"Meta spent more on lobbying in 2025 than America’s three largest oil and gas companies combined"

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Building art used early in development of Age of Empires 1, provided to me by lead artist Brad Crow (although much of this would have been drawn by David Deen). These were later replaced by 3D renders that got flattened to 2D and touched up by hand.

A collection of early pixel art buildings for Age of Empires, mostly dating back to late 1995. Ensemble soon switched to flattened 3D renders for better efficiency (and a neater fit with the skills of their art team). There'll be more of these in the "deluxe hardcover" edition of my book.

Design Room is six months-old (and we're having a sale) Six months in, we look back at what we've gotten up to so far, look ahead at what's coming up, and announce a subscription sale.

We just passed our six-month anniversary, so it seems like a good time to check in and post a sale on subscriptions.

I forget the details, but I know I managed to find a couple of promising leads on him when I was researching my book. Apparently he went on to live in China, teaching English, then his last online appearance was some new small business enterprise thing. He never replied to my contact attempts.

Neon pixel art of an amazon in a sleeveless leather top and miniskirt with a Y2K-style visible midriff. She has a huge blond pony updo and a big sword.

Pixel character portrait of a woman with a mess of brown hair, big, upturned blue eyes, and pursed, pouty-looking lips.

ASCII art of a a brown-haired, blue-eyed woman stretched out while a bloody dagger hovers over her midriff. She looks displeased about this.

Pixel screenshot of a woman in tattered brown rags being held between two Centurian-style soldiers while a king on a throne condemns her.

my new zine, Shareware Made Me Trans, is now out!! ~6000 words (and lots of images) on the 90s games that shaped my gender identity, including windows 3.1 amazons, sapphic crpg romances, and my own teenage fetish games.

link in reply with excerpts and free community copies for trans readers

Age of Empires: How Ensemble Studios Made History The creation & legacy of the 1997 real-time strategy game, based on interviews w/ 29 former Ensemble & Microsoft staff.

Eight days left to fund @mossrc.bsky.social's book on the making of AGE OF EMPIRES.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

#gamehistory #ageofempires #aoe #wololo #realtimestragegy #rts

Yes, please will more people research and write about shareware history. My book Shareware Heroes could never have told all the stories or covered all the perspectives. There's so much more weird and amazing stuff to dig into, and still more folks like Steve Moraff to track down and interview.

(I don't want to spoil the story, but the answer came from one of the programmers, Tim Deen.)

An internal memo from Rick Goodman to his Ensemble colleagues about the prototype build v.02, in which he shares his notes from playing the build. The key quote is "My principle concern right now is that I spend a lot of time just looking at the game at the start."

But by this point, already, they were shifting towards something faster. The first playable prototype felt too slow, and Rick was grappling with the challenge of how to find the fun — of how to streamline and whittle down their extensive ideation into a great game.

A design document discussing visions of a game starting near the end of an ice age, and needing to survive as the ice recedes during the early portions of the campaign. Designer Rick Goodman is critiquing the idea, questioning what it will add to the player's experience and where it might all fall apart.

The vision for Age of Empires evolved considerably over time. Here you can see a hint of how much more geared they were early on towards Sid Meier's Civilization and other slower-paced strategy and simulation games. Initial plans were akin to a modern survival sim colony builder with Civ elements.

Dawn of Civilization! Game Design Document, October 13, 1995. Company Confidential, Copyright Ensemble Corporation. Note: All changes to this Design Document implemented since Sept 1st have been italicized. [Handwritten] Includes Revisions to Tech Chart

Page 28 of the design doc, including the tail end of a section about natural disasters as well as a brief note about the game commencing at the end of an ice age, a short section pondering the inclusion of scenarios, and the beginning of a section about the game's interface.

I'm going to post semi-random dev materials from Age of Empires 1 every day from today until the end of the KS campaign (www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...) for my book about the creation of the game. First up, the cover and a page from one of lead designer Rick Goodman's earliest design docs.

A slide from the GDC presentation, where Laine Nooney is showing my article on the Gentrification of Video Game History

Honored to see my article mentioned by @lainenooney.bsky.social on GDC's "What's New in Game History: 2026" panel!❤️

You can (and should!) watch the whole thing here, it's a great overview of what's happening in game history: gdcvault.com/play/1036008...

Fun to see @riquesampaio.com.br there too :D

Glider Retro App - App Store Download Glider Retro by Victor Franco on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more apps like Glider Retro.

I know, the timing is weird.

Victor Franco ported my published sources for Glider 4.0 to the modern MacOS and, yes, we have another Glider game for the Mac.

It's faithful to the original Glider 4.0 that came out in 1990. (And it's free.)

apps.apple.com/us/app/glide...

