Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007)

lowendmac.com

48 pointsluu11 comments

After Dark was great (I remember oogling it in Babbage's) but firing up my Dad's high-powered 486 and watching my Star Wars screensaver really made me feel high-tech. Especially when the Jawas started walking onscreen and stealing my folders.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Screen_Entertainmen...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1w1SQ3ezh 8

A huge collection of After Dark screen savers. 2:50 in is the X-Men which I had the pleasure of working on as an artist. Many hours spent in front of Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Animator to get the characters on to the screen.

I should have some of that work on a floppy somewhere.

I think x-men was right at the end of my tenure there. I was "chief engineer" on star trek and after dark 3.0. I remember the artist, Dana M. deciding that the beasties from Star Trek, "operation: annihilate!" Looked like clams, so he bought a can full and dumped them on the scanner...

Back then we used to ship software in boxes. There's a story that when they sold them at Macworld Boston, Rob V. flew back with a duffel bag full of cash proceeds...

They were really big on employee perks, like costco runs, but then again we were frequently there until 2am. Thursday night midnight we'd tune into "over the edge" on kpfa.

Um, rambling, get off my yard stuff now. Still, fun to see this pop up here. There was fun technical hacks a plenty there.

FYI, there's a space in your link which doesn't belong. Might want to edit that out.

whoops, to late to edit, here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1w1SQ3ezh8

> "There's nobody doing really creative screen savers these days, that I know of." xscreensaver, which even runs on iOS and OS X, continues to release new modules:

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/

For nostalgia, DarkSide of the Mac had a pretty sweet freeware screensaver collection. (http://www.poubelle.com/DarkSide.html)

Erfert Fenton's book "Art of Darkness" came with a bunch of add-on screensavers for AD. I remember the chalkboard module being particularly impressive.

After Dark was cool, but my heart will always belong to Underware: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/underware

Underware was really impressive. I'm amazed that no-one has built anything like this for Android. (I assume it's impossible on iOS.)

xsnow and xpenguins were pretty cool on the Unix/Linux side.

I wonder if it'd be possible for them to release this as freeware now ?

Neat interview, good job!

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