A time when the most we fought about were games, and not all this other stuff that permeates social media discourse around our games.
It was a time when publishers actually paid attention to media, instead of the gamers who bought our games.
You could still buy hard core flight sims, adventure games etc. Even CD-ROM helped sell games!
A time when publishers did stupid shit, like, oh you know, ship a game it knew was in Beta and NOT ready to ship.
At a time when publishers literally controlled the media and the message, very few were willing to believe an eccentric indie developer who came from out out of nowhere.
I had to deal with shit like this. And trust me, it wasn't even the worst of it.
gamespot.com/reviews/battle…
On Usenet, AOL, CompuServe, print media, and in every corner of gaming, the fallout would have been enough to walk off a cliff.
It's bad enough that it came from an indie dev, and not publishers or their "gaming gods".
1) One of the 1st games with a fully functional, self-learning neural net engine. I wrote an entire language for it, mixed with an FSM, BAM and everything else you could think of.
It powered a fully dynamic universe.
Seamlessly.
With a complete save game state. Any time. Any where.
And to this day, the reason NOBODY has been able to replicate these sort of technologies all rolled into a single game, is because you have to be, literally insane to do it.
And today it's even more costly.
While all this was going on, I had devised a plan to get my work out so that people could see what I had slaved over a decade on.
Then we got wind that Ryan Brant, then CEO of Take 2, was looking to take the co public.
It gave me the advantage that I needed, when, faced with a lawsuit, they settled.
I released it for FREE.
Then for months I continued to work on patching it. For free.
gamespot.com/articles/battl…
Then people started writing about the tech (e.g. the neural net which was the subject of at least two college dissertations) in articles, books, columns etc.
A game which, for all history, will remain as the cornerstone of their IPO.
My work did that.
sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
gamespot.com/news/1998/12/2…
You can still also find it on various freeware sites, including on Underdogs and over on DOSbox where many still download and play it for nostalgia.
dosbox.com/comp_list.php?…
Games which, while not mainstream, have had a dedicated fan base that started with that one fateful game.
3000ad.com/games/
Through it all, I have remained true to the games that I want to build, and to the gamers who make me build them.
This is my legacy. I hope that you all will remember me.
I was here.
I did that.
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