Nice write-up by Ars Technica on the ScummVM project’s history and developers. Hard to believe it’s been around for over 10 years already! (also, I hadn’t heard that they had a brief-lived controversial build that supported Eric Chahi’s Another World, one of the best games of all time…)
Ars Technica has up a history article on the early web browsers, a rare glimpse into the largely-forgotten software that beat NCSA Mosaic to the punch but didn’t quite make it into pop culture consciousness (seen above is ViolaWWW, notable for early stabs at browsing history, bookmarks, styles, and even embedded scripting — probably also the first web browser I remember using on my Slackware copy of X Windows circa 1994! </old>).
For all of the developments in web technology since 1991, it’s remarkable to see how many UI features and browsing concepts emerged almost immediately and are still with us today.
RIP Charles Napier, who I’ll always remember as the great voice actor behind The Critic’s Southern TV magnate Duke Phillips. If you have access to the Critic DVD set, be sure to listen to the commentary tracks where Maurice LaMarche and Nick Jameson share the recording booth with a seemingly uncomfortable Napier… (the above clip also features the remarkable Doris Grau, who passed on around the time the show was still in production)
“ALL HAIL DUKE, DUKE IS LIFE.”
(h/t to SuperHappy)
I remember when Wired ran their May, 1997 issue, focusing on the downfall and imminent demise of Apple with this striking (and to some, controversial) cover. Most of their “101 Ways to Save Apple” suggestions are in hindsight nonsensical (merge with Sega to make games!), a few were prescient (build a ~$250 PDA phone that can do email!), but one definitely stands out as the prize winner:
50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development. … Even if Jobs fails, he’ll do it with guns a-blazin’.
He definitely didn’t fail, by anybody’s standards. It’s hard to think of many individuals out there who have had a bigger impact on popular computing and technology, not to mention who have led the charge for design and innovation as still-relevant business ideals in the 21st Century. RIP Steve Jobs.
The Deleted City, an installation that lets visitors explore the virtual ‘homesteads’ of Geocities.com, the most popular gathering place on the 1990’s WWW. For those not familiar, the site made it easy for the average person to set up a basic website (tacky graphics and all), and then group it into a ‘neighborhood’ based on the site’s presumed subject matter.
The installation is an interactive visualisation of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.
In full view, the map is a datavisualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighbourhoods. While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing invididual html pages and the images they contain. While browsing, nearby MIDI files are played.
I love the choice of music for this demo video.
OMG OMG, some kind soul is posting good-quality, full-page scans of all of the old LucasFilm Games / LucasArts Adventurer magazines! Created at the company’s artistic height, these gems were half retail catalog, half inside scoop trivia treasure trove, decked out with never-to-be-seen-again Steve Purcell art (including single-page Sam & Max comics parodying the major Lucas game release featured that issue). They now sell for an arm and a leg on eBay.
I used to have every one of these, but they all vanished to whatever corner of the landfill my triangular Day of the Tentacle box and Dial-A-Pirate wheels ended up in…
(Via MixNMojo)
If you’re a fan of the old Lucasfilm Games (and the kind of video game nerd that likes this sort of weird find…), don’t let your week go by without watching this internal Lucasfilm Games parody video unearthed by Mix n’ Mojo. Shots of Skywalker Ranch, Ron Gilbert, Larry Holland, jokes riffing off of the “Bo Knows” and “Spielvergnügen” (erm, Fahrvergnügen) ads, and even a song sung on the Ranch’s porch about their adventure games. It doesn’t get much more 1990 then this, folks!
(Bonus: watch for the boxed copy of King’s Quest V on the desk at around 8 minutes in — how’d that get in there??)
RIP Macho Man. Few people exemplified the XTREME!!!! 1990s marketing aesthetic quite so well.
Steve Purcell’s ink drawings for that crucial copy protection code wheel that came in the box of The Secret of Monkey Island - this thing. I still have ours!
