Lots of stuff is coming to Game Pass and platforms everywhere, as TJ enthuses about Ghosts ‘N Goblins, and shows less enthusiasm over Resident Evil Re:Verse.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what you think.
It’s the episode just before Thanksgiving, and both Jordan and Paul have new jobs, as the latter settles into his new Los Angeles home. This week’s Gaming Flashback is the Atari 2600 game Kaboom!
The guys also discuss the following news items:
The question of the week: “How do you buy games most often these days: retail, online retailer, or digital distributor?”
This week, we’re looking at Unreal Tournament and looking back at Digital Extremes. We’re hitting up a few of this weeks top news articles including:
Apple cutting into console sales?Oddly enough, there wasn’t too much exciting news to talk about even given TGS. Slow week, but we had some great community comments and a new question of the week: what game do you recall playing that you felt maxed out the platform it released on?
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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