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.'"

Poor dad

[Anonymous Coward]

He's going to get thousands now it's on /.

Slashdotted?

[dcollins]

"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?

Page 1: Find the programming language in Windows

[tepples]

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.

Re:Slashdotted?

[DavidTC]

Slashdotted with money.

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

does he get orders every week or does he have a huge backlog to hold him over:

"...he still gets an order every few weeks... Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders..."

Easy. He sends out the orders he gets, and in weeks that he doesn't get an order, he sends out orders that he doesn't get.