Great profile on Tim Sweeney from Stephen Totilo. Again, part of my childhood gaming, especially ZZT, which was a brilliant editor and one of the first play/create tools I messed around with. Striking to see how much impact the shareware creators of my youth - Carmack, Sweeney, and all the Apogee/id/Epic crews - have gone on to have in the modern industry. Also: striking to be reminded how much of those early PC gaming days were about borderline geniuses writing terrifying graphics engines.

"Reach, on the other hand, without its player, is an epic waiting to happen, a set of ludics waiting to be given enactment. More than any other comparison I could make, I think this one points out the value of thinking about games like Reach in the light of epics like the Iliad: these two kinds of practomime share the enormously important characteristic of living through re-performance, of gaining their meaning through iteration according to the rules laid down by the practomime." This is good: game as structure, the core loop as enacted by the player being what brings it to life, structures it according to its audience.

"Is this interview just going to be you hawking your wares for the next 20 minutes?" No, it's going to be better than that. A frank - and hilarious - interview with Mark Rein from Ellie Gibson. He really is like this, you know.

Jolly good interview with Tim Sweeney, with lots on ZZT (hurrah!), and, I think most interestingly lots of on building games around editors and tools - from ZZT through Unreal to the present day. I like his acknowledgments of his shortcomings as a progammer - but perhaps also his shrewdness as a manager.

"...this is a good time to consider zzt’s library - not because it’s changing, but because it’s probably complete. the long-running game archive z2 just declared zzt dead, and why not - it’s served its purpose: allowing people who aren’t programmers or digital artists an avenue to game creation before game maker or construct existed. now they do." ZZT must have been one of the first games I played, and I poked around its level editor. This retrospective both fascinates and arouses nostalgia in equal measures.

"It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam." Well, of course. Well done, Epic.

"That is, the activity of making kleos, as a bard or as a player, is about forming an affinity group—people who think the game is a cool game, who want to talk about it, who would go to the mat for it. It’s about making fanboys. Odysseus is going to turn the Phaeacians into Odysseus fanboys, just as the bard of Odyssey 9 is going to turn his audience into fanboys of the Odyssey, just as he the bard is already such a fanboy."

"This is a port of Tyrian for the Nintendo DS." Wonderful top-down shareware Shmup, now abandoned, and put on your portable.