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This is a really interesting run down of forgotten adventure games for various computer platforms.  The only obvious one on the list is Full Throttle, the rest of these aren't any I knew about.

The 1990s were a good age for adventure, if your idea of adventure is playing video games. Point-and-click adventure games were at their peak, offering new worlds and new mysteries to explore. Companies like Sierra Games and LucasArts were publishing titles that often simply dropped players into a new world and let them test and explore in order to find their way, searching for the correct item or action that would let them progress. Clues were often infuriatingly hard to come by, but when you could finally solve that tricky puzzle, you felt like a real genius. 

And now, adventure games of the '80s and '90s are making somewhat of a comeback via modern titles, and remakes of classic versions. Titles like The Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis (LucasArts is the undisputed king of the genre), are still hot topics among gamers, but there are many other games that have fallen by the wayside, or been forgotten completely. Well, thanks to the awesome Internet Archive and their vast collection of old software, we can take a look at some of greatest forgotten and unknown gems of the genre.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fo ... ture-games

This is a pretty cool Amiga article I ran across, I thought some here might be interested.

The story of the Amiga family of microcomputers is akin to that of a musical band that breaks up after one incandescent, groundbreaking album: the band may be forgotten by many, but the cognoscenti can discern its impact on work produced decades later.

So the Amiga 30 event held at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum in late July was more than a commemoration of some interesting technology of the past. It was also a celebration of the Amiga's persistent influence on personal computing.

The highlight of the event was the premiere of Viva Amiga, a crowdfunded documentary telling the Amiga story. Directed and produced by Zach Weddington, the documentary is an impressive achievement. Following the introduction and initial success of the original Amiga A1000 in 1985 by Commodore, the story could easily have become bogged down in the business machinations that eventually led to the almost complete loss of market share for Amiga computers. But Weddington manages to capture the essence of the story, and bring fresh light to several aspects of the Amiga rollercoaster.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the- ... le-machine

I thought some of the Amiga fans here would enjoy this.

As I'm sure I've mentioned in the past, I've worked most of my professional life in the tech industry, specifically working for a managed services consultant in Chicago. One of the things we do is advise our clients on hardware rotations. Client machines, like desktops and laptops for instance, are typically recommended on a four to five year rotation. Because, let's face it, a five year old computer is either functionally worthless or is probably hanging onto a single strand of twisted copper before crapping out entirely, amirite?

Please don't send this post to my customers. Why? Well, because this is the story of the Grand Rapids Public School System in Michigan and the Commodore Amiga, originally bought during the Reagan administration, that is still running the schools' heating and air conditioning today.

    The Commodore Amiga was new to GRPS in the early 1980s and it has been working tirelessly ever since. GRPS Maintenance Supervisor Tim Hopkins said that the computer was purchased with money from an energy bond in the 1980s. It replaced a computer that was "about the size of a refrigerator." The computer is responsible for turning the heat and the air conditioners on and off for 19 school buildings.

Great. My HP laptop from six years ago has the keys falling off the keyboard and I'm pretty sure the fans inside the chassis have had their fins whisked down to tiny little fan-nubs, but this beast from the cold war times is still making sure little Johnny doesn't get sweaty during his lunch period. What's insane about all of this is the intricacy with which the whole thing manages to work. The computer controls the boilers, fans and pumps, while also monitoring temperatures within the schools... and it was programmed by a local high school student in the 80's. Not only that, but because the Amiga is a thing that belongs in a museum somewhere, whenever the school district needs help with the machine they still go back to that very same "programmer" who is all grown up now and happens to still live in the area. I mean, just listen to this.

    "It's a very unique product. It operates on a 1200-bit modem," said Hopkins. "How it runs, the software that it's running, is unique to Commodore."

    Hopkins said the system runs on a radio frequency that sends a signal to school buildings, which reply within a matter of seconds with the status of each building. The only problem is that the computer operates on the same frequency as some of the walkie-talkies used by the maintenance department.

