Category Archives: Modern Times

Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, what follows is a tentative plan only. Nonetheless, if you prefer for every article to be a complete surprise when it pops up in your browser, you might want to stop reading now.

Note that some of these subjects will be just one article, while some will spread out over two or more.

• Alpha Centauri.
• Everquest.
• Heroes of Might and Magic III, Might and Magic VII, and the decline of New World Computing thereafter.
• Rollercoaster Tycoon.
• Discworld Noir.
• Bullfrog Productions from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2.
• Metal Gear Solid. This one is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but several of you suggested that I look at it. So, I’m going to follow your advice, examining it mostly as a piece of interactive narrative.
• Looking Glass Studios from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Thief I and II and System Shock 2. Just as is the case for Metal Gear Solid, I don’t feel all that well-equipped to do full justice to Looking Glass — as many of you have come to recognize, first-person 3D tends not to be my personal cup of tea — but I’ll do my best to honor some brave, uncompromising, visionary games.
• Turn-based fantasy strategy. My love for the Heroes of Might and Magic series prompted me to try out some of the contemporaries of the third game in that series, specifically Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Disciples: Sacred Lands, and Age of Wonders. The results were mixed but interesting.
• The final wave of commercially prominent space simulators, especially the Freespace games. Plus that so-bad-it’s-almost-good Wing Commander movie, because how can a writer resist a temptation like that?
• For my interactive-fiction coverage this time, I want to review some really long games that came out between 1998 and 2000. Damaging as it may be to my literary bona fides, I must admit that a sprawling old-school game that I can keep up on one of my virtual desktops for weeks on end, poking at it during lunch breaks and other snatched moments, is still my personal Platonic ideal for the genre.
• Homeworld.
• Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
• Ultima IX: Ascension.
• Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Because I’m me, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into the longstanding pseudo-historical cult that surrounds Gabriel Knight 3′s setting of Rennes-le-Château, France, out of which also sprang The Da Vinci Code just a few years after this game. But never fear, the infamous cat-hair-mustache puzzle will also get its due.
• The Longest Journey.
• Planescape: Torment.

As I said, these lists are always subject to change; those of you with long memories will notice that quite a lot of what was on the previous list wound up falling by the wayside. This is because some other tales grew in the telling, even as one tale — the story of Legend’s late adventures — got added, and I’m doggedly determined not to let one year of history take up more than one year of real time. Some topics that had been earmarked for the previous group, like Windows 98 and the Deer Hunter-driven phenomenon of “Wal Mart games,” will get folded into other articles in due course. Others, like my dream of doing a series on television game shows, are most likely simply a bridge too far for these histories as currently constituted. (I don’t think there’s a big appetite out there for The Digital Antiquarian turning into The Television Antiquarian for the six months or more it would take to even begin to do such a topic justice…)

There have been some specific reader requests that haven’t (yet?) come to fruition. I perhaps owe you a more complete explanation for these.

• Some of you asked for Oddworld, and I did try. Really, I did. But those games are coming from so far outside of my frame of reference as a lifelong computer rather than console gamer, and are so off-puttingly difficult to boot, that I just don’t feel like I can provide the necessary context or enthusiasm.
• Some of you asked me to look at the Laura Bow games. And I did fire up The Colonel’s Bequest, only to be killed without warning by three separate pieces of inexplicably collapsing architecture within the first fifteen minutes. I’m sorry, readers. I’m just so done with this kind of player-hostile design, and I’ve already taken Roberta Williams and her colleagues to task more than enough for it over the years.
• Some of you would like to see articles about the Impressions city builders, and, indeed, I’ve done more than dabble with them in recent months. I desperately wanted to love Pharaoh, but certain design choices — such as the excruciating worker-recruitment system, the rote busywork of having to constantly schedule festivals to keep the gods from ruining your day, and the drawn-out, repetitive campaign that makes you build city after city from scratch — made it impossible for me to do so. But it looks like the city builder after Pharaoh, 2000’s Zeus: Master of Olympus, fixed all of these problems and more. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to write the whole story when I get there, and end it on the sort of positive note I always prefer to go out on.
• A similar logic applies to Her Interactive, for which I’ve been promising coverage for literally years now. The two Nancy Drew games that I’ve played to date have both been rather underwhelming, awkward affairs. But the good news is that each successive Her Interactive game that I’ve played — four of them in all now — has been a little better than the one before it. So, I remain optimistic that they’ll eventually figure it out, and I’ll be able to write the story I want to write about them as well. Stay tuned.
• The return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the rebirth that followed is another subject that’s been lingering out there for a while. Again, it’s just a question of finding the right grace note. The launch of OS X in 2001 might be it. We’ll see.
• On the flip side, some of you told me that Final Fantasy VIII was probably not the best choice for improving my fraught relationship with JRPGs, and after a brief investigation I’ve decided that I agree with you. But I haven’t given up on the genre. I may give 2000’s Grandia II a shot.

