Tag: gaming

JH AfterParty 1.2

Thank you!

Hey everyone, thanks again for being part of the ride and welcome to the second official edition of the JH AfterParty. As always with the AfterParty, it goes out to Patrons and other contributors a week before everyone else gets it, generally around noon on Tuesdays (at least for now). The public edition is scheduled ahead of time and will always drop at noon eastern a week after the previous one, and the whole mess is published simultaneously on my Patreon and on JohnHenry.US! (The edition on the website tends to be a bit prettier due to limitations of the rich text editor at Patreon.)

It has been a heck of a week in terms of getting things done. Since the “launch” issue of AfterParty last Friday, I put up a couple of articles plus did a ton of work building and creating content on the newly-built section of my site devoted to gaming, which has long been a passion of mine that I’ve wanted to write and create content around, but have never really sat down and taken a serious run at it. There’ll be a comprehensive rundown of all that stuff in the Saturday Substack, but between that and the new article about gun violence alone there’s a couple of hours’ worth of well-spent time waiting for you over at JohnHenry.US if you get the urge to just pop over and check it out.

All of that and everything else I do is possible only because of your support, so thank you!

Looking Ahead Through Blurred Lenses

I had this notion of creating a short – 60 seconds or less – ad video that’s intended to be used by “you,” Constant Reader, to introduce me to the part of the world you have contact with and I don’t.

This is one of those rare things where I’m thinking pretty much in straight-up marketing terms. When it’s necessary I sort of have a little consultant in my head that I allow to run his mouth in small doses and look at me and my work as a product and service and object to be distributed and communicated. According to him, it would be really effective to reach out with a short vid pointing directly to past support and largely intended to be shared by you folks who have been behind me and watching me go through all this mess for the last harumharum years.

Basically it’s an ethical and righteous way of leveraging social proof. Like these clowns that go buy 200K fake followers from an agency right out of the gate so you see them and think “well, obviously with that many people behind it there must be something worthwhile there.” It’s a known human “thing” to do that, and nearly everyone in any kind of marketing space leverages that with the artificial appearance of this support (called “social proof”) to build “real” support.

I think that’s crooked as hell and reduces discourse and platform access to another dollar chase, and the dollar chase is exactly the disease I’m trying to vaccinate us all against. Unfortunately we live in a world that runs on money, and while we can fight to change that all day long it’s still the present reality and we have to work within it to some degree or we don’t work at all.

Consequently I need to lean in a bit harder on the whole marketing thing even though I absolutely HATE it. I’ve often said that I’m a proud graduate of the Bill Hicks school of marketing and advertising…

Planting seeds. It’s Hicks, again if I gotta tell you the audio’s NSFW I’m not sure how you found me in the first place…

But the reality is that you good folks are all out there. There are dozens of names I could think of without looking, should I take the mind, that I know I’ve been seeing in and out of my comment section for many years. You all have an ownership piece of all of this work whether because you’ve put literal cash into it or because of the time and energy you put in reading and watching and liking and sharing and commenting, and I feel like growing the support base is as much a validation of your support as it is of my work.

I want to give you a way to say straight up “hey I’ve been watching this cat fight like hell through some unimaginable garbage that’s been thrown at him over the years, he keeps on going and keeps on kicking out this really good work, I support him and I think you should too.” Everybody loves an underdog, everybody loves a comeback, (especially when it’s against the odds with righteous cause), everybody loves a story of a powerless individual triumphing against the malignancy of power arrayed against their desire to simply live freely. Everybody wants to be part of that.

We just gotta let ’em know I’m out here, and I’m unfortunately “that asshole” who refuses to cheat the system by buying artificial appearances of social approval to “sell” myself emotionally to people by unethically bypassing their critical thinking. That means I’ve got to work a thousand times as hard to magnify and enhance the legitimate social approval I do have. It means eventually I’ll buy advertising on various platforms that I’d rather not exist at all, because those platforms have a monopoly on information gatekeeping and if you don’t pay them, your information doesn’t get in front of people’s eyeballs.

