It’s very simple, valve is a gamer company. Epic is a money company. Every single thing each respective company does shows that. I’m not a bitch, I’m never going to let those Epic cunts have a penny of my money. Fucking with the games industry, fucking with gamers, locking exclusives, it’s all bullshit & they can suck my cock
Yesssssss. Our entire family loved The Dungeon so much. My father wrote a letter to the developers and got a response, with excited descriptions of upcoming games in the series that never came to be. The producer or developer, or whoever wrote him back was bragging about how the next game would have characters you could actually see while in combat! (E: referring to The Arena)
I have to say for me, I know this won’t be everybody, my favorites are going to be the ones that change the way I felt about gaming, not necessarily ones that I would want to play again.
In fact, I have found that going back to some of the seminal games, or the ones that were most impactful to me, hurt my feelings because they were from a time… Where let’s be real, technical limitations made a lot of very basic quality of life things nearly unavailable.
I think the 1st that changed the way I felt about gaming was Ultima 4 - they had flushed out the systems of the earlier three, which were pretty primitive, and made morality, all kinds of wonderful internal game systems, relationships, secrets, optional paths, total exploration. 5 and 6 were games that I explored and played molecularly because they were just a joy for me as well.
Another one I talk about a lot is a game called Squares Deluxe which the developer thankfully changed as freeware a few years ago. So anybody with DOSBox can download it and play it legally, and in my view, it’s the best shape packing game ever made - there are so many amazing mechanics, and if you play Extreme mode and get a great run going, it can be the most thrilling experience!
How can I forget the very first game I played in arcades which was Atari Warlords at Fiesta Foods! I was bedazzled by the cabinet and I had to have a teenager explain to me what it was! I went flying home and explained what I saw to my mother and she was incredulous, and she took me back to play!
Runestone Keeper. I know that really if you distill it down, you’re kind of playing a probability-based card / slot machine game. But play your choice is broad, and I love the fact that the entire playfield changes with every move potentially. Yes you can get screwed over, yes you can have amazing runs, but it’s that unpredictability that keeps me salivating. I can’t actually recommend anybody play this outside of steam version because the app one keeps changing - I’ve bought it a few times and I keep losing my license/progress when they change publisher agreements, to hell with that noise!
I mean I’m open to conversation, I love talking and I love sharing with other humans! You or anyone else can feel free to DM me
Please before you read on, it’s going to get ugly, and know that it is not directed at you. I will leave it at that, proceed at your own risk.
In the public facing area of SM I find that I am very frank and no-nonsense and I will just state the truth, no matter how unpleasant the recipients may find it. I was on BBSs before I was on the Internet, and the Internet before the Web existed. My friend Julian and his friend Frank were the two biggest phreakers in my city and Frank did 10 years for some crazy motherfucking advanced nasty digital shit involving financial transactions. Frank sourced me with an embarrassment of riches in terms of piracy, and enabled me to run my own “game rental service” in Junior High. I have the resume to back my stuff up and I have so many first in gaming I don’t want to hear one motherfucking word of backtalk from anybody who thinks they know more than I do. I did more in the first 5 years of my career than most people will do in their entire lives. I did not just cobble together shit, I literally innovated stuff, I built the things that people now use to build things. And I was doing it with some amazing people along the way. One of them is a major executive at a semiconductor corporation to this day and he’s one of my best buds. Him and I got John fucking Romero kicked out of the CGDC in 1997 for being a drunken boor. Another peer has done digital film work on probably every single film that you have ever seen. I could carry on like an asshole, but I’m just scratching the surface I want you to know.
When I was still a student (e: 1 yr digital media crash course, prior to that it was pure programming and hacky compsci) I won a worldwide multimedia contest. I had made a dentistry simulator where you could actually do surgery on a patient. I conceived, wrote, storyboarded, assembled a team, project managed, budgeted, produced the entire thing myself essentially because at that point I was teaching the teachers. I won 1500 US dollars & my school was awarded $30,000 licenses of software. I wrote the very first plug-in enabled game on the Web that wasn’t just click click, it was a mini golf game for the Swedish mini golf association. I literally programmed my own physics simulation for it. I made the very first touchscreen internet enabled network of gaming systems. I personally made 12 published games for those systems. I made the software and games for North America’s first gaming cafe. I made the very first online parimutuel gaming system. I developed a 3D tennis game that you could play in a web browser and I believe it was a world’s first. I programmed a computer AI that was so advanced he could fucking slay you in a convincing fashion and you would have no way of knowing it was computer controlled unless you knew.
