (more next week!), and just refer you to a couple of posts by The Digital Antiquarian about a game that’s very near & dear to my heart, Ultima IV. First, the origin story – and some conjectures about the real history behind […]

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Grim Fan-Frickin’-Dango!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 10, 2014

Confirmed: The “remastered” edition of Grim Fandango announced for the Sony PS4 and Vita platforms is also coming to PC, Mac, and Linux. I still have my original copy. And the box. Getting it to actually *run* in a modern Windows environment without crashing is a major feat requiring hunting the internet and possibly running dubious […]

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PC Games: Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1992…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 2, 2014

I made a joke yesterday about partying like its 1992, as a PC gamer. It occurred to me that there’s a lot of truth to that. It seems that we’re seeing a lot of recent / new / upcoming remakes, spiritual sequels, and direct sequels of PC games that were pretty hot back in 1991 […]

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The Game that Changed Everything

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 30, 2014

I spent a little bit of time playing Doom this weekend. Yes, twenty-year old Doom. Updated a little bit with some new technology to take advantage of modern hardware and to make it nicely mouse-playable and everything, but it was still the same game. Running in Doomsday with a fan-made high-quality texture pack. There are […]

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E.T. Exhumed from New Mexico Desert

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 29, 2014

I suppose everyone has heard about this by now. I was knee-deep in getting this website put back together, and even I heard about it over the weekend. I’d heard it was happening a couple of weeks ago, but then promptly forgot about it. It seems Microsoft and others got permission to exhume (and document) […]

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