Weird Game Designer Facts #18 Julian Gollop In the early days of PC gaming, the UK and US markets were isolated from one another, because US gamers were playing on Apples and CPM machines, while UK Gamers were playing on the BBC Micro or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and ports across the pond were rare.

Weird Game Designer Facts #17 H.G. Wells The miniatures wargaming hobby was founded in 1913 by H.G. Wells, better known as the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and often credited (along with Jules Verne) as the creator of the genre of science fiction.

Weird Game Designer Facts #16 Don Casimir Frescho The earliest game that we can ascribe to an actual designer is Frescho's Tartaria Grande in Asia. Many folk games are older, and things like The Goose Game were novel designs but not credited to a designer.

Weird Game Designer Facts #16 Don Casimir Frescho The earliest game we can ascribe to an actual designer is Frescho's Tartaria Grande in Asia There are many folk games that are much older, and things like The Goose Game (16th century), that were novel designs but not credited to a designer.

Weird Game Designer Facts #15 Redmond A. Simonsen, co-founder of SPI (a major hobby game publisher in the 70s and early 80s) designed, among other games, Starfleet: Alpha Centauri (possibly the first game to try to represent 3D space on a 2D board) and BattleFleet: Mars (which I worked on).

Weird Game Designer Facts #14 Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games basically resurrected the graphic adventure as a viable game genre. By 2006, when he released his first game, The Shivah, graphic adventures were dead as a commercial medium. They had only rarely ever sold more than 100k copies.

Weird Game Designer Facts #13 Rich Carlson is one of the unsung heroes of the indie game revolution. He worked on Lode Runner 2 and Thief II before becoming sick of the conventional game industry and founding Digital Eel, with Iikka Keranen and Bill "Phosphorus" Sears.

Weird Game Designer Fact #11 Dave Arneson designed Dungeons & Dragons, originally as a variant of TSR's Chainmail miniatures rules, and submitted it to TSR. With some development by Gary Gygax, it was published in 1974.

Weird Game Designer Fact #10 Bill Jackson, who co-founded Ensemble, Zynga Dallas, and Boss Fight, told me "there should be a separate currency for every behavior you want to encourage your players to do" (in the context of F2P). I don't actually agree, but I thought it was an interesting perspective

Weird Game Designer Fact #9 Sid Sackson, best known as designer of Acquire , author of Gamut of Games and The Book of Classic Boardgames, liked to sprinkle red pepper flakes on his Entenmann's crumb cake -- and eat it with chopsticks. He won the Spiel des Jahres award in 1981 for his game Focus.

Weird Game Designer Facts #8 Bruce Shelley, best known for work on Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, and Age of Empires, worked as a day trader before becoming a game designer. He worked for tabletop publishers SPI and Avalon Hill (where he designed 1830) before his first job in digital, at MicroProse.

Weird Game Designer Fact #7: Darrow's Monopoly is a variant of Lizzie Magie's The Landlord's Game. Magie was a Single-Taxer, an advocate of the idea that all wealth came from land ownership, and only land should be taxed. The original game was a CRITICISM of capitalism, and not a celebration of it.

Weird Game Designer Facts #6 James F. Dunnigan, designer of 100+ tabletop games, got the initial capital for his company, SPI, through theft. He worked as a night watchman for AT&T, and stole from them. He spoke about it openly in later years; the statute of limitations had expired.

Has it never occurred to Donald Trump or the USN that battleships have been obsolete since, Idunno, 1942?

Weird Game Designer Fact #5 This one suggested by William Volk: David Riordan, one of the designers of "It Came from the Desert" for Cinemaware as well as other games, co-wrote the number-one hit "Green-Eyed Lady" for the band Sugarloaf in 1970. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_R...

Weird Game Designer Facts #4 Pit, a commodities-trading game originally published by Parker Bros., and now in print from Winning Moves, was designed by Edgar Cayce, an American spiritualist, prolific author of books about paranormal phenomena, and basically a woo-woo nuthatch. Fun game, though.

Weird Game Designer Facts #3 In the 80s, the most famous PC game designers in the US were Chris Crawford, Will Wright, and Dan Bunten (M.U.L.E.). Danielle Bunten Berry, her name after her transition, was the first out trans PC designer. Her last game was Warsport; she died in 1998 from lung cancer.

Weird Game Designer Facts #2 Mr. Milton Bradley, game publisher founder and designer of The Game of Life (his version quite different from the current version of that game), was also an inventor. One of his inventions was the single-armed paper cutter, originally created to slice game components.

Weird Game Designer Facts #1 The game of Risk -- originally published as La Conquête du Monde -- was designed by Albert Lamorisse. He is better known as the Oscar Award-winning director of The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge). He died in a fatal helicopter accident while filming in Iran in 1970.

Obviously staged attack.

I keep seeing devs on Steam offering plush. FFS, I am not going to buy a Balatro Joker doll. But I'd certainly buy tees for games I like. Why doesn't Valve allow this? BTW, I buy indie game tees from Red Bubble, where they are likely copyright violations, and the devs get nothing.

I reviewed Dead Pets, a virtual novel about a punk band bassist having an early mid-life crisis, with Diner Dash-style and rhythm mini-games. indiegamereviewer.com/dead-pets-re...