Game systems I developed and licensed are on river boats right now being played by people. I ran one of the first Web studios where I worked with an amazing programmer named Josh and I think WordPress stole his idea. We made a dump truck of money because I was smart enough to do radio ads, advertising to people who are too behind to use the Web but had businesses. I was the lead developer for gameloft.com. I developed the first online gaming software deployed by state-run lottery corporations. I wrote two books on a piece of multimedia software, I wrote the bilingual curriculum for three years of a multimedia college - That’s while I was also running my own game studio from my apartment in Montreal and punching out games in my underwear on Saturday morning and selling them for 8,000 bucks. I made an entire development framework for a company that did pharmaceutical drug sales CD-ROMs to the tune of $20 million per contract. Ran two extremely successful game studios until the golden handcuffs took me to the desks. Started the very first house doctor PC service in my city and I made so much money I stopped answering the phone. This does not even cover 30% of the things I’ve done. I did all of this completely self-taught with virtually no education beyond grade 10. I basically failed high school because I was so mentally ill from them trauma of my family life. I promise I am not bending the truth in the slightest.
Heard every ill-conceived, half-baked opinionation on gaming and I’m exhausted and I’m done with the kid gloves. I really don’t give a flying fuck how much a person likes video games or thinks they’re great or is in love with them or wants to be a game developer, I’m sick to death of it. Nobody has a motherfucking word to say to me and I literally don’t care. I’m a very very open person, I crave knowledge, you don’t get where I went by being an ignorant. But it’ll be a world’s first if you can show up at my door and tell me something I don’t know.
And I’m sorry to say that really I truly am, because it makes me sound like a fuck face. But if you don’t want to hear what I have to say, stay the fuck out of my inbox because I don’t have time for dildos who dare to tell me how anything works.
I leader boarded Diablo 3 solo. Fucking solo with my own build that everybody jeered me for. When my dad took me to the city’s first arcade when I was 6 I had a run on Mousetrap that went on so long the arcade owner asked me to stop. I played games that my dad’s hacker friends made to run on the Met Service of Canada’s Cray supercomputer… which predated Pong. When I was in grade two they used to pull me out of class and put me in a closet with a beautiful woman with freckles who would teach me computers and I’m telling you that thing was like a huge player piano with a print reel 6 ft wide. On that computer that had less power than a talking greeting card and no monitor, I made a horse race game when I was 7 years old. When I was 23 years old the Canadian Nat’l Snooker team specifically approached me and petitioned me to play for them but I refused because snooker was my peaceful place. I beat Cliff Thorburn in snooker. I thinder-punched Alain Martel “The Dancing Bear” at 9 ball while I was shit faced on a Thursday afternoon in some crummy local pool hall
I am literally made of games. The same way Stevie Wonder is literally made of music, I, game.
Most of the time, the things people believe to be true are completely insane once you understand the underlying nuances and layers. Or more accurately the individual molecules. When you’ve built the tools that built the tools that built the games.
And here’s a statement that will piss people off- one doesn’t stand at the top of the gaming industry for two decades when you lick somebody else’s asshole and sniff their farts, one leads the pack. And I did lead the pack and everybody followed me and stole my work and did what I did. Literally entire features were added to Macromedia software simply because I was taking the software places even the creators didn’t know it could go.
So everybody wants to follow the leader but nobody wants to hear him say how it is, because that hurts their feelings and ego. And after going through 4 years of therapy and now being 10 years sober from severe demon drinking, I can confidently say there’s some bizarre fucking issues going on with people who both want to hear my words, and yell at me once I say them
I’ll tell you a secret. And this is coming from somebody that was at the top-top Top of the gaming world for 2 decades… 95% of tech people are complete frauds and charlatans. Its a miracle anything ever gets made. Look at today’s coders… they don’t even know what a computer does, they just download other people’s modules, cobble them together and pray. The vast majority of people who self-identify as being in “comp sci” don’t even understand the very basics.
They were contracted to design the (edit: low-level coin op hardware, etc) API for our new Internet-enabled touchscreen gaming network kiosks (world first at the time) and they were fucking useless. And then had the gall to present the piece of shit at the CGDG 1997, as a half-finished completely non-functional, but presented it like it was their own product and not a massive NDA violation. Presented like their own product which could be generically extended to other platforms. Fuck you Matt. Fuck you Monolith you fucking cunts.
29 years later, after working with Monolith on one of the worst projects in history… I can finally piss on their grave. Fuck you Matt, fuck Monolith. Yeah this is fucking personal.