CNN looks back to when "dial-up internet (and its iconic dial tone) was 'still a thing..." "File-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire were just beginning to take off... And in sweaty dorm rooms and sparse basements across the world, people brought their desktop monitors together to set up a local area network (LAN) and play multiplayer games — "Half-Life," "Counter-Strike," "Starsiege: Tribes," "StarCraft," "WarCraft" or "Unreal Tournament," to name just a few. These were informal but high-stakes gatherings, then known as LAN parties, whether winning a box of energy drinks or just the joy of emerging victorious. The parties could last several days and nights, with gamers crowded together among heavy computers and fast food boxes, crashing underneath their desks in sleeping bags and taking breaks to pull pranks on each other or watch movies...

It's this nostalgia that prompted writer and podcaster Merritt K to document the era's gaming culture in her new photobook "LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution." After floating the idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, she received an immediate — and visceral — response from old-school gamers all too keen to share memories and photos from LAN parties and gaming conventions across the world... It's strange to remember that the internet was once a place you went to spend time with other real people; a tethered space, not a cling-film-like reality enveloping the corporeal world from your own pocket....

Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent... "It felt like, 'Wow, the future is coming,'" K said. "It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was a very, very different experience...."

"We've kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology," K said. "We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There's less of a sense of exploration because there just isn't as much out there."
One photo shows a stack of Mountain Dew cans (remembering that by 2007 the company had even released a line of soda called "Game Fuel"). "It was a little more communal," the book's author told CNN. "If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."

They adds that that feeling of connecting to people in other places "was cool. It wasn't something that was taken for granted yet."

Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and others spoke at the Game Developers Conference about Tetris Reversed, reports VentureBeat — and told the story of "a lost prototype of a Tetris game that was never published." But little did Pajitnov know that an engineer in charge of the game, Vedran Klanac, had kept a copy of it. Through the help of intermediaries, he showed it to Pajitnov and the two shared their memories of what happened to the lost game...

Pajitnov has lived in the U.S. since 1991, where he has been involved in the development of games such as Pandora's Box and worked with companies such as Microsoft and WildSnake Software... Klanac is the CEO of Ocean Media, and he is originally from Zagreb, Croatia. He was an aerospace engineer who started his career in the games industry with Croteam where he built the physics engine for Serious Sam 2.

Since 2006, he has been running Ocean Media, a game publishing company with a focus on consoles. During the last 20 years, he was involved in production as a programmer and executive producer in more than 200 projects. And it turns out he was the programmer who created the Tetris Reversed code based on instructions from Pajitnov, who had passed them on through a middleman. In 2011, programmer Vedran Klanac went to the NLGD Festival of Games in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He listened to a talk on a charitable effort from Martin de Ronde, a cofounder of game studio Guerrilla Games. Klanac said in an interview with GamesBeat that he listened to De Ronde's talk and offered to help. De Ronde came back months later saying he had an agreement with Pajitnov about creating a new prototype for a Tetris game.

De Ronde asked if Klanac if he wanted to make Tetris Reversed by Pajitnov.

"Are you kidding me?" Klanac reacted.
The idea is still to survive as long as you can, according to the article — but the entire playfield was accessible. "For the first time in public, they showed the video of the prototype in action," according to the article, which also records Pajitnov reaction. "When you see the gameplay video, and when you look at the design elements. This is Tetris for like 300 IQ people."

No word on yet on whether the game will ever be officially published.

Switch emulator Suyu -- a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu -- has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project's open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo. From a report: While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab's public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice "from a representative of the rightsholder."

During its State of Unreal presentation at GDC 2024 today, Epic Games confirmed its plans to bring the Epic Games Store to iOS and Android before the end of the year. The company also shared more details about its app marketplace for iOS in the European Union. As reported by 9to5Mac, Epic Games said it will take a 12% commission from sales. From the report: Epic says the terms for developers will be the same via the Epic Games Store on mobile as they are on the Epic Games Store on PC. As such, the company will take a 12% commission on all sales through the Epic Games Store. The revenue share is 100% for the developer during the first six months on the Epic Games Store. The Epic Games Store will feature Epic's own content, including Fortnite, alongside a selection of third-party partners. The company says it will share additional details in the lead-up to the launch later this year.

