Update: Blog Return and A New Roadmap

It's finally time.

The blog is ready to return in full. The itch to get writing again is getting too strong for me to put it off any longer. Also, seeing that this past month has been the best ever for the blog in terms of views (somehow, despite my absence) also encourages me significantly. While this is still just a hobby for me, I love doing it and combining my love of history and video games together. Seeing even the smallest bit of growth is both validating and gives me the continued motivation to push on.

I've been doing a fair bit of thinking and planning over the last week or so in preparation for my return, and there's going to be a few changes coming in terms of what my content is going to look like going forward.

In short, there's going to be some more variety in article topics, and the frequency of posts is going to increase. Allow me to explain.

When I say "variety," I mean that there will be some expansion of the "gaming history" idea, in that I also want to write about the broader world of games. Most early video games are based off some kind of other game - a board game, pen-and-paper game, ancient logic game, etc... Usually, when these sorts of things show up, I'd include in the regular game article a short history of that game's real-world inspiration. Now, I want to separate that bit of history into its own little series of articles.

Starting with the release of the Game of Hangman article this Friday, each following Tuesday, there will be an article on the real-world game that the Friday article's game is based on. Meaning that, next Tuesday, I'll be releasing a brief history of the real game of Hangman. Not every game has this real-world counterpart, so in those instances there either won't be a Tuesday article, or I'll post a thinkpiece on some other topic if I get the inspiration for one.

Due to the recent development I made in old computer emulation, as outlined in my previous update, there will also be some changes coming in actual game coverage. For the foreseeable future, I'll be alternating between "new" games and revisiting games from past years. The revisits are for a couple of reasons. The first is to do with the aforementioned emulation progress. I now have the ability to cover most of the BASIC games I had to skip over previously, and so that necessitates revisiting previous years to cover what I missed. 

The second reason for revisiting past years is that I want to redo my oldest articles. I've said on a few occasions that I'm not happy with my treatment of the early video game history from when I was green and new to blogging. I skipped games, missed a lot of information, new information has come out since I did those blogs, and I had no idea what I was doing at the start, and so the quality of those articles is not up to my current standard. I do have a bad tendency to start things over and over again, but I think it's important to slow forward progress and do so this time to fix my mistakes.

To boil it down into a simple summary, here's what OGC will look like going forward:

• Weekly Friday game articles will return. I'll be alternating between a new game and revisiting past years of gaming history for these. Videos over on YouTube will still release in tandem with these articles.
• Tuesdays will bring an article looking at the broader world of games, based on the real-world origins of the Friday game. Or, if there is no real-world game basis, a thinkpiece may be posted instead.
• While the past revisit is happening, I'll be doing a quiet score revision. I won't be making a update post for this. The first one I did was enormous, and was far too much work for something that isn't even the main focus of the blog. This will just be an ongoing background process, but I'll add in editors notes on old posts where scores have changed.

With that, I'll end this update. Stay tuned for my first article back on Friday, with Game of Hangman. To old readers, I hope you will continue with me on this journey through history. To new readers - maybe this is the first article of mine you've seen - if you like the sound of what you've read here, I hope you will join the adventure.

May God bless you all,

OGC

Major Update: Development on Previously "Lost" Games + Looking to the Future of OGC

I've got some very good news for you all.

During this week off, I started to develop the desire to get back into the blog. I have some new ideas that I want to try out, which you'll see once I release the Game of Hangman article. During the process of working out one of these new ideas, I had a breakthrough. I'd been messing around with a PDP-10 emulator, seeing if I could get an old BASIC game to work, and I was able to get it working after a few hours of working my way through incredibly obscure and opaque information and online forums. Nobody's made any clear documentation about getting these old games to work, which is mightily frustrating. There was a lot of junk to sift through to get the gold nuggets of information I needed. I had looked into old computer emulators a long time ago, but the lack of clear, non-technical documentation kind of scared me off, if I'm being completely honest.

So what? I got an emulator working and played a game on it. Who hasn't? 

Well, this is actually huge. It's huge because the game I got running was one I considered missing on my master list. What this means is that the floodgates could possibly be opened for restoring these "missing" games into a playable state, provided the BASIC compiler plays nice with me. As of writing this, I haven't experimented with other games yet, but I do believe that I can get most - if not, all of them - running.

This has massive ramifications for the blog moving forward. In a twist of irony, we must now move backwards to move forward. I had been considering a revisit of my Prehistory series, and revisiting my oldest articles. This new development now pushes that into far more pressing territory for me, as there are a few dozen games that I previously couldn't play before due to my lacking knowledge. With this new knowledge, I can restore some of the older games, and give them some time in the spotlight. This includes a bunch of the missing games from the original edition of 101 BASIC Computer Games.

I'm still considering what this all means going forward. I know for certain that I won't be redoing any of the BASIC games I've already covered. I think that's fairly redundant. I may just do a rescore in the background as they come up, but no fresh articles for them. For all the earliest games, I want to revisit them in full, as I grouped games together in my early days, and I really wish I didn't. But, it gives me an opportunity to revisit them and give them a properly well-researched treatment.

What this all means timing-wise is uncertain for me. I still have some significant personal stuff to deal with, so it may be a couple of weeks still until the blog gets back online. I'll be testing some more games, and experimenting with new ideas in the meantime when I have time to do so. But, suffice it to say, I'm pretty excited about the future of OGC.

This will probably be the last update I give before the blog comes back online. I just wanted to write and give an update on where I am with the blog - and just because I'm bloody excited about this new knowledge! 

Anyway, that's all I wanted to share in this update. I hope you are all doing well, and God bless.

#040: Fur Trader - The Ontario Trail

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre(s): Management Simulation

Developer(s): Dan G. Bachor

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

This week's game is quite a fascinating one. Fur Trader is a historical-educational game of several firsts: the first Canadian-made video game, the first business simulation game... there's also some adventure game characteristics, and aspects reminiscent of The Oregon Trail, which Fur Trader also happens to have an interesting connection to... come join the fur trading expedition!

#039: Flip Flop - Xs and Os

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): Michael Kass

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

We're continuing in the realm of basic (ha) puzzle games today. Flip Flop, while it's an odd name, turns out to be a fairly straightforward logic puzzle.

#038x: Even Wins - Cybernetic Version

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle (Nim Variant)

Developer(s): Eric Peters

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

Trust me, it sounds way cooler than it actually is.

History

This little side quest is a follow-up from last week's Even Wins article. As I stated there, 101 BASIC Computer Games has two versions of Even Wins. The one from last week's article is the original, which uses a conventional AI. This one, which is called EVEN1 and Game of Even Wins by the two versions of the book respectively, does something a little different with its AI: it learns.