Akalabeth: The Birth of a Legend
In the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, when the art of making machines calculate was still in its infancy, and computers in homes were rarer than dragons in a bard's tale, a certain young man began a most unusual undertaking. His name was Richard Garriott, and he…
Continue reading
Donkey Kong: The Most Misunderstood Gorilla of the ’80s
Donkey Kong: Was It Really a Story About an Evil Gorilla? Have you ever stopped to wonder whether the classic Donkey Kong story is actually the simple tale of an evil gorilla and a brave hero—or perhaps a pixelated social drama that spent decades cleverly disguised as an innocent platformer?…
Continue reading
Before Minecraft, There Was SimCity
When I think about the early 1990s, I immediately picture CRT computer screens — DOS, Norton Commander running on them, the clatter of keyboards, and the smell of a freshly printed manual inside a game box... well, sort of, because at computer markets back then, original copies were as rare…
Continue reading
From the Black Hole – There and Back Again...
The Hobbit (1982) – one of the first games with an “intelligent” language parser More than 40 years ago, we already had… artificial intelligence. Not the kind that writes essays, generates images of astronaut cats, or answers emails for people. That AI ran on computers with less memory than a…
Continue reading
Almost Nobody Remembers This Dark Sci-Fi Classic
There were evenings in the late 2000s when the monitor lit up half the room with a cold, bluish glow, and the fan inside the PC case sounded like a dropship preparing for takeoff. That was when we first landed on the planet Scayra. Incubation: Time Is Running Out was…
Continue reading
If Not Half-Life, Then What?
There are some games that never truly end when the credits roll. For me, one of them is Half-Life. It was the game of my youth — the smell of dust in Black Mesa, the hiss of those iconic automatic doors opening, the first encounter with a headcrab that made…
Continue reading
The Old Star: Debt, Syndicates, and an AI Game Master
I wasn’t planning any kind of experiment or technology test. I just felt like playing an RPG session, and I had nobody to play with. So I decided to see in practice whether AI could actually run something that felt like a real game, rather than just generating random story…
Continue reading
MUD2 - The Birth of a Legend in Text-Based Gaming
Before online games became visual giants filled with ray tracing, battle passes, and hundreds of gigabytes of data, there was a world built entirely from words. One of the most important milestones in that world was MUD2 — a game that not only expanded the idea of MUDs, but also…
Continue reading