NVIDIA has been working on adding generative AI to non-playable characters (NPCs) for a while now. The company is hoping a newly-announced partnership with Ubisoft will accelerate development of this technology and, ultimately, bring these AI-driven NPCs to modern games. From a report: Ubisoft helped build new "NEO NPCs" by using NVIDIA's Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology, with an assist from dynamic NPC experts Inworld AI. The end result? Characters that don't repeat the same phrase over and over, while ignoring the surrounding violent mayhem. These NEO NPCs are said to interact in real time with players, the environment and other in-game characters. NVIDIA says this opens up "new possibilities for emergent storytelling." To that end, Ubisoft's narrative team built complete backgrounds, knowledge bases and conversational styles for two NPCs as a proof of concept.

According to Bloomberg, Sony has paused production of its PlayStation VR 2 virtual reality headset, as sales have "slowed progressively" since its February 2023 launch. Road to VR reports: Citing people familiar with the company's plans, Sony has produced "well over 2 million units" since launch, noting that stocks of the $550 headset are building up. The report alleges the surplus is "throughout Sony's supply chain," indicating the issue isn't confined to a single location, but is spread across different stages of Sony's production and distribution network. This follows news that Sony Interactive Entertainment laid off eight percent of the company, which affected a number of its first-party game studios also involved in VR game production. Sony entirely shuttered its London Studio, which created VR action-adventure game Blood & Truth (2019), and reduced headcount at Firesprite, the studio behind PSVR 2 exclusive Horizon Call of the Mountain.

Meanwhile, Sony is making PSVR 2 officially compatible with PC VR games, as the company hopes to release some sort of PC support for the headset later this year. How and when Sony will do that is still unknown, although the move underlines just how little confidence the company has in its future lineup of exclusive content just one year after launch of PSVR 2.

Soon you might be able to compete in games against friends and colleagues and even the office next door on LinkedIn. From a report: The Microsoft-owned company is reportedly planning to add a new game experience to the platform. According to TechCrunch, the experience is designed to tap into the same popularity of games like Wordle. Players' scores will be sorted by their workplace and ranked, allowing you to take on another office or even across the country. App researcher Nima Owji posted photos of the gaming experience on Twitter/X on Saturday. A representative from LinkedIn confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is working on adding puzzle-based games to the LinkedIn experience as a way to "unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When Nintendo sued the developers of Yuzu out of existence on March 4th, it wasn't just an attack on the leading way to play Nintendo Switch games without a Switch. It was a warning to anyone building a video game emulator. Seven developers have now stepped away from projects, are shutting them down, or have left the emulation scene entirely. Of those that remain, many are circling the wagons, getting quieter and more careful, trying not to paint targets on their backs. Four developers declined to talk to The Verge, telling me they didn't want to draw attention. One even tried to delete answers to my questions after we'd begun, suddenly scared of attracting press.

Not everyone is so afraid. Four other emulator teams tell me they're optimistic Nintendo won't challenge them, that they're on strong legal footing, and that Yuzu may have been an unusually incriminating case. One decade-long veteran tells me everyone's just a bit more worried. But when I point out that Nintendo didn't have to prove a thing in court, they all admit they don't have money for lawyers. They say they'd probably be forced to roll over, like Yuzu, if the Japanese gaming giant came knocking. "I would do what I'd have to do," the most confident of the four tells me. "I would want to fight it... but at the same time, I know we exist because we don't antagonize Nintendo."

There's a new meme where Yuzu is the mythical Hydra: cut off one head, and two more take its place. It's partly true in how multiple forks of Yuzu (and 3DS emulator Citra) sprung up shortly after their predecessors died: Suyu, Sudachi, Lemonade, and Lime are a few of the public names. But they're not giving Nintendo the middle finger: they're treating Nintendo's lawsuit like a guidebook about how not to piss off the company. In its legal complaint, Nintendo claimed Yuzu was "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale," giving users "detailed instructions" on how to "get it running with unlawful copies of Nintendo Switch games," among other things. Okay, no more guides, say the Switch emulator developers who spoke to me. They also say they're stripping out some parts of Yuzu that made it easier to play pirated games. As Ars Technica reported, a forked version called Suyu will require you to bring the firmware, title.keys, and prod.keys from your Switch before you can decrypt and play Nintendo games. Only one of those was technically required before. (Never mind that most people don't have an easily hackable first-gen Switch and would likely download these things off the net.) The developer of another fork tells me he plans to do something similar, making users "fend for yourself" by making sure the code doesn't auto-generate any keys.