Mostly it means I need to work harder to give you the voice to spread the word, so I’ll be doing that Real Soon™. Clearly the word needs to be there, to be spread, so I’m balancing the need for creating these kinds of overt marketing materials with the need to create quality original content that speaks for itself and doesn’t require a bunch of carnival barking or sales pitching.

Obviously the idea is very rough at present and I’m not 100% sure how quickly that will be done, so that’s about all I’ll say about it for now, but obviously I’m always interested in your feedback and thoughts on stuff like this.

In My Head

Life is incredibly positive right now. Not perfect by any means, there remain challenges even beyond trying to pay for my existence, but I’m working at a speed and level of quality that I haven’t touched in years, and I’m super excited about it. Things I’ve struggled with mentally for a long time because of ongoing stress and anxiety about the stability of my living situation or other pressures related thereto, I’m finally breaking through on and getting settled in properly the way I’ve been fighting to in some ways for most of my life.

This newsletter is one small example of that, and I think I’ve discussed enough others that there’s no need to re-enumerate them here. I’m more organized, more focused, more productive with my work time, generally in a better mood. I’ve even lost about a tenth of my body weight in the last couple of months, which is a good thing – it’s because my diet isn’t mostly pasta, sugar, and salt anymore. I have more energy when I’m awake, and I feel more stable than I have since I was working at Musician’s Friend…more so, because I’m not relying on my ability to not piss off some yuppie.

I’m probably in the best space mentally and intellectually that I’ve been in…at least a decade, maybe two, maybe ever if I take everything into account. By no means does that means life is easy, obviously I’m still scrambling for forward momentum and financial stability, or steady income of any sort that I can count on beyond the $105/month in pledges that goes through Patreon right now for that matter – but boyohboy does that $105 – or really about 97 after fees – make a difference!

If I just had 18 more people pitching in $50 a month, that would be $1k/m. That’s easily survival money in my present situation. That plus an occasional large contribution or a whole lot of other small ones, and I can start doing things like replacing this computer, which has now officially aged out of useful life for my purposes as a primary machine because it’s so old it can’t run Windows 11 and MS has announced they’re not issuing any more updates for Windows 10 beyond critical security patches.

That means that OS is at end of life and it’s the most modern one I can run and still use any of my tools to speak of. That also means my tools are evolving beyond my current hardware’s ability to even upgrade to with the same motherboard and cpu architecture (i7-3700 I think, so i7 yay but third gen; it’s twelfth-gen now plus they’re up to i10 or so. It’ll make a great file server for years to come but as a production box its breathing its last.). I think I’m going to work up some kind of targeted fundraiser specifically for that, maybe two thousand dollars. From what I can see that’s about where the current “sweet spot” is between paying too much for the most modern tech and getting tech that will age out too fast to be worth what they’re asking for it.

Plus the market is so screwy right now you’ll still pay two grand for a box that has 4.5K worth of components in it if you tried to build it yourself, largely because of the price of video cards and how much cheaper they are for fabricators buying them to put in computers than for tech bros buying them to mine crypto. Some of that’s changing and shifting now that crypto has basically fallen apart, but I don’t expect to go back to the days of building it cheaper than you can buy it, except at the very high end of the price ranges, for at least another five, maybe ten years, if at all.

My last guess has lasted me ten years with nothing but video upgrades, so yeah. I’ll be all right, just need the funding. Should make for a step up in video quality too, especially when I also upgrade my webcam and ultimately invest in a solid 4K or (better) 8K portable.

I note that it’s about noon-thirty my time right now, which means in theory I should’ve had this out half an hour ago. I’m gonna shut up for now and get back on the rest of my work. Hopefully as things including my mental health progress, I’ll get to the point where I’ve got this newsletter done by Monday night, and I can just schedule it to drop regularly at noon on Tuesdays for the “Advance” edition at the same time the “Public” edition from the prior week goes public. That said, I also don’t want them to drop on top of each other, so I’ll probably aim for a little earlier, say 9am, on Tuesdays for the Advance and then noon for the Public.

Edition 1.1 will be public at noon eastern, this Friday.

