Brilliant game. We dedicated a thousand words and a two-page spread just to talking about its excellent Scenario mode, which dropped you into in-progress matches and had you trying to recreate (or change the outcome of) some of the greatest moments in international football history.

The goodreads page for AGE OF EMPIRES by @mossrc.bsky.social is up. To read?? www.goodreads.com/book/show/25...

Final cover (front and back) for the paperback version of my latest book, coming out as soon as it's printed. The hardcover edition will have photos and dev materials. Both can be preordered via Kickstarter at www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

With the #WorldCup just started, what better time to dive back into this beauty from @bitmapbooks.com 😀⚽️

World Cup fever has gripped Bitmap HQ 🏆⚽️ Check out our book - Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games Featuring over 400 games! Who do you think will win the tournament? Score a copy: www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/... #bitmapbooks #worldcup #football #soccer #gaming #booksky

A book so good I bought it twice!

Sold-out for nearly a year, From Ants to Zombies: Six Decades of Video Game Horror is back in stock on June 17, along with several other excellent titles, including The Games that Weren't, I'm Too Young To Die & 50 Indie Games that Changed the World.

Written by the award winning @mossrc.bsky.social & published by @bitmapbooks.com we are delighted to have several more copies of the Secret History of Mac Gaming available now! Check it out: buff.ly/zr4PWqi

Mac OS 9 had themes too

~The writing is the point.~ It's a *process*, not a *product*. These are my words and they are precious and I will not have any machine speak for me.

Someone was inspired by my Shareware Heroes book to archive their collection of mail-order 5.25" shareware floppies, circa 1990-94, most of which came from a catalogue called Reasonable Solutions. There's a great mix of stuff in here. archive.org/details/525d...

People don't long for "inconvenience." They long for permanence. And though streaming services may be convenient, people are waking up to the fact that we are paying rent-seeking middle men month after month for things we will never actually own.

Cuba is out of oil. One of many ongoing, humanitarian crises. I’ve been keeping in touch with a Cuban game developer and it’s very grim. www.nbcnews.com/world/cuba/c...

I've recently read Zen & the Art of the Macintosh, a 1986 book that mixes new age stuff with the sheer sense of wonder the author felt doing graphical design on a Macintosh... It's weird, but gorgeous! And also nostalgic... a tribute to computers, from a time before we yearned for a Butlerian Jihad

Nel corso di un decennio, Soleau ha pubblicato più di 60 giochi shareware per DOS e circa lo stesso numero di titoli per Windows, Mac e Web. Di @mossrc.bsky.social. [dall'archivio]

General reminder, as Google continues its lurch to search awfulness, that Kagi is legit brilliant. Its own AI features can be turned off. You can customise your datasets and weightings. Also SlopStop allows you to downweight, or filter out entirely, AI slop results. Legit worth the $10 a month.

In nonfic it can be useful to drop in occasional reminders of the fallibility of memory: "I dunno," X added. "I might be getting it wrong. It was a long time ago." Inoculating writer & reader against the illusion that everything is perfectly verifiable, even as we all do our best.

I wrote about how AI is destroying my career and what it means that highly skilled jobs are being deskilled with nothing to replace them Link below 👇

Over the last six months, I've written histories of the 26 games to have reached #1 in the UK charts during 1986: superchartisland.com/timeline/#1986 Here is a thread on what I learned, with links to each post!

If you wanna create an old school website you can still do it. You don't have to use a huge CMS to make a site in 2026. If you tweak a basic page every weekend it'll grow into a cool lair of thoughts. That's all we did in 1997. The web can just be a bunch of weirdo's sharing. We ARE the web, guys

Y'know, this could end very poorly if we have another Y2K bug. Except this time, no one knows enough to be able to fix it in time.

This is an interesting essay on the dangers of knowledge loss and de-skilling in the era of AI coding, using the impact of the Ukraine crisis on missile manufacturing as an example of what lies ahead. The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-f...

“That’s why the students are booing, I think. They’re experiencing AI in realtime as a forecloser of futures; as the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism, as the prime agent moving a world that’s become a deck stacked against them.” — @bcmerchant.bsky.social really nails it, as usual

The Web Design Museum released 44 classic Cartoon Network Flash games from the early 2000s, now playable in the browser. Play them here: www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-game-e...

If I were to write a book about the history, art, and design of the LucasArts and Humongous adventure games, and their underlying SCUMM engine, based on dozens of interviews, would you buy it? My SCUMM documentary is going on hiatus and I need to decide whether to do it as a book instead.

