Slashdot Mirror
Epic's Sweeney On the PC Shareware Revolution
simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, there's a massive new interview with Epic (Mega)Games founder Tim Sweeney, the guy who's still a key technical figure at the Unreal Engine/Gears Of War developer. He discusses his early programming days, the story behind classic shareware game/tool ZZT, the origins of Epic, the '90s shareware business, and even a bit about the future as well. Particularly neat is his revelation that you can still order ZZT via mail, with orders fulfilled by his dad: 'My father still lives at the address where Potomac Computer Systems started up, so he still gets an order every few weeks... he's retired now, so he doesn't have much to do. Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders, put disks in them, and mail them out.'"
He's going to get thousands now it's on /.
The reasons why shareware exploded into growth in the 90s were because of a number of reasons. Hardware was expensive, today if a game doesn't work because you have too little RAM all you need to do is spend less than $20 and get a gig of DDR2 RAM, likewise if you don't have enough storage, you can move some pictures or movies onto a few GB flash drive for less than $20, if you don't have a fast enough graphics card all you need to do is spend $100 and you can get one that will handle most games (well, perhaps not Chrysis but other than that....), if your CPU is the bottleneck you can get a decent enough box for less than $500, back in the 90s an upgrade like that could be a thousand dollars or more. Shareware gave you a chance to make sure the game ran decently before you spent $50 on it. It also curbed piracy, by giving away part of the game for free pirates had something to distribute other than the full game. On the other hand shareware was as annoying as heck and still is especially on non-PC platforms such as Windows Mobile, iPhone (though due to the app store its a lot better than on Windows Mobile), or the generic cell phone.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"My father still lives at the address where Potomac Computer Systems started up, so he still gets an order every few weeks... he's retired now, so he doesn't have much to do. Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders, put disks in them, and mail them out."
Odds that his dad just got slashdotted?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
From page 1 of the article: "Try to find a programming language in Windows. Your computer's a million times faster, but you can't do a damn thing with it." But Windows has JScript and VBScript.
Haha, yes! Epic Pinball was awesome. It was the first video pinball game that I remember having good physics. The soundtrack was pretty badass too.
If you're still into pinball, check out Future Pinball. It's a fully 3D representation of pinball that you can use to create your own tables or download a number of ones that other people have done.
It's not like it's that hard to *get* a programming language for Windows, though.
Just download a copy of Visual [C++|C#|VB] and you can do all kinds of fun stuff.
Windows doesn't have a programming language at boot because it's an OS for the masses, and the masses would get confused by a "READY." prompt.
Print "readable" version here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4035/from_the_past_to_the_future_tim_.php?print=1
ZZT had (and still has) some absolutely awesome stuff in it. I remember, it was the first game I actually got for my computer. It was also my introduction to programming and dicking around with "how do you make a playable game?" as well. There were some absolutely awesome fan-made worlds which really pushed the in-game programming to its limits - "Operation: Gamma Velorum" comes immediately to mind. It did some stuff which the in-game engine allowed, but I don't think it was expected to be used in -quite- that way...
You can still find a bunch of fan-worlds at http://zzt.belsambar.net/ (among other places), but it actually looks like they're trying to close down the page. If you're getting into the classic stuff, get it while the getting is good. _
As far as other games, it's funny, I was discussing this on IRC the other day - Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit 1 -and- 2, Traffic Department 2192, Solar Winds, One Must Fall 2097, Kiloblaster, Overkill, and Zone 66, all games I (think I) got under that label when I was just starting out, and picked up again for my collection of classic games. :D
Of course, I'm not 100% sure they were -all- by Epic, and I'm not opening them all just to check, but I'm pretty certain that most of 'em were.
Lets see, I remember... Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Dare to Dream, Solar Winds, Castle of the Winds, Highway Hunter, One Must Fall 2097, and Seek and Destroy... yup. Lots of time wasted on Epic Megagames stuff back in the day. And that's completely ignoring the fact that I was an Unreal Tournament (1/2/2.5/3) junkie for six or so years. Epic has definitely published and produced some memories for me.
if you have .net, you have the c# and javascript.net command-line compilers.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
They probably just need the C++ runtime:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf
There's a separate download for x64, but express won't usually target that.
Or, if you're doing games on Windows, you might want Microsoft's XNA instead, a game development environment, with the advantage that if you pay a little bit of money, you can play them on your Xbox360. It's effectively a sanctioned way to do homebrew on the 360.
massive new interview with Epic (Mega)Games founder Tim Sweeney
You wouldn't happen to have a link to instructions for taking a pre-existing cross platform code base and getting the current version of Visual C++ Express to produce a binary that actually works, would you?
Find your c++ settings and change the runtime library option to be something without DLL's. That way the C++ runtime gets linked into the application.
In fact there's an archive of Tim Sweeney of posts and interviews out on the web.
As an aside, I remember reading an article Tim wrote about the programming languages back in 2000...
It's effectively a sanctioned way to do homebrew on the 360.
Yeah, in the sense of "trade sanctions" or something, maybe. Pay to play? Fuck you, I still have an original Xbox and the XDK is everywhere.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"