Fringe Game History Podcast

Shawn Hargreaves talks about the Allegro game programming library and the community that sprung up around it in the late 1990s. We talk about what happens when your hobby project accidentally turns into something with a life of its own, the inexplicable popularity of games involving the murder of Barney the Dinosaur, and the vital role of accessible tooling in providing a path to learning.

• Oric Atmos
• Allegro home page, April 1997
• Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice
• PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia
• Denthor of Asphyxia
• Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days (CD-ROM)
• Near / far pointers
• DJGPP
• CWSDPMI DOS extender
• FreeBE/AF
• No more "Swapware"
• Barney Mutilator (alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die)
• Kill the Barney (Play online)
• NeoPaint
• Teen Programmers Unite (Original usenet post)
• Simtel / cdrom.com
• Shawn told me the flightsim game he liked was not Triplane Turmoil (play online), and I haven't been able to dig up anything more plausible, so please leave a comment in the forums if you've got a guess!
• Allegro 3.11 FAQ
• An example of a blatantly-didn't-read-the-documentation question I posted to usenet that got many helpful responses
• allegro.cc community
• Allegro Speedhack game jam (Shawn's first entry, second)
• Allegro contributor list
• Allegro add-ons / library extensions
• PCX file format
• MikMod and Mikalleg
• Scream Tracker (Wikipedia)
• Impulse Tracker (First-hand account of its creation: 1, 2, 3, 4)
• DIGMID patch sets
• XNA Game Studio
• Avatar Fart, a representative example of the "fart game" on XBLIG. See also Rocket Fart, Surround Sound RC Gopher Farting Masseuse, and of course, Try Not To Fart.
• Shawn's current website
• Garret Thomson's 1997 MIDI licensing webpage, including download links for Sorcerer and Demonics, the two pieces used in the Allegro demo game
• Garret Thomson's current SoundCloud

Leonard Richardson talks about a number of free and open-source games he made, as well as his time running a goofy BBS as a kid. We discuss the experience of having dozens of strangers create their own riffs of a game he tossed together in a couple of days, writing interactive fiction as a stepping stone to writing non-interactive fiction, and Nethack code patches as a form of fanfiction.

• Choppy the Pork Chop (Play online)
• Some Prodigy ads
• Mustang Software / Wildcat! BBS
• Party line
• Da Da Warren Memorial Memorial
• Door games (Tradewars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon)
• David Griffith
• Museum of ZZT
• Worlds of ZZT, feat. Leonard's 1993 game House of Bob (Play in browser)
• Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten, slides for a talk given by Leonard for Roguelike Celebration 2017.
• Pete Peterson II
• PalmOS robotfindskitten
• Apple II and C64 robotfindskitten
• Atari 2600 robotfindskitten dev diary
• robotfindskitten.org
• OpenGL robotfindskitten
• cc65 C compiler for C64
• The Ultimate robotfindskitten Fan Site / robotfindskitten 2: This time it's personal!
• Original MS-DOS version of robotfindskitten (playable in-browser)
• What Fools These Mortals
• Leonard's Nethack patches
• Planetfall (playable in-browser)
• Lost Treasures of Infocom
• The Interactive Fiction Archive
• TADS
• Guess the Verb (IFDB, ClubFloyd transcript, Play in browser)
• IFComp
• Degeneracy (Postmortem, ClubFloyd transcript, IFDB, Play in browser)
• Constellation Games
• Darius Kazemi's Fuck Videogames
• The Minecraft Archive Project

Jonah Davidson talks about his time as part of the rpg2knet RPG Maker community. We talk about the desire to push the limits of the tool's strange constraints, the rite of passage of dealing with terrible translations, and how a community can spend a lot of effort trying to emulate the games it loves, only to slowly discover that the games that break out are the ones that are nothing like them.

• Hangedman Design / @JonahD
• Usborne BASIC programming books
• gorillas.bas
• Construct
• RPG Maker RTP
• Don Miguel (interview, original site)
• rpg2knet
• Verge
• The Rare/Obscure RPG Maker Games Request Topic - a centralized list of downloads of RPG Maker community works
• A Blurred Line
• Legion Saga
• Power Trip (Video)
• Space Funeral
• Yume Nikki
• Off
• Dogs can't climb trees
• laughy's tetris (Don Miguel's Tetris contest site, rpg2knet review)
• Super Turbo Power Man
• Enter Password
• FPS Banana
• OHRRPGCE

My childhood best friend Roman Banias talks about the games he made for fun as a young child. We discuss the magic and wonder of type-in programming books, the home computer as a toy, the act of creation as a natural extension of childhood play, and the Alien Zit Cinematic Universe.

• The Bookmobile
• GW-BASIC
• Dorkgimp Weinerstink, my Zak McKracken fangame with Leisure Quest Hunter-like ASCII maps
• Dr. Sbaitso
• The Alien Zit
• Alien Zit 2000 and theme song
• Alien Love Triangle
• Teen Programmers Unite
• Breton Voice Replacer, a Morrowind mod
• Whirlybird Attack and my teenage remake
• Computer Monsters
• The MAD Computer Program
• Eat Sh*t Victor

Phil Salvador of The Obscuritory talks about his tenure as an administrator of the Mario Fan Games Galaxy. We discuss the driving energy behind goofy joke games, the fragile nature of early internet communities, the interconnected nature of fan sites, and Waligie, a community icon born from a random poster's terrible spelling.

• The Obscuritory, Phil's current major project
• Mario Fan Games Galaxy
• Official Hamster Republic RPG Creation Engine / OHRRPGCE
• Mario Vs. NWO
• Hello Engine
• Paper Mario World
• Waligie
• Pocket Mario
• Live In A Buttock (Download)
• G4TV's Attack of the Show plugs MFGG
• Toad Strikes Back
• Normal Mario Bros
  • (A correction: Normal Mario Bros is not by Tech Wing. Phil told me afterwards he was thinking of Super Mario Melatonin)
• The Midas Machine
• Eyes in Everything, game company started by Thunder Dragon and Yoshiman
• MFGG Underground
• CJB.net / home.ml.org

Kirk Israel talks about JoustPong, a game he has made and remade many times over the years. We dive into the homebrew community surrounding the Atari 2600 in the early 2000s, the strain of obsessive assembly coding on relationships, and the challenge of finding a supportive community.

• The Usenet thread where JoustPong was first proposed
• Visual Basic JoustPong
• PocketC JoustPong
• Java JoustPong
• Atari 2600 JoustPong / FlapPing development blog
• processing.js FlapPing made for Flappy Jam
• You can buy a physical FlapPing cartridge for the Atari 2600
• kirk.is, Kirk's personal blog, which he's been updating daily since 2001
• Kirk's gamebutton arcade
• Batari Basic is an accessible tool for Atari 2600 game creation
• Kirk reviews every type-in game from Compute!'s Gazette magazine
• Hozer Video vs. AtariAge