Let me get back on it, there’s still about a day’s work I want to get wrapped on this gaming subsection, then get at least one and probably two bits of “serious” writing and content done, then I get to start doing the same thing I’m doing now with gaming, but with music which is a whooooooole different game. In spite of appearances, I remain first and foremost a musician, and I’m getting awfully long in the tooth to keep all that knowledge to myself too. Plus…yeah. Let me get on or I’ll stay here talking until I starve to death.

Love y’all, see ya soon!
-jh

May 16, 2023
Ratholes and Tangents

Hey kids, let’s write a blog post about ratholes and tangents!

I wanted to take a second and tell you a little “behind the scenes” story of how sometimes even when you’re firing on all cylinders, you end up taking a detour…

Front page of this site

So if you’ve been paying attention here the last couple of weeks you know I’ve been doing a lot of work across the board, but mostly here at JohnHenry.US. I’ve got a couple of huge new articles up, a handful of smaller ones, and entire new sections of the site.

As I write this there’s still some flash that needs to be trimmed all over, but this is about the rathole so ignore that part and check out this page real quick. Just peek and scan, there’s not much there in the way of words.

Now look at the front of this site.

The front of this site should be that “Home” page, but this theme won’t let that happen. Why? Don’t know, and hacking through the internals to track it down would take weeks. Harumph.

Guess I have to try a new theme. I’ve got all kinds of new branching internal content set up and planned and executing (like this) that’s designed around this theme with the same basic setup of hero banner on top, pages and posts below, and sidebar, so we’ll try to stick to something close to this layout…and nothing works.

I noticed this problem late Wednesday night.

I tried almost forty themes on this site yesterday, and the ones that would properly render the “right” home page, ended up having other major content formatting issues that made them unusable or would have forced me to redesign the entire site again.

There’s probably a fairly easy solution to this, but nothing jumped out at me in the theme code, and all the available Google solutions are dead ends. I even gave some serious thought into using WordPress’ new “Site Builder” feature, which is rather deeper than simply theming, but again this would be a huge rathole that would take me weeks to crawl out of and bring my forward momentum to a dead stop. (Note to self: make time for that rathole once you’re back in production.)

I’ve been trying to improve a lot of things about myself over these last few weeks that I’ve been quiet, for me, since I moved out of the motel. On one hand, I’m not in a crisis which demands that I just keep paddling as fast as I can and hope I hit land before I sink, so I can take the time to find the right solution. On the other hand, I know I’m prone to getting lost in these ratholes and tangents,

What the front page of this site is supposed to look like.

So I gave it one day. I mean, it’s the entire site design, right, so it’s okay to take a minute and see what you can do to make it exactly the “right” way you want it. But again: let’s not lose momentum or get into tangents of tangents of tangents, or all this stuff you’ve started doing is going to get lost.

Turns out: no good solution! I spent a day fiddling with different themes trying to make it work, and consistently the themes that fit reasonably well into the aesthetic and UI I had in place, will not render that home page as the root page of the site no matter what I do to it.

So the home page of the site is just gonna have to be vaguely mis-matched from the rest of it from now on. Hardly anyone visits home pages anymore anyway. Plus I can rig it a little bit by taking the time to properly set up my site’s page structure, using the “right” page as the root of the site tree, and then the breadcrumbs should use that as home and get SOME traffic pointed there.

So today it’s back to the tangent I was on…getting the gaming section of the site set up and a bit of content in it, then setting in to a production groove for a minute with new content coming in there and in other areas of my work…and at that point I can start thinking of doing the same things with music, film, books, TV/streaming, IT geek stuff, and all of the other things that interest me.

I figure it’ll be a year – and probably at least one more site redesign – before I’ve got this site in the condition I want it to be. The good news about that is it’s all one-time work that I frankly should have done twenty years ago anyway. Not only is it all scalable and amounts to a bunch of plug-and-play content boxes, the same techniques and some of the scripting I’ve written and so forth can also be used on Custode and WeAntiFascists, and it will be.

