There's a great history piece up at Gamasutra on the history of the Dreamcast. It has lots of quotations from interviews with key people and is well worth checking out. It's always fascinating to think of "what might have been" if certain decisions had gone the other way.

Play.tm has a huge History of Resident Evil up. It's a lengthy read, but I suspect survival horror fans will want to check it out. Here's a snippet:

If Alone in the Dark is credited with inventing the modern survival horror genre, then it was Resident Evil that refined it and turned into something that truly appealed to almost every gamer.

Of course, if you want to learn more about Alone in the Dark and its relation to the Resident Evil series--it's chapter 1 of Vintage Games! :)

There's a potential project that's a bit too early for Matt and me to talk about in detail that I thought would be worthwhile to seek everyone's help with, since many of you were so helpful with the Vintage Games book. Who do you think are the most fascinating people in videogame history? There are some obvious ones, like Ralph Baer, Richard Garriott, Roberta Williams, Bill Budge, Chuck Peddle, etc., and I've already come up with a list of roughly 23, but it really needs to be fleshed out (and Matt still needs to take a crack at adding to it). The goal is to get as many names as possible. The only criteria is that they must be living, live in North America or be readily available via e-mail (or Skype) if elsewhere, and probably speak English reasonably well. They might have helped create a great computer or videogame console or some component thereof, they might be great programmers, they might be great tools or middleware developers, etc. Any fascinating person in our industry's history. Who do you want to read about? Let us know as soon as you can as it would be a huge help. There's no reason to share the current list, as it would be helpful to validate some of the names I/we've already come up with independently. Thanks everyone!

I have exciting news for fans of computer role-playing games and readers of my book on the topic, Dungeons & Desktops. Rusty Rutherford, creator of PEDIT5, the first CRPG we know about, has contacted me via email to tell his story. I've printed it below for all to enjoy, and I'd sure like to get some discussion going here about this all-important first for the computer games industry. I encourage you to read the "dark ages" chapter before reading the below, unless you're already familiar with PLATO and that era of computing.

Well, I've decided to leap forward a bit and start working on the Pong chapter. While many people seem to think Pong is more fun to historians than gamers, I did see its draw demonstrated recently in Chicago during a videogame exhibit.

Thanks to Bill L. for letting me know that my book is now on Slashdot Book Reviews. The reviewer, Mr. Michael Fiegel, does an excellent job covering the book's, well, coverage, and says that he finds it informative and entertaining. While he doesn't give the book a perfect score (again, the subject of the muddy screenshots rears its ugly head), he still recommends the book to anyone who likes fantasy and RPGs. On more personal notes, I recently received my first official fan email from a guy living in Greece, who says he loved the book because it brought back so many memories to him of playing these games as a teenager.

Next Generation has posted an excellent but brief history of copy protection by Adam Swiderski.

Thanks to Dan Chisarick on the SWcollect mailing list for the heads-up on the info for Waxy.org's posting, Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is truly an extraordinary discovery, as the post begins, "From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989." There's even a playable version of "Milliways", the never completed sequel to one of the company's best-selling games, Hitchhiker's Guide. I'm flabbergasted and there's even a great story in the blog post!

My copy of dungeons and desktops came today!

Obviously I havn't read into it much yet but

First quick impressions;

- Nice size / weight hardback
- Pictures all b&w (which we knew)
- Unfortunately all pictures are _very dark_ in printing... :(

more to come later