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This is an incredible find. It would be amazingly cool if we could create an emulated environment for compiling and running Unix v4 from these sources.

If you are interested in hacker culture, you might enjoy the game I released yesterday, Outsider (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/).

The main character is an old school hacker (AND a cracker, which is a different thing) and the game leans heavily on the community's culture.

I own the poster version ("The Art of Atari, the poster collection") and it's great. I have three of their posters hanging in my office right now. It's not just nostalgia, the art is terrific.

EDIT: the poster collection now costs $600+ on Amazon. Wow.

You're right. My comparison was more about sculptures as art vs the games as art. If you don't believe them to be equivalent at some level, it would be difficult to find this preservation work worthwhile.

That said, unfinished games are similar to manuscripts of an unfinished book. Many such manuscripts have been published throughout history and are, in my opinion, part of our cultural heritage too.

This is really important work.

Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.

I actually wrote my first toy multitasker on a Gameboy Advance, although that's ARM7... Great little project. It's a joy to develop on an emulator with good debugging tools.

My upcoming story game, a love letter to SETI and the Hacker News crowd, offers some perspectives on the question: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

It will be out in 2 weeks!

If you like CYOA games, you may enjoy my upcoming game Outsider, a modern sci-fi take on dynamic narrative games. It will launch in 7 weeks and I'm working on it full-time!

Here is the Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

If you like Puzzle Hunt puzzles, you might enjoy my upcoming game, Outsider, which contains a MIT-style Puzzle Hunt puzzle. You can complete the game without solving it, but the solution uncovers a whole new layer in the story: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider

I wouldn't have believed my eyes if I had seen that back in the day. The interesting thing is that the capability was there all along.

It's a very common feeling and I'm no stranger to it as a solo game developer. But remember that the "grass is always greener on the other side". Chances are that, once you go back to the "nice job" at the end of the day, you'll miss the peace and ownership of your solo building days.

I always enjoyed chatting with my coworkers and learning from them. I do miss that. But I don't miss anything else from that environment, to be honest.

I think text-only games have a certain special power that modern games can't quite emulate. Modern city planners are more accessible and better in most ways, but there is a raw gameplay elegance in games like Sumer that I think could make a comeback one day. Perhaps the game equivalent to vinyl records.

I'm close to finishing a commercial interactive story with choices using Ink: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

Awesome! You can also find great art made with Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. The limitations from early computers in resolution and, most importantly, palette, create unique art styles:

https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/DeluxePaint.html

They seem to be old Mac games. Old Macs are already being emulated and out of Apple's reach of you own an old copy of the OS. You can play these games forever even if Apple or the game makers go out of business.

My uni had these, as I mentioned in a reply elsewhere on the thread. I'm curious to know what kind of Serious Work people here saw back in the day.

I was a student so I had relatively rare access to the high end stuff... Most of my time was spent in cheap-ish sun terminals. Later on, as a last year student, I became cooler and got access to the RISC 6000s and started hanging out with the graduate students.

Most of the Serious Work I saw was email. There was some limited running of simulations and research software from other universities, but little that required a lot of processor power on an ongoing basis. I think these were generally more useful due to their native networking capabilities and software availability than their raw CPU power. In a sense, you had to have them because everybody else had one.

This is cool story! My uni's lab was all SGIs, IBM Risc 6000s and Sun workstations.

But I visited the lab for the first time in 25 years last week and everything got replaced by cheap PCs... :(

The 90s was perhaps the last gasp of high end, branded PCs. Man, these were some good looking computers. Try keeping your SGI in good shape, perhaps it will find its way to a museum one day.

Wonderful project.

Despite the great languages we have today, I still think that BASIC is among the best languages for sparking the love of programming in beginners.

The demo would have been impressive even if it only had a handful of animations... With that many, it's absolutely mind blowing.

I've been using this for a few years. I have a legal copy of Win98 with several games from my physical collection fully set-up. Getting to the desktop is just one click away on Win11. Also, my setup is fully portable and can run on any PC from a USB stick. Dosbox-X and Dosbox-staging is what powers my retro PC game collection!

I was a huge fan of the demoscene growing up and IQ is one of the best. When my son was little, he loved watching demos on Youtube (a geek's version of Baby Einstein)!

I like the scene so much, I explicitly mention it in my upcoming narrative game Outsider (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/). The main character was an active member of the BBS/pirate scene in the 90s and also a big demoscene fan!

This is a great opportunity to share my upcoming sci-fi narrative game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

One of the two main characters is a veteran BBS-era and Internet movie pirate (among other things). I don't necessarily endorse his actions, but he is who he is...

Some games are almost entirely about the story, like mine: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

Correct. Phones are getting bigger (but thinner) compared to older phones while portable consoles are getting bigger compared to older consoles.

One clear trend in mobile devices since the GBA times is the increase in screen sizes. The Switch's screen is just so much bigger than the GBA's. You also see that on phones, with popular models approaching if not exceeding 7" which used to be reserved to small tablets. Where do we stop? Don't get me wrong, I like the bigger screens, but portability is suffering and most pockets no longer fit today's "portable" devices.

Great work! I learned about this game just last week when reading "The Secret History of Mac Gaming". This looks like an excellent adaptation.

Some of these games are better than recent AAA titles...

This topic is near and dear to me. It is so important that I'm working full-time on a game about how a first contact with an extraterrestrial could look like. If you are interested, I just released a free demo with ~2 hours of content: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

One of the saddest things in my gamer resume is that I was never able to get into Half-Life. I can absolutely see what everybody likes in the game - both technically and in terms of gameplay. But I was never into its uneven pace when compared to Doom, not even back in the day. I always felt that the game couldn't decide whether it was a shooter or a puzzle-adventure, what the article refers to as "friction".

The Orange Box console versions also suffered from a non-adjustable field of view that made me feel sick after a few minutes of playing.

I'm not far behind, so I decided to leave my megacorp job and do this instead: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/