A couple of notes from the Department of Miscellanea:

It will mostly likely be a few months before I have 1998 ebooks for you, folks. The old system for creating them relies on a Python 2 software stack that is deprecated and all but broken by now. A good friend of mine whose coding skills have not atrophied as badly as my own is going to help me bring it up to date. But we’re in the midst of the all too short Danish summer right now, a time to be outside as much as possible; extracurricular programming projects are best reserved for other times of the year. Please bear with us.

I haven’t found a good place to mention this before today, but I actually switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint as my primary operating system back in December; the end user in me was fed up with the creeping enshitification of the Windows 11 ecosystem, while my inner environmentalist and social-justice warriors were incensed by the arbitrary obsolescence Microsoft wishes to impose upon tens if not hundreds of millions of perfectly viable computers. I couldn’t be happier. I can recommend Linux as a fine everyday operating system for anyone who is reasonably technically proficient, or who has someone who is to call upon when the occasional lingering issue does crop up. It’s come a long, long way since the last time I tried to run it on the desktop, about 25 years ago. And with the aid of Lutris and/or Steam, Linux runs old Windows games better and more effortlessly than recent releases of Windows itself in many cases, whilst keeping them nicely sandboxed from the core operating system in a way that Windows does not. If you’re a retro-gamer or just a gamer in general who’s been contemplating giving Linux a try, by all means do so. What with Valve putting serious resources behind it, I expect that it will only continue to improve as a gaming platform.

Which reminds me: Linux is another story I should try to tell soon… Sigh.

Anyway, thank you for reading and supporting these histories for so many years! As always, feel free to suggest topics and games you’d really like to see in the next few years. Even when I can’t give them separate articles, I can sometimes shoehorn them in somewhere. And if you haven’t yet taken the Patreon plunge and have the means to do so, do give it some thought. It’s only thanks to readers just like you that I can afford to keep doing this.

I’ll see you tomorrow — yes, tomorrow already! — when we’ll get started on our bullet list for 1999. We’ve got our work cut out for us…

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Hi, folks…

I just wanted to give you a very quick heads-up that I’m leaving The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. In the future, you can receive notifications about new articles and the occasional other announcement by following me on either Mastodon or Bluesky. My apologies to anyone who’s inconvenienced by this, but it does feel like the right time to make the jump, what with Bluesky in particular growing so quickly.

I’ll see you all on Friday with some fresh Digital Antiquaria. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Hi, folks!

I don’t have an article for you this week, but, rather than leave you hanging with nothing whatsoever to read, I thought I would post a little preview of what’s coming over the next year or so. Note that this “year” of mine applies to both real time and to the historical timeline, which have become largely one and the same these days. I do still have one 1997 article in the pipeline, on Activision’s last two graphical Zork games. I’ve also pushed a couple of topics that were originally earmarked for 1997 into 1998.

So, here’s what’s coming, with some further clarifications wherever it feels appropriate. If you like to be totally surprised by each new article, now is the time to stop reading. If, on the other hand, you played a role in any of the following, or know someone who did, or have any other kind of research tips or inside information to share, by all means get in touch via email, Mastodon, or just in the comments below.