I have a piece about Virtua Striker in this.

"A tragic birth, and death, in a tent – and still our poorest must pay" @amyremeikis.bsky.social thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

Just learned of this classic Australian poem *Faces in the Street* that captures much of the mood and lived experience of the moment, across many countries, despite the poem being over 100 years old. https://www.australianculture.org/faces-in-the-street-henry-lawson/

Was a pleasure researching this one. This one's for anybody who has ever wondered why party animals wear lampshades on their heads. Also adding #lamphistory for that juicy lamp SEO

"Why are all the journalists laid off now" this is why. Pretty simple.

Introduced the four year old to JezzBall by way of Richard Bannister's mobile clone Green Balls. She picked it up pretty quickly and *nearly* finished three levels. It was fascinating to watch her play with a heady mix of reckless abandon and extreme caution.

That running animation makes me smile every time I see it. There's so much personality in just a few frames and a handful of pixels. Having played hundreds of different football games while writing the book, I can confirm that Match Day is one of the most important — and best — games in the genre.

Didn't want this one to get buried amongst the 100 other announcements in our Newsletter ☝️ Only a few hours left for @bossfightbooks.com's 41st entry: 𝐀𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐄𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐬 Go check it out! www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab... @mossrc.bsky.social #Gaming #Booksky #AgeOfEmpires

#WinningEleven 10 dropped 20 years ago yesterday. Even today, I can still remember the excitement in the days and weeks leading up to each release of the series on the PS2. ⚽️ games haven't reached those heights since.

Here are four screenshots of early dev builds for Age of Empires 1. The graphics, UI, and gameplay all went through huge amounts of iteration over 2+ years of development, and my new book recounts the journey: www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

"These are people, not content machines. They have thoughts and feelings and mountains of personal baggage from their past that I need to dance around with only the faintest idea which items are the most fragile." -new Q&A with @mossrc.bsky.social bossfightbooks.com/blogs/news/q...

A screenshot featured on the Age of Empires box. The art team carefully staged the scene in the game's scenario editor then captured it in action. My new book includes a chapter on how Microsoft and Ensemble put together the packaging and marketing for the game. www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...

Up close and personal with a duck.

Ensemble Studios founder Tony Goodman was so excited about the launch of Age of Empires that he put a banner up on the side of his house. (You'll learn why it was such a big deal to him in my new book: www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...)

At one point the Age of Empires developers considered adding natural disasters to the game. But it wasn't consistent with their presentation of an inviting, sunshine-drenched world or their player-centric design philosophies.

The Age of Empires tech tree from October 1995, two years before the game came out and many months before Rick Goodman thought to divide progress into "ages" of history. Despite its complexity, this "Version 13" is actually much simpler than his 12 prior attempts to devise an R&D progression system.

A render of the chariot unit from Age of Empires that was included with the E3/June 1997 press kit for the game. (The game was in beta at the time.)

Age of Empires dev milestone schedule from October 1996 (revision 14!). This is shortly after the game had been delayed six months, and shortly before it got delayed a further six months. Note that it doesn't mention the wonders anywhere, because they hadn't actually thought of wonders yet.

"Meta spent more on lobbying in 2025 than America’s three largest oil and gas companies combined" www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

A collection of early pixel art buildings for Age of Empires, mostly dating back to late 1995. Ensemble soon switched to flattened 3D renders for better efficiency (and a neater fit with the skills of their art team). There'll be more of these in the "deluxe hardcover" edition of my book.

We just passed our six-month anniversary, so it seems like a good time to check in and post a sale on subscriptions.

my new zine, Shareware Made Me Trans, is now out!! ~6000 words (and lots of images) on the 90s games that shaped my gender identity, including windows 3.1 amazons, sapphic crpg romances, and my own teenage fetish games. link in reply with excerpts and free community copies for trans readers

Eight days left to fund @mossrc.bsky.social's book on the making of AGE OF EMPIRES. www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab... #gamehistory #ageofempires #aoe #wololo #realtimestragegy #rts

Yes, please will more people research and write about shareware history. My book Shareware Heroes could never have told all the stories or covered all the perspectives. There's so much more weird and amazing stuff to dig into, and still more folks like Steve Moraff to track down and interview.

I'm going to post semi-random dev materials from Age of Empires 1 every day from today until the end of the KS campaign (www.kickstarter.com/projects/gab...) for my book about the creation of the game. First up, the cover and a page from one of lead designer Rick Goodman's earliest design docs.