Today would have been Gary Gygax’s birthday.
Gygax, one of the co-creators of the game Dungeons & Dragons, inadvertently helped create the massive computer game industry that exists by inspiring three decades of future game designers. There’s been much written on the subject [you can read our chapter on the D&D [...]
I had a chance to visit the Origin Systems building in 1997 when I first moved to Austin, at the time the only THX-certified game studio in the country. Starr Long even gave me a demo of naked Ultima players running around a rather barren virtual landscape.
When we were working on the book, Richard [...]
The Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down just a bit ago, marking the end of the Shuttle Space Age in America. Throughout my life, Americans have gone to space regularly. Now that is over.
As I dug through the Dungeons & Dreamers yesterday constructing a draft of the Second Edition introduction, I was [...]
I was never much sold on the cover for our book. It looked too much like a business book (which it wasn’t) without any of the modern flair of say Tron. It seemed to be designed by committee.
That said, this particular version of the cover came out infinitely better than the first draft [...]
The idea of professional computer gamer was in its nascent phase when John and I started writing the book. Jonathan Wendall, better known as Fatal1ty, was making headlines, and Stevie Case was the new nerd pinup girl.
The first computer game was SpaceWar!, we all know that.
However, this is the first game produced by Richard Garriott, the man who built the first commercially successful massively multi-player game.
Akalabeth would eventually morph into Ultima, launching a franchise of games that built — and then changed — the gaming landscape.
This is [...]
I’m selling my house in Austin, which is only interesting to this tale because I purchased the house with the advance onDungeons & Dreamers, and then moved here to finish the book.
As I was digging through my files, I came across this little gem, the map of some of the early Ultima games.
[...]
It’s been almost 10 years since we first started working on Dungeons & Dreamers, a fact that I hadn’t thought about until just now. Time flies. In the game world, not much has changed…and everything has changed.
The timing is right, and John + I decided upon a basic framework for the Second Edition [...]
One experiment I’m going to try this summer is to record the entire book, broken up by chapters and as a whole book. It’s ours now, so I’m interested to see the traction we get.
Plus, it’s always fun to sit in a room by yourself and just record things, right?
::crickets::
When John and I were negotiating the book deal many moons ago, we were adamant that we weren’t going to do anything unless we had the opportunity to get our rights back.
As of last month, that happened.
We are now free to do anything we want with the book — which for us means [...]
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Or check out excerpts in the Dungeons & Dreamers collection on Scribd.Contact
You can catch Brad here: wiredbeat2000 at gmail dot com
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Dungeons & Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