Age of Empires: How Ensemble Studios Made History The creation & legacy of the 1997 real-time strategy game, based on interviews w/ 29 former Ensemble & Microsoft staff.

We're already about halfway done with our AGE OF EMPIRES launch!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

#retrogaming #realtimestrategy #aoe #ageofempires #videogames #pcgaming

There's a whole chapter in my forthcoming Age of Empires book (www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...) all about how the Rippy brothers created the music, sound effects, and speech in the game. Really fun anecdotes and a few great lightning-in-a-bottle moments.

It's week 2 of our AGE OF EMPIRES launch! Available in ebook, paperback, and deluxe hardcover. www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

Age of Empires: How Ensemble Studios Made History The creation & legacy of the 1997 real-time strategy game, based on interviews w/ 29 former Ensemble & Microsoft staff.

My latest book is about more than the making of Age of Empires. It's a story of brothers, camaraderie, innovation, and dreams—the cost of chasing them, the passion that drives them, and the joy when they come true. Available for preorder from @bossfightbooks.com
www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

This bit refuting attempts to train AI in editing a specific writer made me laugh: "Telling a machine that can’t perceive that it can’t perceive won’t make it perceive that it can’t perceive." It's horrifying how easily a *lot* of people have been fooled and misled about how this tech works.

This essay about refusing genAI in journalism is fantastic. Great reporting—and great writing, broadly—is irreducibly human. And not just the final prose, but rather the whole process that leads there—ideation, research, 1st draft, *every* phase of editing + more www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-t...

Age of Empires: How Ensemble Studios Made History The creation & legacy of the 1997 real-time strategy game, based on interviews w/ 29 former Ensemble & Microsoft staff.

My friend and FPS co-writer @mossrc.bsky.social has written the definitive history of Age of Empire's development! You can back the book on Kickstarter here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab... @bossfightbooks.com

Age of Empires: How Ensemble Studios Made History The creation & legacy of the 1997 real-time strategy game, based on interviews w/ 29 former Ensemble & Microsoft staff.

My latest book is about more than the making of Age of Empires. It's a story of brothers, camaraderie, innovation, and dreams—the cost of chasing them, the passion that drives them, and the joy when they come true. Available for preorder from @bossfightbooks.com
www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

Age of Empires: How Ensemble Studios Made History The creation & legacy of the 1997 real-time strategy game, based on interviews w/ 29 former Ensemble & Microsoft staff.

Announcing our 41st book! @mossrc.bsky.social tells the story of the making of AGE OF EMPIRES.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

#ageofempires #rts #realtimestrategy #ensemblestudios #retrogaming #pcgaming #wololo

We've got 1 final copy of the Secret History of Mac Gaming: Expanded Edition by @bitmapbooks.com & written by @mossrc.bsky.social : buff.ly/WY0Jd7P

#bookstagram #retrogaming

EGA Loom adapted in the same way would be amazing, although I'm not sure how they'd pull off some of the animation.

We love celebrating the culture & history of gaming… and our featured book is the Secret History of Mac Gaming by @bitmapbooks.com : www.pixelcrib.com.au/products/the...

Written by the award-winning @mossrc.bsky.social, it is a wonderful account of how the Macintosh changed video games 🎮

Confirmed cast: Brad Taylor. Brad joined LucasArts in 1990 to help with SCUMM system development, then carried on that vital work through eight years as lead system programmer for Humongous Entertainment. His contributions include the uSWEAT/uSMELL, SPLAT, and CYST animation tools, the 3DO and Windows engine ports, and lots of performance optimizations.

When I contacted Ron Gilbert about the documentary, he told me "you need to talk to Brad Taylor". And talk to him I will. He goes by @lardratboy.bsky.social on here, and you'll hear lots of tech stories and insights from him if the doc goes ahead.

Sign up at scummdoc.com to help get it greenlit.

AI still doesn't work very well in business, reckoning soon interview: Codestrap founders say we need to dial down the hype and sort through the mess

So many great quotes, and a lot of good insight, in this piece about how widespread LLM use in business is soon to trigger a big reckoning with cascading disasters — from non-viable code to lawsuits, insurance woes, costing disputes on consulting slop, and more. www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/a...

Those kinds of recordings usually need a bit of finesse to clean up. Crappy mics, big echo-y rooms, speakers with no mic training, and static hiss on the recording medium all add up to a bunch of different overlapping issues that each need resolving individually to get a good restoration done.

I can remove a bunch of the noise from that for you if you'd like. I'd just need the raw audio files.

Making stuff is expensive, getting funding to make stuff is hard. And my new documentary film project @scummdoc.bsky.social is in danger of getting cancelled before it even really begins. All because the internet is so broken I can't reach a huge chunk of its target audience to tell them about it.