The same is true for some of the less major tangents I’ve been on this last week and a half or so – changing my SEO tool from Yoast to RankMath, adding and changing all kinds of back-end tools and plugins for the site (talked about some of this in last week’s Substack – make sure you’re signed up, all you gotta do is punch your e-mail address in the sidebar form on my site or go to my SubStack home page and punch it in there – always free!), most of which will also be implemented on my other sites. (The WAF site is set up a little differently with less metric/traffic monitoring and no advertising implemented whatsoever…so that’s like six different tools that aren’t used over there, or are used in substantially different ways.)

Shot of the “Gaming” section – you can see it’s still rough, but the aesthetic-thematic consistency should be obvious.

The first edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter goes public in a couple of hours, be sure to keep your eyes out for that please and thanks. Let me get back on the game section and get that wrapped up (mostly design elements and I want to get a few more Fallout 4 screenies posted, plus get the Cities:Skylines section started), then I’ll start picking up on the half-dozen articles I’ve got almost finished for other platforms (all my sites plus Medium, plus I need to get my Substack newsletter written so it’s ready to roll in the morning).

Finally just a quick personal note: yes, I recognize that from “out there” it looks like I’m kind of up my own butt right now, but that’s what happens when you’re a one-person conglomerate. I’d love to have some folks working for me to handle like 85% of this so I could just focus on writing, but that’s life in the big city. I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of social justice issues to discuss – and I have been even in the middle of all of this – so please don’t be concerned that I’ve decided to stop doing what I do and just focus on “light” stuff like gaming and music. I have a rich, full intellectual and artistic life, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it in my public work. I’m starting to get some of that stuff out there now, because it’s interesting and – as I’ve mentioned before – I frankly have much less ethical quandry related to monetizing that stuff as opposed to public interest work that ought to be free. Ironically this will end up resulting in the other stuff generating the income necessary to do the social and public interest stuff well.

That’s it for me for now. I’m not going to set a schedule on “My Actual Blog,” but am trying to make sure I hit it at least once in every calendar period.

May 12, 2023
Gallery: The Life And Times Of Lazarus Long

The omnibus collection; this is the entire screenshot life of Lazarus Long, Sole Survivor. Companion to “The Irradiated Notebooks Of Lazarus Long.” This will likely feature hundreds if not thousands of screenshots by the time it’s done, but I’ll try to make them entertaining.

Lazarus, Come Forth

The birth of Lazarus Long, Sole Survivor.

Meet Lazarus Long, the Sole Survivor. That’s his wife behind him, she (spoiler) will not be surviving.

I rolled ol’ Lazarus here specifically for this blog. I’m going to walk him through the main quest lines, doing my best to create as few settlements as possible along the way (save that for after the main quest lines). I don’t have a big plan or purpose other than to post a bunch of cool screenshots and share various things about how I play this game, cool mods and things you might be in to, and so forth.

Biggest reason I’m starting a new character for you is that the one I have running has been running since about 2018, and much of the space is unrecognizable where settlements have been build up and so forth. So I figured if I’m gonna do it, let’s do it right and get proper before-and-after stuff and let people see how it all develops and changes over time, what kinds of neat screenies I get, and all that good stuff.

I’m going to let the gameplay and process dictate when things get screenshots and what sort of content I write here, but fundamentally this is my character to do this blog with so a good deal of the eventual side and meta content like plugin/mod reviews and so forth will feature both here and in its own content space. I got a few early shots from The Story We All Know And Love, but you’ll see I start going on detours right away…

Impending Doom

The Sanctuary Hills area prior to the firestorm.

This, as anyone who’s played for more than five minutes will recognize, is the entrance to Vault 111, looking back at my wife Nora and son Shaun as we’re evacuating the town, you all probably know the storyline. Basically just a “candy” shot of the world before it gets blown to hell.

The Big Bang

And now, the end is near…

Again, hardly a spoiler for the new game cutscene that was released in 2015. Shows off some nice work with the graphics though, and it’s a nice bit of howdy for folks who haven’t played.

Rings Of Fire

And they burn, burn, burn…

Just a few seconds later, as we see the light of the bomb and the pulses of energy (heat, I’m guessing) in the atmosphere creating concentric rings in the atmosphere, as Our Hero And His Beloved Family Desperately Run For Safety.

