A Slow Year Wins at Indiecade

My Atari VCS game earns Virtuoso, Vanguard awards

Last week and weekend I exhibited A Slow Year, my Atari VCS game poem project, at Indiecade. The show and the conference were fantastic, and it was a pleasure to meet new friends, see old ones, hear great talks, and see great games. I was particularly happy to meet Gaijin Games’s Alex Neuse, to finally get to play Chris Hecker’s… read more

A Slow Year Cover Art

The book jacket for my game

A Slow Year has gone to the printer at long last. I thought I’d share the jacket art. I’ve shown the illustration here before, but not the cover. This is the jacket for the standard edition, which will be available in trade paperback with software for Windows and Mac. The limited edition with Atari cartridge will be different, of course,… read more

Quotables

Stuff I said to the Press

I thought I’d share few recent mentions of me in the media. I try not to do this with every little mention, but all of these are really good articles that you should read anyway. First, Chris Suellentrop’s New York Times Magazine story Video Games that Bring Afghanistan Home. It’s a wide-ranging feature, and even though I only have one… read more

Halo 2600

Ed Fries demakes Halo for Atari

Ed Fries, who used to run game publishing for Xbox, has created a demake of Halo for the Atari 2600. I’d talked to Ed about the project when I was exhibiting A Slow Year at the IGF this year, and he’d been kind enough to show me some late stage builds of the game. The result is excellent, both as… read more

Playful & Playable

Plus yet another update on A Slow Year

My forthcoming game A Slow Year is on exhibit at a show curated by Lara Sánchez Coterón, Playful & Playable: Critica y Experimentacion con Videojuegos. It runs until September 15 at Sala Amarica, in Vitoria Gasteiz (in northern Spain). Here’s a description of the exhibition, which also includes work by Eastwood – Real Time Strategy Group, Anita Fontaine y Mike… read more

Mommy, Can I Be Daniel Larusso for Halloween?

Thoughts on Karate Kid

Recently I’ve been interested in remakes, so I was eager to see The Karate Kid, which revisits the now-classic 1984 film of the same name. The remake is one of the most faithful I can remember; in a time (in a world?) of updates and adaptations that wax nostalgic about TV, film, and toys of the 1970s and 80s while… read more

A Slow Tease

Updates on the Development and Release of A Slow Year

One of the lovely things about making a videogame called A Slow Year is that I can take as damn well long as I please to get it done. But that doesn’t mean I don’t owe an update to those of you who have been following the game. At the IGF in March, I had the opportunity to watch a… read more

Flash is not a Right

What Gripes about Apple tell us about Computational Literacy

I’ve been watching reactions to Apple’s controversial decision to prohibit the publication of iPhone applications created in environments other than Apple’s own. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g.,… read more

Exhaust Objects

Thoughts from an Atari 1978 Board and ROM

In anticipation of the Independent Game Festival next week, today I constructed the first two cartridges of A Slow Year. More on that soon, but for now I wanted to share the object below, residue from the construction. It’s a board holding a 2k mask ROM for an Atari game. The photo probably stands alone as far as a blog… read more

A Slow Year Nears

Updated Screenshots and Trailer

As the IGF approaches, I have a few updates to relate about A Slow Year. First, expect to see a number of interviews with me about the game emerging over the next two weeks. The first is on Rock Paper Shotgun, and I’ll report back when the others drop. My favorite line from the RPS piece, “I hope the game… read more