Hi, folks…

I’ll have the last article in the series on Maxis Software for you next week. Today, I’m happy to say that the new ebook, covering the historical year 1999, is available, and on a far more timely basis than the last one at that. My thanks go to Richard Lindner, for developing the scripts that produce it, and to my hiking buddy Stefaan Rillaert, for modernizing them slightly and adapting them to run on Linux instead of Windows.

As always when we finish out another year of history, here’s a sneak preview for you of what I have planned for the coming year.

• Maxis in the 1990s and The Sims. We’re up to eyebrows in this already, so I assume that no further explanation is required.
• Driving sims, a hugely neglected topic around these parts. I can’t hope to remedy that neglect entirely, but I can tell you about how these lifestyle-adjacent games came to be, and tell you about the one driving game that I ever got seriously into. (Hint: it involves Porsches.)
• The somewhat anticlimactic later days of the Lemmings franchise, which did at least conclude with one last really good game.
• Deus Ex.
• Diablo II.
• Iceland Dale and Baldur’s Gate II.
• The Russians are coming! Most notably for our purposes, with Evil Islands, an idiosyncratic but engaging take on the CRPG.
• Impressions Games and their historical city-builders.
• Her Interactive. I’ve been promising something about the folks who found fame and fortune — on a modest scale, that is — through the unlikely vehicle of interactive Nancy Drew for years now. I’m finally going to do it this year. No, really, I am!
• The ongoing struggle for relevance of the adventure genre in general: Discworld Noir; In Cold Blood; Stupid Invaders; Escape from Monkey Island; RealMyst; Fairy Tale About Father Frost, Ivan, and Nastya. (Try saying that last one three times fast…) Not an overly heartening list, but needs must.
• The Longest Journey, because this adventure game does deserve its own bullet point.
• No One Lives Forever, a groovy, desperately needed breath of lightness and whimsy for the gamer-dark, testosterone-overloaded FPS genre (even if it does totally rip off the Austin Powers aesthetic).
• The uncanny popularity in Germany and parts of the rest of Europe of Aufbaustrategie games, as exemplified by the Settlers series and especially Anno 1602, the best-selling German game of all time at the turn of the millennium.
• Technomage: Return of Eternity. I stumbled across this obscure curiosity of a console-style action-adventure from Sunflower Interactive, the studio responsible for Anno 1602, when I was doing some preliminary research on the latter game. I found myself weirdly charmed, not least by a script which has never heard of the concept of irony. So, here we are.
• On the digital-culture front, I’m toying with the idea of an article on Napster and the disruption it caused, if I can squeeze it in.

Looking back over my last list, I see that I managed to do a reasonably good job of keeping my promises for a change. One exception is Discworld Noir, which gets pushed into the adventure article above. Another is The Longest Journey, which didn’t reach markets beyond Norway until 2000 or later, so it fits fine here instead. As far as Metal Gear Solid goes… I tried, folks. I really did. But I found it impossible to take seriously in any sort of way. If I wrote about it, I’d just spend all my time making fun of it, and that would just make those of you who enjoy this Japanese console aesthetic hate me even more. I’m sorry, Solid Snake fans. It’s not you, it’s me.

As usual, last-minute suggestions for year 2000 and pitches for things you’d like to see in future years are welcome. I can’t promise to act on all of them, but I will take them all under advisement, within the boundaries of scheduling, personal interest, expertise, and how non-boring I feel I can make any such articles.

If you’ve been enjoying my writing and like what you see above, please do thinking about becoming a Patreon patron if you haven’t already. You have free rein to choose any pledge level you’re comfortable with, from as little as $1 per article (which works out to $2 per month).

Speaking of which: it looks like I am going to be forced to switch over from per-article to monthly billing within the next months, thanks to a policy change at Patreon. I hope — and think that I have good reason to believe — that this will be a distinction without a difference, as I’ve been publishing two articles per month religiously for quite some years now. So, your new monthly rate will be either double your current per-article pledge or your monthly spending cap, whichever is smaller. If I ever can’t give you two article in a month under the new regime because real life gets in the way in some sense, I still have the option of pausing billing completely for a month. I will certainly never allow you to be charged for content which I cannot deliver.

But I’ll be talking with you patrons some more soon on this somewhat annoying topic. In the meantime, thank you for your support, in whatever way you provide it. I wish you all a great rest of the summer. Stay real, stay safe, stay outside as much as possible, and (particularly if you’re here in Europe) stay cool! See you next week with a monster of an article on The Sims…

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