For the past few years I’ve been working on reverse engineering and remaking an almost 40 year old DOS game. Despite its age, I’m often surprised by the complexity and little tricks the game used, one of which is sound priority. Here’s the deal: the game, Crystal Caves, uses PC speaker audio, an extremely primitive,...

When I was very young I, like many kids, thought subjects like history were dull and impenetrable. A series of meaningless dates and events to memorise for the sake of writing history reports. But by the time I was a young adult my attitude had done a 180 - I was a full blown history nerd, thinking about empires,...

This one’s a practical coding article, one that I haven’t done in quite a while. It’s something I’ve come across often over the years so I’ve always wanted to have an article to point people to, so here it is. Here’s the premise: you’re making a game (or really any program) that reads data, whether that’s game data,...

The games industry is famously tough and insecure to be in, as it is hit-driven: rush the right game to market at the right moment and you can rake in the big bucks as your game becomes the current cultural phenomenon, or miss it and die in ignominy. This leads to a bunch of pathologies: the persistence of crunch,...

There are few experiences where the situation is so incongruent that you are left utterly speechless at the absurdity of it all, your mind incapable of processing what just happened, after feebly trying to search for an explanation. One of these is the soundtrack for Resident Evil: Director’s Cut DualShock’s Mansion...

There are few experiences where the situation is so incongruent that you are left utterly speechless at the absurdity of it all, your mind incapable of processing what just happened, after feebly trying to search for an explanation. One of these is the soundtrack for Resident Evil: Director’s Cut DualShock’s Mansion...

table, th, td { border: 1px solid black; } Back in the day I played a lot of online FPS games, but one really stuck with me and earned most of my devotion: Enemy Territory, the free (and now open source) team, class and objective-based game. I remember during a late night session, one of my clan-mates said:...

Everyone loves game maps. Especially when it comes to large game worlds, there’s nothing quite like looking at a mesmerising map filled with awesome detail, and imagine (re)inhabiting parts of this virtual world. When studying a map of a game that I’ve spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in, I often get a sense of...

Everyone loves game maps. Especially when it comes to large game worlds, there’s nothing quite like looking at a mesmerising map filled with awesome detail, and imagine (re)inhabiting parts of this virtual world. When studying a map of a game that I’ve spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in, I often get a sense of...

In the 2022 book Goldeneye 007 by Alyse Knorr, interviews with the dev team reveal the incredibly unlikely success of this groundbreaking game. An inexperienced hodgepodge team left to their own devices produced an industry-changing, record-breaking game, despite many odds going against them. It was truly a...

In the 2022 book Goldeneye 007 by Alyse Knorr, interviews with the dev team reveal the incredibly unlikely success of this groundbreaking game. An inexperienced hodgepodge team left to their own devices produced an industry-changing, record-breaking game, despite many odds going against them. It was truly a...

In the closing days of 1993, id Software released Doom, and the gaming world was changed forever. A landmark title that arguably established the first person shooter (FPS) genre, it was technically and artistically foundational, became one of the top selling and critically acclaimed games of all time, and even...