#nostalgia

Music, art and games are timeless human pursuits. Why should those pursuits be about nostalgia or reminiscing just because they happen to take place on an old computer? When creating, a home computer - just like any other tool - provides certain intrinsic qualities that affect both the process and the outcome. This happens to appeal to some people, while others would rather choose an aerosol, a violin or a brand new PC: the guitarist doesn't want to switch to a keytar, the chess player wouldn't trade chess for Quake, and the painter doesn't think of her brushes as artifacts of her childhood.

Unused tracks from the Demonlocke OST.

Because FriendNet serialized all of its communication into chat messages, it sent corrupted data whenever the broadcasting player was drunk.

Because FriendNet serialized all of its communication into chat messages, it sent corrupted data whenever the broadcasting player was drunk.

“Tourney” is a game that barely exists. It’s the shadow of an idea that slipped into the world last week during a free-wheeling conversation about design, agency, failure, and whether games can make meaningful statements about the nature of tragedy. To help the discussion along we invented a few imaginary games that could serve as stable reference points in unfamiliar terrain. One of the things we dreamed up is Tourney, a game about maintaining one’s integrity in the face of inevitable decline.

“Tourney” is a game that barely exists. It’s the shadow of an idea that slipped into the world last week during a free-wheeling conversation about design, agency, failure, and whether games can make meaningful statements about the nature of tragedy. To help the discussion along we invented a few imaginary games that could serve as stable reference points in unfamiliar terrain. One of the things we dreamed up is Tourney, a game about maintaining one’s integrity in the face of inevitable decline.

I took all of the songs listed by Ernest Cline on his blog as being on "The "Official" Ready Player One Soundtrack Mix Tape" and made this playlist.

Connect your tablet/computer headphone jack to your Apple II cassette input (next to joystick port), remove any diskettes, power on, CTRL-RESET, if you have a "]" prompt then type "LOAD", if you have a "*" prompt then type "800.A00R 800G", press RETURN, then press play.

"How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space -- and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more -- in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed "W" then SHIFT-space then "O" then SHIFT-space then "B", "T", "A", "X", all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the "WOBTAX" example. "

"It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."

At the age of 8, I can clearly remember staring for hours at every page of this wishbook, and I wanted everything in it. "1983 was the year of the video game crash and that year’s Sears Wishbook was chock full of the detritus of a bloated dying industry. You got the handhelds, Vectrex, Gemini, Colecovision, Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Atari 2600 and Atari 5200 in this issue. Along with some great games and accessories. My favorite is the Handsome Hassock storage system on Page 9. I would love one of those now."

"I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running. So here it is - probably the most stereotypical project I’ll ever come up with."

Heh heh

"When I was 17 and a senior in high school, we had to pose for yearbook pictures."