Happy Birthday, Keen!

Today is the 15th birthday of the first trilogy of the classic Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons!

Our team was super small when we created these three games: John Carmack, Tom Hall and myself. Adrian Carmack came in near the end to do some art touch-up but the majority of the art was Tom Hall's. It took us three months of working at night after our day job (where we were making games all day) and December 14, 1990 it was uploaded to the Software Creations BBS and exploded all over the world overnight! After we received our first royalty check one month later we officially quit Softdisk and started id Software.

Blix Clouds That Kill Time

Here's a few really cool games to play this weekend.

CLOUD was made by students, paid for by an Electronic Arts grant. I'm still figuring out how to consume the clouds! Make sure you use the right & left mouse buttons and press F1 for scant help.

Kill Time is a crazy Japanese game where you have to keep your cursor from being captured by the little guy. Move it all over the place, just don't go off the screen or touch the blue walls on the side or your score restarts at zero!

BLIX comes courtesy of the talented Eric Zimmerman and his gameLab - it's very addictive!

You may have noticed some changes to the site, namely the coolass music player on the right side. The Game Music section also has the player so you can just listen to the music without downloading the songs. So now maybe it'll be easier for you to check out video game music and see what you've been missing. One of my fave remixers, Quinn Fox, just released some new original compositions on his site. Click on the green icon on the left side to get to them.

Happy Birthday, DOOM!

Yep, it's rolled around again - DOOM's birthday. Just turned 12 years old today and still going strong with Skulltag and ZDaemon and the wonderful DOOMWORLD.COM supporting everything DOOM.

I would be hugely surprised to see people still playing DOOM in 8 years...that would be unprecedented. Anyone playing any games from 1985 frequently? I didn't think so. Geez, is anyone playing other games from 1993 or earlier? I occasionally run Wolf3D but DOOM is really the only one from that time that I still play.

LONG LIVE DOOM!

Exidy

So I had a really cool visit to the local Bank of America yesterday. I was talking to a personal banker there and we finally got around to talking about the game industry and she said that her husband is the guy who founded Exidy!

Super cool. She was there with him every step of the way, too, from 1975 to 1994 when they finally shut 'er down. I told her the mobile market is just sitting there ready to have their games licensed for platforms like BREW, Symbian and J2ME but her husband hasn't done anything in this area.

There are many compilations of classic games emulated on newer hardware but Exidy's games haven't been seen outside of the arcade cabinet! This is a prime opportunity for some of you biz guys out there to score a classic game compilation - just contact me and i'll get you in touch with her.

Any of you remember Venture? I loved it (in fact, I have a mention of it with my game Crazy Dunjun). The game Chiller was totally boycotted by arcade operators as being too bloody so most people never saw it - in classic game circles it's very rare. Death Race, Mouse Trap, Targ, Cheyenne, Circus, etc. are all great, classic fun. Exidy even released a home computer called the Exidy Sorcerer.

UPDATE: A mobile publisher has struck a deal with Exidy! This blog actually has some use!

Dio

So I'm in my car and listening to XM41, the metal channel, and an oldie by Rainbow is playing and Dio's singing. Hmm...song sounds familiar.

Oh, that's because Dio really likes about 20 different words. And i've heard them over and over and over through the years and i think it's just time to STOP. Put down the rainbow in the dark and back away. Lock up your FOOLS and EVIL and WITCHES in the DARK and let them be.

I truly love Dio's work, but fella, there's a limit to the number of times you can talk about LIGHT and DREAMS and GYPSIES. Good NIGHT!

By the way, if you haven't heard the song "When A Woman Cries" off Dream Evil, check it out! It r0x0rs!