This week probably has the most shocking and industry moving news of the week, as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo start to play nice — and their players get to play together.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Jonah returns from PAX Unplugged 2022, while T.J. defends the maligned Castillo Protocol. Aside from the news, the Gaming Flashback is the Klei Entertainment’s stealth 2D platformer Mark of the Ninja.
The rest of the news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.
The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).
In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”
The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.
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This week we had to cut some segments short due to some work we’re doing on our house that had us tied up. We’re just doing up some news this week and community feedback. This weeks news includes:
And, here is the story about The Boy Who Stole Half-Life II. Here is our Question of the Week: Will all MMOs eventually follow a free-to-play model?
