Since Jonah Falcon is in London this week, there is no proper episode this week. However, that’s not to say we’re leaving you high and dry, as a new Outtakes episode is here for your listening pleasure, highlighted by Paul’s bile, Paul’s love of Shrinkydinks, and a long conversation between Jordan Lund and Jonah about Rob Liefeld’s Charlie Sheen-like departure from DC Comics.
See you next week when we have a normal episode.
Gaming Podcast is back after being off for a week. This time out, there’s a Gaming Flashback as Jordan and Jonah discuss The 7th Guest, which was coincidentally just released on Steam.
This week’s news includes:
This week’s Question of the Week, “What was your favorite adventure game?”
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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We’re bringing a new gaming podcast to our heaps of mates, the listeners. We’re discussing some good community feedback while hitting a few key news article for this week. This weeks industry gaming news includes:
This weeks question, can a user-generated content create a game that extends far behind its own life cycle? Or, do we really rely on the developers to extend it?
