Categories

• Podcast

  Discuss the Fringe Games History Podcast

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  Have you talked to the man upstairs?

  Youtube Video

• Games

  Talk about games made by people, old or new

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  @michael Seems interesting! And at $4 there's no risk in trying it out. I'll pick it up sometime

• Communities

  Discuss communities where games are created and spread

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  all I remember about BYOND is space station 13 a complicated simulation game usually about sabotage shenanigans and clowns and the one time I played a doctor put my brain in a robot. The learning curve intimidated me.

• Organizations and People

  Discuss the people and companies that make fringe games happen

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  The NABU was a Z80-based PC designed and sold in Ottawa in the early 80s. Instead of storing software on tape or floppy disk, it connected to the cable TV network in Ottawa, which was continuously broadcasting all available NABU software in a continuous loop, and was continuously being updated with the day's news, recipes, etc, as well as a bunch of games. Many were ports, but there were a number of original titles as well that never appeared for any other platform. NABU hired a bunch of local programmers to write games for it, including a teenage Leo Binkowski, who saved everything he had access to when the company went under. Last year a bunch of these machines surfaced on eBay, curious retro computer enthusiasts snapped them up, and Leo worked with a quickly growing community to bring them back online with the original software. Today you can buy an inexpensive USB serial adapter, build or buy a simple cable with a standard DIN-5 connector, plug it into your PC or a Raspberry Pi running NABU "internet adapter" software, and the machine will come to life as though it's still 1983.

  Leo recently announced that he's rounded up a few more NABU alumni to do a livestream on December 16. Feels like it may be worth checking out.
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QoZTBNz47co

• Tools

  Discuss tools that put game creation into more hands

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  @spindleyq bless candle for making tools for the unskilled at html peasantry such as myself, I'm enjoying bipsi more than bitsy due to a few quality of life features not having to depend on plugins... Flickguy and tape window are also fun

• Casual

  A place to talk about whatever

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  Is there a canonical definition of what makes a game fringe for this forum's purposes

  My main focus has generally been digging into the stories around games that are outside the normal scope of a "games industry" history. Freeware, homebrew, and fangame stuff most obviously, but with enough vague wiggle room to dig into basically anything that doesn't get written about enough. (For example, I have a strong desire to really dig into the guts of how the shareware industry actually worked, despite, you know, Doom being among the most well-documented games of all time. But most shareware games weren't Doom!)

  Above all my interest is in the people whose stories get ignored, and the communities that supported them in their work. I wouldn't be interested in making a podcast episode that was a deep dive into the development history of UT2004, and the hype cycle surrounding it on release, but I'd definitely consider talking about the fan community that surrounds it now, keeping it alive long after the industry has moved on, well within the scope of my project.

  That said, that's just how I think of it. It's not like anyone else was using this forum for anything, so if you're excited to talk about a thing with the folks here, I'm sure not gonna stop you.