This article tells part of the story of John Romero . At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls. It was the whole Carmack idea of, “I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair,” instead of, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of money, why not make a really bad-ass office?” — John Romero Romero is chaos and Carmack is order. Together the

The Tudor Queens Also, a little programming note: there will go one extra week between this article on The Analog Antiquarian and the next one on The Digital Antiquarian. Just the usual excuses: a holiday and a five-Friday month.

This article tells the last part of the story of Lemmings . For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore Amiga, its Liverpool-b

This Porsche is very much leashed. The one I got wasn’t even a turbo model. I’ve had a running joke with my wife Dorte for almost as long as we’ve been a couple. I reasoned back in the day that, since she was going to be a doctor — a more reliable source of income than writing about computer games — she should be expected to buy me the Porsche of my dreams at some point. Needless to say, I’m still

Your humble author in 2009, with his last even vaguely cool car, a 2000 Volkswagen GTI. I sold the GTI and left the United States that same summer. I wouldn’t own another car for ten years. Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989,

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software . I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives. — Will Wright On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after writing his last bit of code for SimAnt , Will Wright climbed out

Hi, folks… I’ll have the last article in the series on Maxis Software for you next week. Today, I’m happy to say that the new ebook , covering the historical year 1999, is available, and on a far more timely basis than the last one at that. My thanks go to Richard Lindner, for developing the scripts that produce it, and to my hiking buddy Stefaan Rillaert, for modernizing them slightly and adaptin

Would you trust these two men with your investment? Jeff Braun and Will Wright shortly before Maxis’s IPO. This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software . Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000 , the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation . This may sound like satire, but it was all too

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software . I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. — Will Wright Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t

Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II . Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international commu