well My history is quite broken.
I was not round the time of infocom, born in that time yes but only
knew after I got the net.
By the time I started audyssey it was up to issue 24 or 25.
Hack it yourself is the term I use for those that with the bgt and
other scripting languages just put stuff together, sure its not near
as pro as conercial companies but its something.
Like diy if you get my meaning.
My history started in 1996.
By then companies like pcs and to some extent gma, and even
kitchensinc were on the way to actually going online.
Esp was not far off and what became draconis was not far either.
L-works came in the middle.
It was only after pb-games came and went to blast bay that I
actually fully came into the fold.
And Lets not forget the companies that never were.
Surreal horisons came, and started a promising game idea called torrent.
They dissapeared though, then came came starbase defender which was
abandoned due to other commitments.
Then there was oriol games which ended after one of the devs did not
want to release the first comercial title.
Ok, so things have settled down.
We are in the period right now where all the moving and groving is done.
A lot of major companies have changed hands.
Single devs have come online to as themselves.
The main companies are the 3 origionals, being kitchensinc, pcs and gma.
then draconis and l-works
Lastly usagames and blastbay which are new.
Oh and blindsoftware also fits in with the top 3 in that list.
Then there are the developers making audiogames.net including its
forums, bpc and maybe a handfull of freelance students, and hackers
who have had or still have projects on the go.
Also remember that from 1985 to at least 1996 it was all dos.
from then till about 2009 it was windows.
Now its multiplatform and iphone to some extent and maybe android
with braillesoft's releases.
I'd like a full history myself though since there is probably more
history before 1996, I know there was way back to the 80s, and
judging with some speech recordings I heard on a demo tape a bit ago
70s and maybe even 60s.
But I was born in 82, and Lived netless through the years up to 1996
with no knowledge outside my small world, we did not use compuserve,
bbs's or anything like that.
At 02:42 a.m. 20/05/2011, you wrote:
Shaun,
I want to start by thanking you for the audio games history, I
actually find it very informative and useful. I like having some
idea of how things went in the past, so I can get a better idea of
how they will likely change now, and in the future. I think it
would be an excellent idea for several of the "old timers" to
collaborate on a detailed audio games history. With everyone
working together, I'm sure the time line of things could be fine
tuned, and many specific details and events would start to surface
that had been long forgotten.
I'm not really familiar with your phrase "hack it yourself", so
you'd probably have to define that for me. I would have thought it
was the same as "opensource devs", but you seem to have
differentiated them in your last post, so I'm not quite sure of the
meaning you intended.
I can't really comment about being the fastest developer or
not. When I was just starting high school (1995 or 1996 I
believe), I began teaching myself programming so that I could make
little games and things. When I had high school programming
classes, I was the "expert" who would know more than the professor
so I'd help my friends with their work and we'd spend class playing
my latest game rather than working on the day's lesson, haha. I
went to the University of Michigan and got degrees in Computer
science and Mechanical engineering, but I have to say that 95% of
what they "taught" me I had already learned myself before
going. All in all, it was a huge waste of time and money just to
earn the piece of paper that says degree. I've always been the
stubborn person who was slow to change my programming habits when
those around me did. I always focused more on the end result, and
how I could accomplish the same thing in a quarter of the time, by
not changing my methods over to whatever was currently popular at
the time. In different situations, being stubborn like that is a
problem, but for the most part it has benefited me.
Since it seems I've started writing a bio of myself, lol, I'll
say a bit more. I'm sure there are people floating around who
assume I only know Visual basic 6.0, since that is what I've
written my audio games in. For the record, I do know C++, C#,
Java, Objective-C, and a few of the smaller ones they make you
learn as you go through college. In my stubbornness I just use the
one I want to, depending on the task at hand. Oh crud, I'm sure
I've just summoned a barrage of comments from other programmers
haha! I've been programming pretty much every day since 1995, on
all manner of personal projects. My specialty is actually vision
systems, which seems a little ironic since I'm also writing audio
games! For those who might not know, this means I write software
AI which uses a camera for input. I'm currently waiting to see if
my program has won $20,000 in an open engineering challenge sent
out by the US air force.
The last thing, before I stop my speech, is probably the number
one most important thing to know about me. I simply cannot keep
myself on a single project. At any given time I am probably
working on 10 different projects, I think about them all day while
I'm at work, I dream about solutions at night, and the moment I get
stuck on one, I immediately fill that spot of my brain with a new
one. This probably means I'll die young from some sort of brain
tumor haha! My wife and I have joked around about that since we
were dating. Because I'm always mentally wrestling with so many
projects, I really do fit the stereotype of the absent minded
professor. I will forget where I am if I'm out driving, I'll
forget which cabinet we keep dishes in, and I'll even forget
friend's NAMES for like a day at a time! ROFL, I'm a mess!
I have no idea how this turned into a biography about me, but maybe
it'll entertain you guys to read it. Oh yeah, I'm married and 29
years old. Most people start with that kind of information, I had
to tack it onto the end before I forgot. :)
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