• The Journeyman Project trilogy. I nearly passed these over, but on a whim I decided to try the 1997 remake of the first game, and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. This prompted me to play Buried in Time and Legacy of Time as well. To whatever extent these can be considered Myst clones, they stand now as my favorites in the sub-genre.
• Starcraft.
• Douglas Adams in the 1990s and beyond, including Starship Titanic. He filled quite a lot in the early years of this blog, and, although he wasn’t such a high-profile presence in games and computing after the 1980s, he deserves to have his story finished.
• Tex Murphy: Overseer.
• Might and Magic VI.
• Sanitarium and Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy. Yes, this is an odd couple. These two games are linked only in being early harbingers of where adventure games would go as their AAA commercial heyday faded into the past. The budgets would get smaller, the list prices would decrease, and most of the studios still making them would be located in Europe rather than North America (although this last is only true of one of this particular pair). None of these changes strikes me as necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, they often gave space for design to come to the fore again.
• The X-Files. As I promised a reader recently in the comments section, this is also a good chance to talk about the television show, one of the most indelibly 1990s of all media creations. (Wasn’t it nice when our most prominent conspiracy theories revolved around aliens from outer space?)
• The Windows 98 launch.
• Grim Fandango.
• The casual-sports-game phenomenon. Did you know that schlocky little Deer Hunter made way, way more money for its creator than Starcraft or Half-Life or any other iconic late-1990s mega-hit you care to name? I’ve always found these incongruities between gaming history as it’s remembered by the hardcore crowd and the reality on the ground at the time to be fascinating.
• Game shows. Most years, I allow myself one significant departure from the game-by-game brief, and I think this will be this year’s. It’s a topic I’ve been mulling over for a long time now, given that television game shows were the first “video” games of all in a sense. There’s probably two or three articles here, tying in the end back into 1990s CD-ROMs like Jeopardy! and the You Don’t Know Jack series — the latter of which is another of those hidden moneyspinners of the era, that you would barely know existed from reading Computer Gaming World and the like.
• Interactive fiction. I never intended to stop writing about text adventures; it’s just that I haven’t had quite enough to say about them in the last few years to make a good article. Now, however, we’ve come to the year of Anchorhead, Spider and Web, and Photopia. In terms of seminal works, 1998 is arguably the interactive fiction community’s biggest single year of all.
• Half-Life.
• The first two Oddworld games, which I think are best discussed as a unit.
• Railroad Tycoon II. (My lord, have I gotten addicted to this game…)
• Fallout 1 and 2. Again, I think this pair can be most profitably discussed together. And waiting until this point lets me better tie them into the CRPG Renaissance that was cemented by Baldur’s Gate.
• The downfall of TSR and its purchase by Wizards of the Coast. Another long-running story that deserves a proper conclusion, even if it is more computer-game adjacent than specific.
• The aforementioned Baldur’s Gate.
• Speaking of conclusions to long-running stories: the strange and rather anticlimactic end of Ken and Roberta Williams’s Sierra, including coverage of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Quest for Glory V.
• Boulder Dash and its successors. Yes, you read that right. I spent a lot of time with Boulder Dash as a kid on my Commodore 64, and I think it deserves an article, however belated. I don’t know why I didn’t write one back in the day, but better late than never. I already circled back to pick up Lode Runner…
• Thief.

And now to explain why a couple of topics are not on this list. I plan to discuss the two Freespace games as a unit later. And I haven’t forgotten Her Interactive and Nancy Drew; I’m just waiting for the right place to tell that story. I’d like to end it on a triumphant note, and the first Nancy Drew game is still a little rough around the edges.

I know that there’s a (small) minority of you who would like to see more coverage of Voyager Interactive. I’m afraid I just haven’t found the later discs as compelling as I did the early ones, so I think I’m going to table that topic. I’m sorry!

Of course, I’m always eager to read your thoughts on what you find most (and, if you like, least) appealing from the list above and what other topics you’d like to see covered. I can’t promise to follow up on all of your suggestions — I have to be guided as well by the kinds of games I most enjoy, by what I find most interesting in general, and simply by what I think would yield a readable article — but many of them have led me in the past to subjects I never would have thought to write about on my own. (In fact, a couple of these can be seen on the list above…)

If you’re a regular reader and you haven’t yet become a supporter, please do give it some thought if your financial circumstances permit. I depend on all of you to keep writing and to keep this site ad-free.

