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Here's a link to the current and past story

Creative and id Software's John Carmack have been at odds ever since Doom. Back in the Doom days John called creative for sound driver support and they basically told him to go away.

Of course, after Doom was released Creative was begging to help support id Software but Carmack wouldn't have it.

So now they pull this stunt. GG CREATIVE!

Indie and casual game designers are discussing the Popcap interview at great length at the Indie Gamer forums. As I remarked there, many people have observed that the current syndrome of blatant, rampant plagiarism is dangerous to the casual game market's long-term health -- and whenever someone does observe this, the plagiarizers move immediately to smear that speaker's reputation. By demonstrating the speaker isn't a pure and saintly exemplar of all things holy, the plagiarizers believe they prove their arrant plagiarism represents no danger to the market. It's nothing but an unhelpful and short-sighted diversionary tactic.

I wrote about the cloning phenomenon in The Escapist issue #34, "Attack of the Parasites."

I'm still enormously proud of my Cinemaware game "King of Chicago". It was Cinemaware's 2nd best-seller in its first 2 years - waaaaay behind sales of Defender of the Crown by Kellyn Beeck (250k units DoC - amazing in '85, 50k KoC - nice in sales in '86). King was definitely not one of the 10 most influential Amiga games, however, because I rolled my own interactive narrative system - Dramaton ( GDC talk on Dramaton: http://www.zogax.com/verbiage/battle.htm ) - which was just a little too out there for anyone to replicate.

I did the first version of King on the Mac in '86 and then ported it to the Amiga and the Apple IIGS. I did my own art on the Mac (using digitized clay heads) but C-ware wisely redid the art for the Amiga, which had a lot to do with the big sales. Rob Landeros (who later formed Trilobyte and did 7th Guest) did the art.

Coding on the Amiga was a blast. The main online hangout for developers was BIX, the Byte Information Exchange. Simple things like screen-flipping for animation were poorly documented and there was little agreement in the first years about the best way to code them. You had to get down and dirty writing little fragments of code executed by "the copper" - the video coprocessor system.

"Cinemaware is still alive today and currently working on an update of Defender of the Crown.'" - And screwing the original game devs royally. They stripped any mention of Kellyn Beeck from their current version of Defender of the Crown and left my name off the King of Chicago credits on their website. Here's a little discussion with a current Cinemaware employee on the Indie Gamer's forum about their current version of Defender of the Crown http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=9738 &highlight=King/.

At least they'll never butcher King of Chicago because they'll never figure out Dramaton.

Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/ .

There seems to be a good chunk of ire directed at him on the IndieGamer boards.

If you want to find underground or indie games, I'd recommend sites like

http://www.gametunnel.com/
http://www.madmonkey.net/
http://www.indiegamer.com/

Anyone who is interested in getting into indie game dev should definitely check out the indiegamer forums. There's tons of good info available and it's populated by a large group of indie/casual games developers along with artists, portals, and other and various other industry people.

Unfortunately, it is quite risky to develop and market a downloadable (under 15mb or so) Windows game using OpenGL, at least for the time being. A significant portion of the marketplace has computers that do not have working, hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers. [1] They have decent enough video cards, ones that have reasonable OpenGL drivers written for them, however they haven't been installed. Furthermore, Windows Update does not seem to update one's OpenGL stack. This has caused a lot of downloadable developers to either use the better supported Direct3D API, or stick to software rendering (with DirectDraw, and more increasingly, with SDL.) [2]

[1] Reflexive attempted to use hardware-accelerated OpenGL in their downloadable game, "Wik: Fable of Souls", however they switched over to full software rendering after encountering numerous driver issues. More information on this can be found in the game's postmortem, available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050214/hallam_ 02.shtml . More info on using OpenGL in downloadable games can also be found on the http://indiegamer.com/ message board.

[2] PopCap's framework uses both Direct3D and DirectDraw-based software rendering.

A lot of the guys there are creating games and then releasing them for sale on the internet, totally ignoring the whole publisher/retail method. It's a real alternative for game devs. I am supporting myself in just this manner by my own game.