    "Because they share the same frequency as our maintenance communications radios and operations maintenance radios — it depends on what we're doing — yes, they do interfere," Hopkins said.

    If that happens, "we have to clear the radio and get everyone off of it for up to 15 minutes."

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150 ... oday.shtml

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/arch ... -2015.aspx

I'd say it's the end of an era, but there isn't much of the old Sega left at this point, anyway.

We have some bad news for Sega fans (and, especially those holding out hope for a Shenmue announcement at E3). The company has confirmed to Game Informer that it will not have its own booth at the show next month in Los Angeles.

Sega will be teaming up with some of its partners, though. So you might see titles at booths belonging to platform holders or PC partners.

"Over the next months, SEGA of America will be focusing on the restructure and relocation to Southern California, and we have decided to not attend E3 with our own booth this year," a representative told us via email. "With the majority of our bigger titles launching later in 2015/2016, particularly those from our AAA studios Relic Entertainment, Sports Interactive and Creative Assembly, we are concentrating our efforts for some of these major announcements after our relocation. Instead, we will be collaborating with our various business partners for this year's E3 show."

Sega announced a major restructuring in January that heralded significant layoffs. At the time, the company said it was planning to refocus on PC and mobile gaming. Most recently, Sega announced Total War: Wahammer under development at Creative Assembly.

**TIP**
This post contains spoilers about a 26 year old game.  You've been warned, I don't think the [SPOILER] tag works on this board. 

I wanted to bring this up because I replayed Phantasy Star II recently, and it made me reflect back on the legacy of this game.  In particular, a lot of things credited to the Final Fantasy series seem to have shown up here first.  The storyline really is what strikes me as outstanding and groundbreaking. I see Final Fantasy VII recognized all the time for the serious storyline that involved protecting the planet and killed off a main character early on.  But, Phantasy Star II had a message about respecting nature and killed Nei off early on, then kept her dead.  It also had an open ended conclusion where the planet was - maybe - saved, but the fate of the main characters was left open.  This was in 1989, mind you, when Nintendo were still policing the content of their games.

The detail of the sprites, soundtrack and complex dungeons (the hardest of any RPG to date I think) also impress me to this day.  I know this board isn't as big on JRPGs as some, but I was curious about what others thought with 26 years between us and the release of this game.  When you compare it to anything else from 1989 it is just mind boggling to see how far ahead of its time it was, I'm pretty sure it's my favorite 16 bit game.

This is an interesting article, including an interview with Tim Schafer, that i ran across.

In 1987, Tim Schafer sat in a lecture hall at University of California, Berkeley. Professor and anthropologist Alan Dundes spoke about a ritual found in Mexican culture, where family members welcome the dead back into their homes. Stories of The Day of the Dead, or El Dia de los Muertos, fascinated Schafer, then a budding writer and computer programmer. A decade later, he wrote a videogame—ambitious, over-budget, late—inspired by these tales. Grim Fandango was the last of a dying breed, a PC adventure game beset by constantly advancing hardware and an audience raised on faster, louder, flashier alternatives. You have likely never played the completed work.

That's because, like so many of its characters, Grim Fandango died. It succumbed as any late-'90s computer game on CD-ROM would, its jewel case an inevitable coffin. In 2015, the only way to play the original Grim on a modern computer is to download special files modified by a fanbase that put years of effort into keeping the game alive, the work of a patient and overzealous mortician.

There is no wrong way to mourn those lost to us. Some remember. Some let go and wait for their return. But no matter the macquillage, an ugly dead thing remains ugly. Grim Fandango—the long-deceased original—is beautiful and strange and smart, an improbable marriage of disparate cultures and time periods, of plots and puzzles and balloon animals the shape of Robert Frost's head.

There is an old interview with Schafer from 1997, the year before Grim came out. A reporter  is asking him about LucasArt's next big game, wondering what the next "holy grail for gamers" is. The interviewer surmises a few: "Better graphics, better sound, better interface?" Schafer answers. "We try to do a real story, a complicated story, with real human involvement."

http://blog.longreads.com/2015/01/29/lo ... -fandango/

But, then I read this!