This Is The End

My only friend…

Just as the kinetic shock approaches Our Heroes, the elevator to Vault 111 lowers them to safety, and the world burns overhead…

The Cold Equations

“…but I didn’t DO anything!”

I’ll spare you the nine millionth recounting of the Fallout 4 storyline here. This is the last thing Lazarus sees before the unexpected cryogenic hibernation. It’s the second to last time he’ll ever see his beloved wife Nora. sniffle Note: If you’re not familiar with it and you don’t mind a story pretty much guaranteed to leave you sobbing and maybe not in a terribly bright space in your head, you absolutely must read the short story ‘The Cold Equations‘ by a fellow named Tom Godwin, originally written back in 1954. It’ll make you think.

That’s All For Now!

To Be Continued…

And that’s the end of the gallery for now. This will be updated constantly-ish, as I get opportunities to put time in on the game. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget my entire life and work is crowdfunded so please like, share, comment, subscribe, and use that tip jar if you can!

May 9, 2023
JH’s Brief History Of Video Games

Introduction

I figure since I’m going to open the box on the whole gaming thing, which I really haven’t touched in terms of content creation in about 25 years, I should probably introduce myself in that context. Then I started writing and about eight hours later had a fairly cool and comprehensive article about the history of video games between 1975 and 1986, so I decided to go with it and do a multi-part project covering that history from my perspective as a gamer, and this is the first segment of that project.

This isn’t “the” history of gaming, it’s “my” history of gaming. This is what it looked like to me, as someone alive at the time, to the best of my memories. I’ve done significant work to ensure I’m not communicating any old urban legends or myths, but in the end this isn’t intended to be an objective article; it’s my subjective memories and opinions, augmented by research. Feel free to argue about it in the forum!

In this edition we’ll go from “In the beginning…” up to the calm before the Nintornado that blew through the industry in February of 1986. Note I’ve used the post splitter, so pay attention to that little navbar where the section title is, at the top and bottom of each page.

Early Days

I’ve been a gamer since before video games existed. Pong clones and two-word text parsers were hours of time spent before I was ten years old…and that was in 1980. We’re talking single-color monitors, 80×25 characters, and a “pixel” was roughly the size of your pinky nail.

When there were any pixels at all. There are none here, or there wouldn’t be if it was running on OG equipment. NB: This isn’t a really early beta of “Elder Scrolls VI,” but it’s closer than you probably think.

Whether it was early consoles like those PONG clones, ante-computer-geek text games and bad, blocky knock-offs of then-currently popular arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, or just taking a screwdriver and shorting together the pins in the EPROMS on my VIC-20 while it was plugged in so I could see what it would do on-screen, I’ve always been deeply fascinated in computer imaging and gaming both.

Trivia point: the first thing I ever “hacked” was using what eventually became Norton Utilities to overwrite the contents of a floppy drive, directly to the disk as hexadecimal text input from the keyboard, to remove the copy protection and customize the load/splash screens on a bunch of old games like this. Then I’d take off to the local mall, go to the Radio Shack, load up a game on their demo box(es) and walk away. That was when I was probably 13, 14.

So yeah. I’ve been at it for a minute.

Over the last forty years or so of course video gaming has gone from a micro-niche targeted toward “kids” to become not just a multi billion dollar industry, but depending on your sources it’s arguably the largest sector of the entire global entertainment business. While one may quibble over methodology and rankings and calculations, certainly it can’t be argued that gaming has become an incredibly popular, and lucrative endeavor.

What’s your vector, Victor?

Around 1980 we started seeing some interesting innovations, beginning with “vector graphics.” This is a little different than the way we use the term today. In 2023, programs like Adobe Illustrator use “vector graphics” to draw scalable images that are defined by mathematical formulae in the rendering software. By contrast, “raster” graphic programs like Adobe Photoshop instead program an array of pixels with color and (in some cases) transparency information.

So a raw vector formula to create an “S” might (in the simplest implementation) describe mathematically a pair of sine waves, oriented vertically, calculated such that they intersect at each end of the “S.” A rastor formula for the same “S” on the other hand would basically be a small relational database or spreadsheet – a two-dimensional array – with each intersecting coordinate being described in terms of the levels of red, blue, green, and “alpha” (transparency) that each pixel will be programmed with.

