The Sandbox

Old school text-gamers take note.

BoingBoing hips us to a hacker who has update Infocom's classic game based on the Douglas Adams' novel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Now it runs as an instant message game that you can play on your cellphone. How cool is that?

Want more? The other day, I was checking out an emulator of the first Multi-User Dungeon - another early text-based game.

...does anyone really want to buy a PSP because it has a Darth Vader stenciled on the back? I mean, what am I missing here? There's a picture, that you could probably find as a sticker, of a character whose evil badass nature has been forever ruined by the fact that he apparently killed, not children, but "younglings", in an utterly insipid movie. Otherwise, it's a PSP. If you don't have one, you're not missing a ton: get a DS instead.

As I wrote in my book Masters of Doom, id Software's lead programmer and co-founder John Carmack grew up making games on his own. These days, of course, it takes teams of people and millions of dollars to churn out most mainstream titles. That's why mobile games have such an inherent appeal to people like Carmack. These are cool little things you can effectively go out and code on your own.

After getting his mobile game in with his game Orcs & Elves, Carmack is now joining the conversation about iPhone games and, more interestingly, iTunes as a potential for game distribution. "The iTunes distribution channel is really a more important aspect than a lot of people understand," he wrote recently on Slashdot, "The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market."

The Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote is happening right now, and if you care, you're likely looking at this page, or, heaven forbid, this page. But in case you're not, and you're here, and you care, Steve has been touting the gaming functions of iPhone 2.0, and some of the games that will be available through the iTunes Store, presumably once the keynote ends. Sega with Super Monkey Ball, Pangea with Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally, and a few others. Some Guitar Hero clone.

I'm psyched about the live mlb.com app, for game updates. Because I will be, you know, obsessed with that. I will be out to dinner with my wife, and she will brain me with my iPhone after I check it for the umpty-seventh time.

Neil Young - no not that Neil Young, but the game developer of the same name - has always been an interesting geek to watch. Back in the 2001, he developed Majestic - a mind-blowing but ill-fated title that unfolded in phone messages and faxes (and, oh yeah, computer game stuff too). Majestic pioneered what's now known as "alternate reality games."

Young went on to head up Electronic Arts' LA studio, which sought to bridge the game/Hollywood talent. EALA produced, among other things, the upcoming titles from Steven Spielberg. Now word comes that Young has left EALA to lead ng:moco - a new publisher devoted to mobile games, particularly for the iPhone. Hopefully, he'll bring back a new version of Majestic or, rather, iMaj.

So my hand is sort of cramped up from playing Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS, and it just got me thinking about the world of input devices, and how this is really a new golden age of interesting ways of interacting with games.