Before the Apple II had floppy drives, however, it had an audio cassette interface for storing programs and data.  This was a very primitive system, requiring you to hook up a cassette recorder to your computer and fiddle with the volume knob until things started working.  To read data from tape, you specified a range of memory to fill, and hit the "play" button on your tape recorder.  If all went well, the computer cheerfully beeped at you and off you went.  Loading BASIC programs was even easier, because the start location was pre-determined, and the length was stored on the tape.  All you had to do was type "LOAD".

I recently found myself extracting software from cassette tapes purchased on eBay.  At the start of the project, I thought to myself, "it's awkward to get at the data, but at least there's no copy protection."  As it turns out, I was wrong.

http://www.fadden.com/techmisc/cassette-protect.htm

This is an interesting article I ran across, and thought I'd post.

Consider the humble video game cartridge. It's a small, durable plastic box that imparts the most immediate, user-friendly software experience ever created. Just plug it in, and you're playing a game in seconds.

If you've ever used one, you have two men to thank: Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel, who invented the game cartridge 40 years ago while working at an obscure company and rebounding from a business failure. Once the pair's programmable system had been streamlined and turned into a commercial product—the Channel F console—by a team at pioneering electronics company Fairchild, it changed the fundamental business model of home video games forever. By injecting flexibility into a new technology, it paved the way for massive industry growth and the birth of a new creative medium.

Almost two decades ago, cheaper means of distributing game software—first optical media, then the Internet—began to supplant cartridge technology. Even so, the business model created by Kirschner, Haskel, and engineers at Fairchild still remains as relevant as ever. Until now, their amazing story has never been told.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3040889/the- ... -cartridge

I wasn't sure as to where to put this documentary, since it covers games, hardware, etc.  Pixel Pioneers: A Brief History of Graphics, Part One Sprite Supreme: A Brief History of Graphics, Part Two
Polygon Realm: A Brief History of Graphics, Part Three
Voodoo Bloom: A Brief History of Graphics, Part Four
Future Crisis: A Brief History of Graphics, Part Five

This post isn't NSFW per se, but I hope it's okay to put in this sub-forum as it is somewhat borderline (but very interesting in terms of gaming history). 

  Released in 1981, Softporn was controversial, cheesy, and earnest to a fault. It also presaged today's ongoing debates about who computers and games are for.
Laine Nooney Dec 2 2014, 6:45 AM ET
Softporn box cover ( Courtesy Brad Herbert and The Art of Sierra )



On October 5, 1981, Time magazine ran a story called "Software for the Masses"—a retrospective meditation on how computing became personal. If 1970s computer ownership had been limited to hobbyists who built and programmed their own machines, the 1980s were reeling in a new world of potential, non-specialist users: small business owners, housewives, children. The possibilities were endless, and for many consumers, overwhelming.

"Software for the Masses" might have been an otherwise arid tech story, buried and forgettable. But it ran with a warm, risqué photo of three brunettes in an outdoor hot tub, their breasts bobbing and nudging the waterline. This image was the promotional photography for the "computer fantasy game" Softporn, in which "players seek to seduce three women, while avoiding hazards, such as getting killed by a bouncer in a disco." For $29.95 (plus $1 shipping and handling) a company named On-Line Systems would mail out this "funny, provocative, challenging adventure game for adults only!" on a single 5.25-inch floppy disk. Time reported that 4,000 copies had already been sold, making each and every purchaser the proud, unsuspecting owner of America's first commercially-released pornographic computer game.
Time Magazine. October 5, 1981.
Photo courtesy of Sierra Gamers

As an erotic episode, Softporn would leave much to the imagination. Softporn was a text-based adventure game, meaning it had no graphics. Upon booting the floppy disk, the player was given control of a "puppet," a human male through which the player executes textual commands. PLAY SLOTS. BUY WHISKEY. WEAR CONDOM. SCREW HOOKER. Softporn is set in a vague, 70s-infused urban dystopia entirely comprised of a bar, a casino, and a disco. Computer games had escorted players into underground caves, realms of starry space, and sport fields of every kind since the 1960s. Softporn captures a different kind of aspirational landscape, a contorted, pulpy vision of a bachelor's night on the town.