The end result of this was no more blocky edges on diagonal lines traveling across horizontal CRT scanlines…but alas, still, no more curves at all.

Pictured: not curves. A screenshot of the vector-graphics game Battlezone. This screenshot is from a version ported for the US Army called the “Bradley Trainer,” which was used to train literal legit tank operators for the US military. The Battlezone monitors were green on black, not white.

Vector monitors (a whole different setup than your traditional CRT monitors and TVs, or modern LED displays) couldn’t draw circles either, but only straight lines between a series of points (think about the levels in the video game “Tempest,” which was one of the earliest memories I have of color vector graphics).

Lines, lines, everything is lines. Screenshot from the attract screen of Tempest (1980)

What made vector monitors sort of cool and different was that the lines were sharp. Where a CRT or television simply draws a series of horizontal lines that quickly “scans” from top to bottom, a vector monitor draws the lines directly from point A to point B. An old-school CRT draws a diagonal line as a series of horizontal lines with different characteristics at different points across the inside of the tube to create the illusion of a vertical line. Consequently – although it’s impossible to really show you here because you’re all not reading this on a vector graphic monitor – the resulting drawings are remarkably sharp and crisp when compared to traditional raster graphics.

Unfortunately limitations of computing power and the overwhelming prevalence of raster graphics in consumer products like TVs and (increasingly) computers made these games pretty limited in their ability to really capitalize on the improved visuals of vector monitors. Probably the peak of the field was the 1983 Star Wars arcade shooter, in which the player sat in as Luke Skywalker on a repeating three-level infinite adventure. (World record: five days on a single credit, played back and forth between two guys in the 80’s. Total score slightly over a billion points.)

Those funny things that look like asterisks on way too much caffeine are supposed to be fireballs. The other things are tie fighters, and a shooting reticle, and then the “guns” of your x-wing fighter at the edges of the screen. Courtesy Atari, Inc or whoever owns the game IP this week.

Unfortunately as you can see from the image, this really didn’t get us to the sort of photo-realistic pinnacle of graphic art that we youngsters were hoping to reach, but in 1983 plenty of us spent many many dollars in quarters hearing “Red five standing by!” and “Use the force, Luke,” and my favorite line “Luke, let go!” The first was Actually Mark Hamill and the second and third Actually Alec Guiness. I don’t know if they recorded the lines specifically for the game, or if the audio was pulled from the film soundtracks – in fact I just tweeted Mark Hamill to ask, I’ll let you know if he offers a canonical answer. He might, he’s known for being pretty cool with stuff like that.

Color! And More…

Around the same time vector games were rising, we also saw the introduction of color into early eight-bit games.

Carrying on a long-standing tradition of pretending that Americans in the old west were all the same color.

The first “eight bit” game is generally recognized as “Gun Fight,” a 1975 arcade game by Taito (worldwide) and Midway (North America). The use of the phrase “eight bit” can be confusing because now most people related that to the graphics of the game itself, but in reality this was the bandwidth of the CPU. Prior to “Gun Fight,” video games were created with “discrete logic” electronics explicitly, physically created for the tasks at hand. When Midway licensed the game for the US, they ported it to run on an Intel 8080 CPU, making it the first CPU-based video game.

At this stage of the technology, using a CPU allowed game developers to begin true game programming – the creation of game software to run on hardware that is intended generally for “computing” rather than specifically “to be a video game cabinet.” In 1979, the game changed completely with the introduction of the Galaxian platform by Nintendo in Japan. With various leaps forward in processing techniques, Galaxian was the first truly modern video game, with the now familiar “Pac-Man” graphics. Trivia note: Pac-man was originally developed on Galaga hardware, as were several others like Galaga and (if I remember correctly) Jungle King).