Most of all, though, thank you for being the best readers in the world! I’ll have a proper new article for you next week, and the 1997 ebook should be coming along in the relatively near future.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

This new month of September being a five-Friday month, I’ve decided to take this week as an opportunity to bank an article. That way, I’ll be able to travel back to the United States for the holidays later on this year without missing two weeks of content in a row across my two sites. In lieu of a proper article — which you’ll get next week, I promise — how about if we pause today to take a breath and survey the territory behind and ahead of us?

As the more studious readers among you may already have noticed, we finally moved out of the borderlands between 1996 and 1997 and into the new year proper with my last article. That means it’s ebook time. You can find the 1996 volume of the ever-growing Digital Antiquarian archive, in .epub or .mobi editions and with or without reader comments included, in the usual place. I learned how to make these myself this time, but the tools I used to do so are still those of Richard Lindner. Thanks, Richard! I shouldn’t have to bother you so much going forward…

And speaking of going forward: here’s a taster of what I have tentatively planned in terms of 1997 coverage. Looking at the year as a whole, I must admit that I don’t quite see one bursting with perfectly formed classics. But I do, on the other hand, see a year of important experiments that laid the groundwork for classics to come, as designers continued to wrestle the many new technological affordances they had been granted recently into natural-feeling, playable forms. The flood of undeniable classics would come in 1998, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, some quick notes on what’s in store for the immediate future. Needless to say, if you want to be completely surprised by what appears on this site every fortnight, now is the time to stop reading!

• I’m currently working on a two-parter about the Magic: The Gathering phenomenon, the first part being about the card game that upended the whole tabletop-gaming industry in the 1990s, the second about its digital adaptation, Sid Meier’s last game for MicroProse.
• The Last Express
• This topic is a little more unsettled than most of them, but I’d like to do something with sex. No, not in my personal life — I’m too old and too married for that — but in the context of the digital world of the 1990s. I have a minimalist and a maximalist version in mind. The former would look at games like Voyeur I and II, Psychic Detective, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, Blue Heat, and Tender Loving Care, which attempted to carve out a market for “adult” computer entertainment within the interactive-movie space. The latter would survey these games as well, but expand the story to encompass the emergence of an online pornography industry, the first folks to make real money on the Web. I lean toward going for the Full Monty, so to speak, but I’d love to hear your secret thoughts and innermost desires. Or, um, come to think of it, just the surface ones would be fine.
• Japanese CRPGs, leading up to and then showcasing Final Fantasy VII. This is foreign territory for me in more ways than one, but the story of how this hugely popular strand of gaming emerged out of the Apple II Wizardry strikes me as under-told, while Final Fantasy VII itself is without a doubt one of the most beloved games of all time. It even fulfills the letter of my law of focusing on computer rather than console games here, since it did get a release on Windows…
• Ultima Online
• Age of Empires
• Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror
• Developments in the realm of the first-person shooter, especially Unreal and Jedi Knight. (I’ve already had a lot of fun playing Jedi Knight start to finish, a first for me with the genre whilst writing these histories. Maybe I can stop worrying and learn to love to run and gun…)
• Fallout
• Riven
• Blade Runner
• The Curse of Monkey Island
• Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor

Feel free to chime in in the comments with suggestions of what you’d like to see. While I can’t promise to deliver on every request — I do have to follow my own muse to some extent in order to give you good articles, and I do have to keep moving so that our progress through history doesn’t start to take even longer than living through the real events did — I do take them all seriously.

And if you’re a regular reader who hasn’t yet taken the Patreon plunge, please do give that some thought as well if your personal finances are up to it. Your pledges are the only reason I can do this.

Last but by no means least, there is one thing that I can’t say enough to those of you who already pitch in: Thank you for your support! That includes not only existing patrons but all of you who take the time to offer up typo reports, factual corrections, and alternative perspectives in the comments and in emails. I remain as honored today that you consider me worth the effort as I was when all of this began twelve years ago. You remain, as ever, the best readers in the world.

See you next week!