Softporn was the creation of Massachusetts-based programmer Chuck Benton, an unlikely man to herald the erotic software revolution. A self-described "conservative New Englander," Benton was a single guy in his late twenties at the time, and he initially designed the game as an exercise to teach himself programming on the Apple II. He intended the game as satire, a self-amused catalog of the unique sufferings of his species—the embarrassment of buying a pack of condoms, or accidentally going home with someone who ties you up and steals your cash (Benton claims parts of the game were drawn from his own experience, but has never fessed up to which parts).

Benton wasn't trying to innovate on the text adventure genre so much as he was iterating from a pattern of pre-existing games. Many of the game's cleverest features have the quality of introductory programming exercises: playing the blackjack and slot machine simulators, spending and earning money, a question and answer scenario using basic programming routines, and graffiti on a bathroom wall represented like ASCII art. The game was a silly thing, programmed and play-tested on the weekends, but Benton's guy friends took a liking to it and encouraged him to publish it.

There's a gawkiness to Benton's lines and lines of textual description, from the "swinging singles disco" full of "guys and gals doin' the best steps in town," to the prostitute's bedroom, where "the bed's a mess and the hooker's about the same!" For all of Softporn's exhausting chauvinism and wearied sexism, the game is absent of actual obscenity, and earnest to a fault. Even Eve, the final girl sought by the player, is sketched in little more than boyish exuberance: "What a beautiful face!!! She's leaning back in the jacuzzi with her eyes closed and seems extremely relaxed. The water is bubbling up around her....A '10'!! She's so beautiful.............A guy really could fall in love with a girl like this."
Softporn Screenshot. Courtesy www.mobygames.com.



What is remarkable about Softporn isn't that it existed, but that it was commercially sold. Erotic content had circulated freely on mainframes and minicomputers for decades, whether in the form of dirty joke generators or ASCII print outs of the Playboy bunny head. Raunchy code on a mainframe was available to any curious, specialist user poking around in the file systems. It wasn't unlike a pin-up girl on the office wall: It could affirm the standard notions of what was and wasn't desirable among male co-workers, but wasn't necessarily intended to provoke sexual activity. In contrast, microcomputers had an unforeseen potential for privacy, individual use, and personal ownership of code. Eroticism in this context could be illicit and furtive. Softporn was the computational equivalent of a Penthouse stash.

  More at - http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-odd-history-of-the-first-erotic-computer-game/383114/?single_page=true

He built his own games, too!