This was the dawn of the first wave of modern video gaming. With hits like “Space Invaders,” “Galaxian,” and “Pac-Man” raking in billions of dollars in quarters, gaming had started to carve a niche in the culture. Although a certain Italian plumber would ultimately take the role, Pac Man in particular was the symbol of everything exciting about video gaming in 1981 or so…

Leading us to the unlikely scenario of two hillbilly-lookin dudes lip-syncing an electro-synth pop anthem about a yellow pizza with a slice missing on what was then the most-watched visual music presentation in the US, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

Often called the “golden age of arcade gaming,” the period from 1980-1983 saw an explosion of arcade games, for the first time supplanting pinball machines as vice du jour for the nation’s misguided youth. This is where the classics really began – in basically a three year span you had Pac Man, Galaxian, Frogger, Space Fury (the actual first color vector game). In 1982 the first 16-bit CPU arcade game, “Pole Position,” was released by Atari, and with groundbreaking offerings like “Tron,” “Dragon’s Lair,” and “Space Ace” capping off the run toward the end of the wave, it was a pretty magical time to be a gamer.

This coincides roughly with the first real wave of home gaming consoles beginning with the Atari 2600 in 1977, which was the first “must have” home gaming console right up until they created a game so bad they had to bury it in an undisclosed desert location and it basically killed the platform.

Some say Atari died in 1979 when Nolan Bushnell sold out to Warner, but the gravesite’s been found and the body is definitely dated 1983.

The long version of the story is that Atari had been bought by Warner in 1979 and generated some 65%-ish of their 1982 profits…and then proceeded to lose about a half a billion dollars the next year, in part due to the failure of E.T. but also disappointing results from their port of Pac-Man – these two titles themselves owning about 85% of votes across the board for “worst video game ever.” Warner sold them off in 1983 and their steep decline continued. The brand has basically been used as a venture-capital electronics brand buoyed by its early 80’s reputation ever since, and by all accounts ceased being “the real Atari” in any way after being sold off by Warner.

Into the vacuum stepped a couple of quite decent contenders among a mess of nonsense like the Timex Sinclair. Although the Mattel Intellivision sported the first 16-bit processing in a home console and superior graphics and sound, a series of business missteps including the abominable attempt at creating an attachable keyboard that would convert the whole thing into a rudimentary home computer ended the Intellivision while the Colecovision – running on an 8-bit Z80 processor but coming out of the gate with the first home version of Donkey King that was ridiculously faithful to the original – started eating Atari’s console market share until similar missteps with their Adam ended that.

Fortunately for gaming, a revolution was around the corner.

And that’s where we’ll break it off for now. Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon!

May 7, 2023
JH The Gamer

I’ve talked for a long time about my love of gaming, going back to childhood in the 70s. For those of you who are interested there’s going to be a lot more content related to that showing up on my blog as well. Kinda tired of allowing my public life to exist under the shadow of the idea that poor people don’t deserve to have fun. So watch for that, I’m about to throw up a bunch of Fallout 4 stuff and get some basic things in place to start doing a lot more work on that and dishing out a bit of the lore and wisdom carried by JH The Gamer.

Insider secret: I tend to bury myself in reading books and gaming when I’m super depressed AND when I’m in that “percolating” mode where I’ve been through a bunch of experiences and now it’s time to sit down and process them and build the platforms for whatever’s next.

Breaking that stuff out into content mitigates some of the losses involved when I’m locked in some mental illness issue that includes executive dysfunction, by creating interesting and monetizable content out of the results…and all I really have to do is lean on the screenshot button and then write about and post the results when I’m in a more productive and energized space.

EZ mode, and as a bonus there’s zero ideological or ethical reason not to monetize it and push it as a “product” rather than feeling very averse to that idea the way I do about my social justice, public interest, and creative artistic work. MBAs & muggles cf. “long tails” and monetizing EVERYTHING, just the way capitalism demands. Plus it’ll pull some inevitable cross-traffic to my work.

Also, as part of the overall reorganization of everything I do, I decided to launch an explicit category here called “My Actual Blog” that will serve as the space for little “by the ways” and “slices of life” and so forth that go by and I feel like blogging about with no particular explicit intent or purpose. This is the first entry in that blog 🙂

I’ll set up a nav tree and proper landing pages and get it all plugged in to the menu and all that stuff soon. Meanwhile have a little gallery of screenshots from Fallout 4!

May 6, 2023