Retroactively.

Neural networks are proof that we suck at defining things, but our labels are excellent.

When Day Breaks.

Competing is haaard, you guys.

Sometimes dead is better.

Jason Scott compared “we’ve been acquired by Yahoo!” to “we found a lump.”

That was easily ten years ago.

Fuck-all was the good option.

RIP Tumblr.

Oh wow, I didn’t know Guerilla Games was owned by Sony since 2005. I thought it was a Naughty Dog / Insomniac situation where they were second-party.

… they really lost the console war, didn’t they? I mean, sales figures, yeah, their number is bigger. But it’s over. They lost the war to have a console. They’re publishing on the other guys’ machines, the other guys are publishing on their machines - it’s just branding, now. Developers won.

The gradient from “cute” to “horny” is difficult to describe, but clear to see.

Abolish software patents.

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

[email protected]

Nazis making shit up and moderation failing to silence them is not a question of eloquence. Fuck off with that.

The industry was so different back then, Unreal Tournament 2004 still shipped with a software renderer.

The industry was so different back then, Michael Abrash documented that renderer’s development in Dr. Dobbs, an actual ink-on-paper journal.

Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed: Intel. This renderer, Pixomatic, was all hand-optimized assembly, from the guy John Carmack hired to outclass him. At one point he realized one instruction in a very tight loop was redundant. Removing it made the loop slower. Which is, in technical terms, some bullshit. Doing less should not take more time. It wasn’t from alignment or cache or pipelines or any sensible cause. Abrash called in favors so he could study the actual traces of the Pentium 4, because he just had to know what the fuck was happening under the hood - and Intel made him sign a stack of NDAs, so we the public will never find out.

That’s not disproof they did things differently - or well. Any multiplayer-only game without players is a dead game, even if the gameplay it would have is mindblowing.

Why would it matter who made it? It was a corporate trend-chasing exercise, for an abusive business model, arriving years late and costing the wealth of Croesus.

Multiplayer-only shooters are a death wish. Either you succeed instantly and massively, or your game is nonfunctional. With digital distribution it’s not even a coaster. If all these nice people were allowed to be smart people they’d deliver the PvE that Overwatch lied about.

I’m told the pace was a lot slower. Less twitchy, more tactical. Higher time-to-kill.

I’m also told it was ugly as sin. That’s one way to stand out from Overwatch’s waifu parade.

This video and the Portal trailer blew people’s dicks off when they came out, but at least the Portal trailer, younger audiences can see why. So much of HL2’s tech is now ‘Yep, that’s a thing. Was it new?’

If you want the proper contemporary experience, here it is in potato quality, with live commentary.

Never give Nintendo money.

Do things that are never finished. Optimize the everloving bejeezus out of some code. Endlessly fiddle with webpage layouts. Explore and review all the ways not to reticulate a spline.