In the late 1990s, my parents divorced, and my mother took my brother and myself and had us go live in a very rural area of Australia with a psychopath who was wanted in 3 states. This was our new stepfather, so we were to remain in isolation so that he wouldn't be found. This being said, we were not allowed to leave the house after school hours, nor use the internet, nor own mobile phones. Before leaving, my dad left me an Osborne 486, with a whoppping 640k of extended RAM if memory serves me correctly. This 486 had only a copy of MS Dos 6.0 on it, and the standard utilities (EDIT.com, QBASIC etc). It had a shareware copy of Rise of the Triad 1.0, and I believe, one or two other shareware titles, Xargon and Wacky Wheels. The last game I saw before leaving New South Wales in the 1990s was a Half-Life preview in a games magazine. I was not allowed to rent books that were not strictly relevant to school work and this made the 6 hours after school incredibly slow, so I set to work making my own games and entertainment on this 486. Thankfully I was able to convince my parents that I needed a copy of "BASIC BASIC" and "ADVANCED BASIC" by James S Coan from our school library, despite being dated to the 80s. With these, I built my first DOS Clone which emulated/mimicked dos in every way I could possibly achieve. Technically, it would function identically (you can move/change/rename/delete files and directories, list time, date, directory listings etc). Fairly basic stuff. I'll post the source codes to all of these shortly, just sorting them as I type this. Next I moved onto text-based adventure games: I wrote a horror game and some generic crappy adventures which totalled to around 40 000 lines (bearing in mind, that's by labelling each line as "100, 200, 300" etc, rather than going by single digits. My next experiment was to introduce graphics. Ideally I wanted graphics to accompany the parser. You would say "Walk NorthEast", and the screen would show a little display that of a first person view walking. I began work on my own "raycaster" of sorts. Below is a screenshot of an early version before I had working skies: Soon after, I was able to create very very primitive "detailed" scenes using various ASCII combinations. I created a DOOM clone to the best of my memory, as I hadn't seen or played doom for a few years at that point. It had relatively small maps consisting of 10 x 10 unit data grids which looked a bit like this (Each number represented a different wall tile or object. 0 meant nothing - floor and sky. The screen would be divided up into 8 x 8 chunks and project pre-written ASCII art that depicted walls at different angles. I did a wall at a 45 degree angle, a 22.5 degree angle, etc until I had 4 or so of each wall setup rotated at each angle, and then was able to make the player rotate in iterations of 22.5 degrees at a time (creating a very basic "3d" engine). (map grid example) DATA 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5 DATA 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2 DATA 4, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 2, 4, 0, 5 DATA 3, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 4, 2, 0, 2 DATA 4, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 5 DATA 3, 0, 1, 0,-1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2 DATA 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 6, 0, 6, 7 DATA 3, 0,10,12,10,12, 0, 0, 0, 7 DATA 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 7 DATA 8, 7, 8, 7, 8, 7, 8, 7, 8, 7 By this point, I wanted to up the ante. I had vaguely recalled one of my childhood friends at the school I had been going to before leaving for the country whom was into C++. He told me about John Carmacks wolf3d engine, and how it "cast" rays out until they hit a surface, and simply calculated the distance from the camera, then painted the image in vertical strips on the screen. I made a simple (albeit crappy and slow) raycaster over the next year and ended up with this. Instead of projecting pre-made ASCII art at various angles, it correctly cast rays and projected them onto the screen in vertical strips. I then wanted to take it a step further and make my own "game engine". (Silly me, thinking I might make something that could possibly sell? It would've been about 2004 by now). I developed my first general GUI and implemented the raycaster into it (only just noticed that I had the map being read back to front. The map on the right should be mirrored the opposite way)

  More at - http://imgur.com/gallery/hRf2trV

Not to be confused with the Amiga or Famicom games that were actually released.  Here's all Wikipedia has on this: 

  There was also an unreleased and apparently unfinished Super Famicom game based on Akira by THQ, as reported in the 1993 CES Preview provided to subscribers of Electronic Gaming Monthly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_%28video_game%29

Cancelled Akira game [SNES / Mega Drive / Genesis]

I just ran across this video, thought others might appreciate it as well. 

A 50-minute documentary about five games that defined their genres, and then were forgotten because they were superseded by more successful, more marketable, and more mainstream clones.

 

[align=center:3vg5g8s5]5 Genre-Defining Games Forgotten by History[/align:3vg5g8s5]

I thought it was worth making a thread about this, because when I was looking up the games D and D2 for another thread, I found out that Kenji Eno had passed away about a year ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenji_Eno#Death 

Eno died on February 20, 2013, due to heart failure brought on by hypertension. He was 42

  He was both a composer and a developer, and in particular supported Sega's Saturn and Dreamcast consoles with the groundbreaking games D, D2, and Enemy Zero.  His studio, Superwarp (earlier WARP), was also known for supporting the 3DO and producing some famous talent, who would eclipse him in success. 