What’s better than a piracy prevention device that actually depicts PIRATES? Arrr! I still have this Dial-a-Pirate™, too, along with two of the Mix’n’Mojo wheels from LeChuck’s Revenge. I’ve always appreciated that none of these pirates are in the game (well, not exactly: the dude on the bottom left looks an awful lot like Guybrush, and maybe that’s a proto-Elaine in the top row?), adding a bit of extra unseen character to the game’s world.
See also this great circa 1990 photo that cropped up a few months ago showing the Monkey Island developers personally assembling the Dial-A-Pirate wheels, getting ready to stick them in the retail boxes!
Awesome full sets of sprites and backgrounds ripped from Konami’s 1991 Simpsons arcade game are available over at The Spriters Resource. I could have bought one of those machines with all of the quarters I lost playing it at the bowling alley or pizza parlor or wherever else grubby kids hung out in 1990s suburbia.
I’ve trimmed down Marge’s action sprites here because I’m fascinated by one detail that I’m pretty sure is otherwise depicted nowhere else in the rest of Simpsons canon: Marge’s Life in Hell rabbit ears hidden inside her hair!
(Via The Spriters Resource: Simpsons. I owe someone source attribution, but I can’t remember where I saw this link recently…help!)
Know who assembled the retail boxes and whatnots for the original Secret of Monkey Island launch (including putting together the Dial-A-Pirate™ codewheels, as seen above)? The actual developers! I believe that’s Hal Barwood in the red glasses, and maybe that’s Dave Grossman on the left? If you have positive ID’s on anyone in the photo, let me know! The GameCola blog scored these photos of launch assembly from Tim Schafer’s Facebook page, including this good bit of trivia:
In one of these boxes, the developers slipped a five-dollar bill, signed by the whole team. It hasn’t been seen since.
The game industry’s definitely a bit different these days.
(Source: mixnmojo.com)
Think DifferentOne of the first things that Steve Jobs did after taking over as Apple’s interim CEO in 1997 is to get Apple back on track with their branding. In this short presentation from ‘97, Jobs talks about branding & Apple’s core values and introduces the Think Different campaign.
[It] might be one of the best five minute explanations of good branding out there.
I wasn’t even a Mac user in ‘97 (I was all of 14) but I had a bunch of these “Think Different” posters on my wall. (I had the Miles Davis one taped to my piano.) Brilliant campaign.
Kottke makes a great point: notice how Apple shows nothing *but* the product in its current ads for the iPhone and iPad.
I wasn’t an Apple user then, either, but as a self-declared “platform agnostic” in 1997 I had Wired’s famous Pray cover hanging on my wall (amongst lots of other magazine cutouts and collage junk, granted). Journalists and disaffected users were piling on, and the company was expected to fold. It’s amazing to see how far things have shifted for Apple’s fortunes since that Wired article ran. Apple took a lot of the criticism and advice to heart, it seems. Here’s a relevant bit:
10. Get a great image campaign. Let’s get some branding (or rebranding) going on. Reproduce the “1984” spot with a 1997 accent.
(via austinkleon)
Anyone else remember Cannon Fodder? An early sorta-RTS game, it was both cartoonishly über-violent yet sardonically anti-war. A rare example of social commentary from the Amiga / DOS shareware era. I hadn’t read about the box art poppy controversy until just now, which places the game in the context of the misinformed public panic over video game violence circa 1993.
Cannon Fodder (Amiga). Sensible Software, 1993.
Incredible 1995 interview with the great Brian Eno, in which he more or less predicts Nintendo Wii, reality TV, Pandora internet radio, & artists giving away their songs for fans to remix.
Insights from Eno on music, machines, and art history. The Brian Eno cover issue is one of the only early issues of Wired that I’ve kept (possibly because it’s one of the few that didn’t meet an xacto blade demise during my collage-letter years in high school). This was from when the magazine embodied the best of the nascent Net utopia, focusing more on art and tech culture instead of overhyped stories about the demise of the web and “the Long Boom” (Gary Wolf, the editor, cites the Push! article as the worst they ever published, but unfortunately 1997 is back in style again).
This article has some great 1990’s nostalgia, too: MUDs, After Dark, fuzzy logic, and lines like “You’ve seen the software Photoshop, right?”