Welcome back to the Free World, Hungary! Now let us work to ensure that we can say the same about America in three years. Because we cannot claim the same today.

Suggested changes to mottos: Google: "There's more money in being evil." Meta: "Build gates to control all human connection and possibility." Microsoft: "Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to pay us more." AOL: "Life needs love. No one needs AOL."

I marched in the No Kings protest in Park Slope, Brooklyn today.

LA's Metro is extending their D line to new stations in May, and through their merch site, recently offering tees saying "Ride the D!". Which sold out almost at once, for... reasons... if you think twice. www.latimes.com/california/s...

I'm going to GDC (wanna meet up? let me know) Today, I went through the agenda In the last 2 years, 25% of game devs have lost their jobs. The GDC schedule is all about happy fun times. Tech things and how to. The industry has never faced a contraction this dire since the Atari crash. Maybe say so?

The @indiegamereviewer.bsky.social writers and editorial team are immensely proud of our Top 10 Indie Games of 2025 article, featuring #indiegames from @dogubomb.bsky.social, @dotemu.bsky.social, @blakemanorgame.bsky.social, @riverendgames.bsky.social and more: indiegamereviewer.com/top-10-indie...

My review of Perfect Tides: Station to Station, solo developer Meredith Gran's sequel to her earlier Perfect Tides. It's a point-and-click adventure game. It's very angsty In the firstgame, the angst was about "high school sucks;" here it's about "love sucks." indiegamereviewer.com/perfect-tide...

Me: Atlantic Avenue subway station, pulling a heavy cart of groceries up the stairs, trying to get to the N-R. A women in a full chador grabbed the back of the cart and helped me pull it up the last few steps. I thanked her, of course. But anti-Islamacists can go... do creative things to themselves.

So the Grucci family, who supply fireworks for Macy's on the 4th of July, often do practice sessions from the Jersey City waterfront, across the Hudson from my apartment. They did so today (I could hear the explosions); I didn't go about, but my daughter did, and caught a little of the fireworks.

1. At the end of WWII, the US had -50- military installations across Greenland. 2. Denmark has been our ally since WWII. 3. Denmark has NEVER revisited the establishment of US bases in Greenland, and has welcomed them to bolster its defense.

SPAGHETTI MAN ATE MY DREAMS In the oughts, I used to take my kids to my Dad's house in the Hamptons. I sent them to camp there, and would send the day working on a novel (or slacking and playing Heroes of Might & Magic 3). We took back roads to get to camp, because traffic on the Sunrise Highway..

I'm surprised to see this, but maybe they had already started development on the next game, and figure it's worth taking it to release. Since it takes place at Caledon University, they can probably save money by reusing environments they already built for Double Exposure.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure was a flop (failing to recoup its $300m+ dev costs -- not that Square Enix should ever have spent that much on what started as an indie game originally).

Oh, so up for this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwVW...

Are you interested in our Junior Program? Recruitment for our next cohort is open! For 12 weeks between February and May, we'll take on 8 candidates to join us. We'll take you through the production pipeline from start to finish, provide feedback, and ensure you ship a title.

Every American citizen deserves Congressional and Senatorial representation, and none should be treated as a second-class citizen without such. Puerto Rico should become a state, and include the American Virgin Islands. VI is too small to be their own state, but this gives them representation.

I contributed to Indie Game Reviewer's "Top Ten Indie Games of 2025": indiegamereviewer.com/top-10-indie...

I have an occasional intellectual discontinuity when I read something that talks about the "modern era." As someone interested in history, the "modern era" begins in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.

I wrote about TOON and the forthcoming new edition for Tabletop Quester: tabletopquester.com/toon-the-car...

A shift in the dairy cooler at the Park Slope Food Coop today. Restocking cream and eggnog constantly, you'd think there was a holiday coming up or something. And the usual things: milk, oat milk, and kombucha. Now my back hurts, but okay, lie in bed and read the most recent Travis Baldree novel.

There's currently a Backerkit (Kickstarter-like) running for a second edition of TOON, the roleplaying game of cartoon mayhem, which I designed (with Warren Spector) back in the 80s. Steve Jackson Games (which published the original) will also publish it. More here: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s...

I reviewed ON YOUR TAIL, a charming mystery-solving narrative game set in an Italian seaside village for Indie Game Reviewer: indiegamereviewer.com/on-your-tail...

I spent some years working for Nokia, and spent some time in Finland. I only learned three words in Finnish. "Hehe:" "(hello", also goodbye.) "Olut": (beer). And "Kiitos:" "thank you." But, this are the three essential words in any language: "Hello! Beer! Thank you!"

The Linewaiter's Gazette, the newspaper of the Park Slope Food Coop, ran a letter-to-the-editor I wrote, suggesting that the PSFC work with the Mamdani administration to spread the food coop model across NYC. linewaitersgazette.com/2025/12/09/d...

Park Slope Food Coop: www.foodcoop.com Rochdale principles of cooperation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdal...

Capitalist supermarkets: 1, coops 10, in terms of sales per square foot; and coops offer typically <60% of the price of the items they sell to their shopping members. If only we could devise a business play to bring this to the world.

Fundamentally, the PSFC shows that anarchosyndicalism (the radical self-organization of people to cooperate with each other) is superior to the capitalist system, and it should be replicated across the nation and the world (we have sister Coops in France and Brazil).