  Eno formed WARP, Inc. with a small team of programmers and designers including animators Fumito Ueda[7] (Ico and Shadow of the Colossus), Takeshi Nozue (Final Fantasy VII Advent Children) and Ichiro Itano (Macross), all of whom later became famous under different employment.

So I was just curious, was anyone else here a huge fan of his?  If so, what were your favorite games, and what do you feel was revolutionary about them?  For me, the influence of D in particular isn't remembered enough, I'm not sure the survival horror genre would have developed the way it did without his work.

I was just thinking about this, and why Sunsoft don't get more love, specifically their fighting games.  Waku Waku 7, Galaxy Fight and in particular Astra Super Stars (probably my all time favorite fighter, either it or KoF 97').  Team SANTACLAUS especially were underrated, and I don't see them mentioned much anymore (granted, not making games will cause that).  Hardcore Gaming has a great retrospective on these:  http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/sunsoftfighters/sunsoftfighters.htm   I'd also throw out Journey to Silius and Gimmick as very underrated Sunsoft games on the NES, especially for their soundtracks.

So with that in mind, who are some of the defunct, or just downtrodden developers/studios that you feel are worth remembering?

*Honorable mention for Atlus here, the only reason I didn't pick them is that they seem to be on the radar recently.

Pretty nifty article over at Ars Technica, I really want to hit up this place someday. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/05/a-visual-tour-of-galloping-ghost-the-largest-arcade-in-the-usa/

If you live in the Chicago area and are a fan of classic arcade games, you really need to visit Galloping Ghost. The arcade is open from 1pm to 2am daily and offers unlimited gameplay for $15, a fact that would have blown my mind when I was 14 years old. Galloping Ghost boasts over 400 games, from classics like Galaga, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong to really obscure titles such as Super Zaxxon, Wild West Cowboys of Moo Mesa, and Blasteroids. Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson and I spent about four hours wandering around and revisiting childhood memories. The only old game I had been looking forward to playing that wasn't there was Moon Cresta.

 

I just thought I would bring this up, as this really bothers me.  IMHO, the best USB gamepad ever made for emulators is the Sega Saturn USB gamepad done by Sega's ST Labs circa 2004.  I bought one years ago, but it has worn out, and they now sell for $80+ on ebay!  There are some junky Play Sega branded controllers you can take board out of and put in a vintage Saturn controller, but you're either going to pay crazy money or break out a soldering iron to get one of these now.

So here's my question:  Why aren't Sega selling these?!  The ebay/Amazon prices show the demand is there, why not produce them?  Maybe Sega could try a Kickstarter, even?

Thought this was really cool, and glad to see some Skies of Arcadia merchandise coming out after all these years.  http://kotaku.com/the-hero-of-skies-of-arcadia-gets-the-statue-he-deserve-1569495350 

To start, I want to say I'm really glad I found this board.  I've tried a couple of other retro gaming boards in the past, but they tended to mostly consist of teenagers who are going back and playing these older games  now, not so much an older gamer type of crowd.  I was about to give up, and found this board, so I thought I'd ive it a shot.  Anyway, I'm mostly a hardcore Sega and classic Arcade fan (though I always picked up Nintendo consoles later, and foolishly bought a Jaguar  ); my first console was a 2600 hand me down, a Master System was the first I bought with my own money.  From that time on, I was mostly a console and arcade guy, never got into PC games too much outside of the Amiga.

My favorite genres are shmups, rpgs, 2d platformers and 2d fighters, but I will play just about anything.  My favorite console of all time would probably be the much maligned Saturn, given that it had the best arcade-like controller and IMHO 2d fighter and shmup library of any console.  The last time I participated online much was in the Usenet and early GameFAQs days, and part of why I'm getting back now is that I'm trying to collect for older systems I never had growing up (Turbografx 16/PC Engine being a great example), as well as the fact that most of my friends have moved on with work/family and just don't play much these days.  My favorite arcade games are probably the classic Atari and Konami cabinets, as well as SNK fighters and beat 'em ups (KOF being my favorite of those)