I just got a craving for The Spice

Dune II is to the real-time strategy genre as Wolfenstein 3D is to first-person shooters. Like Wolf-3D, Dune II wasn’t the absolute first example of its genre, but it was the first game to bring together all the distinctive elements of its respective genre into one title — in this case, those elements would later be copied and expanded upon over and over again by games like Command & Conquer and Warcraft.

That being said, I’ve only played Dune II a few times — only many years after its release. I never got into it, but I can see why it is a historically important game. Warcraft was my first modern RTS game.

Discussion Topic: What’s your favorite Real-Time Strategy game of all time?

Despite what you may think, Newsbits is not dead. It just needs more fiber.

Recent News

• The RetroN 5 Launching June 6th (Today!) in the US
  (Source: Destructoid)

  Hope it works as advertised.

  This thing is a beast, supporting NES, Famicom, SNES, Super Famicom, Genesis, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and GBA cartridges. All of that, with 720p output via HDMI and original controller support.

• Wii U plugs first DS game into Virtual Console in Japan

  Once upon a time, Nintendo frowned strongly upon emulation. Now its business model depends on it. Oh, how times have changed.

  Puzzle-poser Brain Age is the first DS game to arrive on Wii U Virtual Console, and it’s out now in Japan for free until June 30.

• Unearthed E.T. Atari games will be curated by New Mexico space museum and then sold
  (Source: Polygon)

  A unique situation where one of these games in unopened, mint condition could be worth far less than one crushed and buried in a landfill for 30 years.

  Seven hundred of the 1,300 E.T. and other Atari cartridges recovered from a New Mexico landfill will be appraised, certified and put up for sale, the Alamogordo City Commission decided this week.

• The Verge Publishes Rarely-Seen Photos of Apple’s 1980s Prototype Case Designs
  (Source: The Verge)

  Incredible photos of early 1980s Apple products that never were

  Some of its earliest and most iconic designs, however, didn’t actually come from inside of Apple, but from outside designers at Frog. In particular, credit goes to Frog’s founder, Hartmut Esslinger, who was responsible for the ‘Snow White’ design language.

• Watching kids trying to figure out how to use an old Apple II is totally hilarious
  (Source: Cult of Mac)
  

  This video of children from the ages of 6 to 13 trying to figure out how to work a vintage Apple II … shows just how inexplicable computing was to pretty much everyone before Steve Jobs released the original Mac in 1984.

• Modder Stuffs a Raspberry Pi into a Game Boy Pocket
  (Source: Hackaday)

  This is one of the most amazing mods I’ve ever seen

  After sanding down the bosses on the inside of the case, gluing the battery door shut, and installing a bit of plastic over the cartridge slot, WarriorRocker was able to fit a Raspi inside. The buttons use the same PCB as the stock Game Boy, connected to a Teensy 2.0 board that simulates a USB keyboard.

• Exhibiting .gifs: An Interview with curator Jason Eppink
  (Source: The Signal)

  Wonder if they know about Retro GIF of the Week

  Jason recently curated ‘The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture,’ which exhibits a set of GIFs he identified in consultation with redditors.

Cool Links

• Where Have You Gone, Peter Norton?
  (Source: Technologizer)

  A look back at the PC utility guru’s career by Harry McCracken at the newly-reborn Technologizer

  Norton’s empire grew to include multiple software products, articles (including a long-running PC Magazine column), and books. He was everywhere that PCs were. And then, in 1990, he sold Peter Norton Computing to Symantec, which made the Norton line of software even more successful.

• Wolfenstein game graphics, 1992 vs 2014
  (Source: Twitter)

  A million more pixels, but the jaw remains the same

• The Most 90s Thing That Could Ever Exist
  (Source: The Atlantic)
  

  The zeitgeist summed perfectly in one technological artifact, which is a VHS tape promoting Windows 95, starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.

• Total Chaos is the Best-Looking Doom II Mod You’ve Ever Seen
  (Source: PCGamer)

  More like a “GZDoom mod,” but still very impressive.

  Total Chaos doesn’t run on the Doom 2 engine from 1993 proper, but a modified version of the original source code that brings in OpenGL, mouse looks and other features like 16x motion blur, high resolution textures, 3D models, and bloom effects.

• The Secret History of Hypertext
  (Source: The Atlantic)
  

  Historians of technology often cite Bush’s essay as the conceptual forerunner of the Web. And hypertext pioneers like Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee have all acknowledged their debt to Bush’s vision. But for all his lasting influence, Bush was not the first person to imagine something like the Web.

• The Woman Behind Apple’s First Icons
  (Source: Priceonomics)

  …and Windows 3.0 to XP’s Solitaire cards! (I did an interview with her about that once, gotta find it.)

  For many, Susan Kare’s icons were a first taste of human-computer interaction: they were approachable, friendly, and simple, much like the designer herself. Today, we recognize the little images — system-failure bomb, paintbrush, mini-stopwatch, dogcow — as old, pixelated friends.

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In early June, I conducted a lengthy telephone interview with Scott Miller, founder of Apogee Software (now known as 3D Realms). Today, the interview is up on Gamasutra. This is sort of a companion interview to my earlier talk with Tim Sweeney of Epic Games (another shareware heavyweight), although both stand alone quite well.

Apogee is best known for publishing dozens of episodic shareware games, including Kingdom of Kroz, Duke Nukem, the Commander Keen Series, Wolfenstein 3D, and Rise of the Triad. The company later changed its name to 3D Realms and scored a monster hit with Duke Nukem 3D.

Through Apogee, Miller revitalized and dominated the shareware game industry, invented episodic gaming, pioneered the use of the freely distributable game demo, and provided the spark that inspired id Software’s founding.

During the interview, Scott and I went through his early days in programming, the founding of Apogee, the transition from simple shareware to 3D games, his interactions with id Software, his thoughts on shareware game competition in the early 1990s (including Epic MegaGames and Tim Sweeney), and much more. If you’re a fan of BBS or shareware history, you won’t want to miss it.

Giving Shareware the Attention It Deserves

The concept of shareware has for too long been seen as the red-headed stepchild of the computer game industry. It has oft been relegated to the metaphorical back pages and footnotes of the history books — if it shows up at all — and frequently looked down upon by “serious” publishers who never deigned to give away any version of their work for free (until Apogee came along, anyway). I’d like to change that, and I’m hoping that my recent interviews with Miller and Sweeney will lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of shareware’s importance for future generations.

Although it might be a philosophy whose place in the sun has come and gone, shareware has not been an idea without merit or influence. As you’re about to read, the story of Scott Miller, his partner George Broussard, and their company firmly prove otherwise.