Most developers I spoke to are also trying to make it clear they aren't profiting at Nintendo's expense. One who initially locked early access builds behind a donation page has stopped doing that, making them publicly available on GitHub instead. The leader of another project tells me nothing will ever be paywalled, and for now, there's "strictly no donation," either. When I ask about the Dolphin Emulator, which faced a minor challenge from Nintendo last year, I'm told it publicly exposes its tiny nonprofit budget for anyone to scrutinize. But I don't know that these steps are enough to prevent Nintendo from throwing around its weight again, particularly when it comes to emulating the Nintendo Switch, its primary moneymaker. Since Yuzu's shut down, a slew of other emulators left the scene. The include (as highlighted by The Verge):

- The Citra emulator for Nintendo 3DS is gone
- The Pizza Boy emulators for Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color are gone
- The Drastic emulator for Nintendo DS is free for now and will be removed
- The lead developer of Yuzu and Citra has stepped away from emulation
- The lead developer of Strato, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from emulation
- Dynarmic, used to speed up various emulators including Yuzu, has abruptly ended development
- One contributor on Ryujinx, a Switch emulator, has stepped away from the project
- AetherSX2, a PS2 emulator, is finally gone (mostly unrelated; development was suspended a year ago)

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Discord will soon allow developers to build new games and apps that can be used directly in its chat app. A selection of minigames and apps have been available to Discord users for months now, but starting March 18th, all Discord developers will get access to a new Embedded App SDK that lets them build these special embedded apps. Discord has used its Activities feature to enable apps like YouTube, promote minigames like poker, and even encourage users to play with a shared whiteboard experience. These apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, but they've been limited to select developers so far.

The SDK will open up this Activities section of Discord to many more developers, so we're bound to see a lot more minigames that can be played directly inside Discord chats. [...] Discord is also experimenting with a way to allow users to add apps to their accounts so they roam across servers. Developers will be able to enable their apps for accounts, and the experiment will launch alongside the app SDK on March 18th. Discord is also bringing back its app pitches, where developers can pitch prototype app ideas and secure up to $30,000 in funding.

In 1995 Scottish video game designer Chris Sawyer created the business simulator game Transport Tycoon Deluxe — and within four years, Wikipedia notes, work began on the first version of an open source version that's still being actively developed. "According to a study of the 61,154 open-source projects on SourceForge in the period between 1999 and 2005, OpenTTD ranked as the 8th most active open-source project to receive patches and contributions. In 2004, development moved to their own server."

Long-time Slashdot reader orudge says he's been involved for almost 25 years. "Exactly 21 years ago, I received an ICQ message (look it up, kids) out of the blue from a guy named Ludvig Strigeus (nicknamed Ludde)." "Hello, you probably don't know me, but I've been working on a project to clone Transport Tycoon Deluxe for a while," he said, more or less... Ludde made more progress with the project [written in C] over the coming year, and it looks like we even attempted some multiplayer games (not too reliable, especially over my dial-up connection at the time). Eventually, when he was happy with what he had created, he agreed to allow me to release the game as open source. Coincidentally, this happened exactly a year after I'd first spoken to him, on the 6th March 2004...

Things really got going after this, and a community started to form with enthusiastic developers fixing bugs, adding in new features, and smoothing off the rough edges. Ludde was, I think, a bit taken aback by how popular it proved, and even rejoined the development effort for a while. A read through the old changelogs reveals just how many features were added over a very short period of time. Quick wins like higher vehicle limits came in very quickly, and support for TTDPatch's NewGRF format started to be functional just four months later. Large maps, improved multiplayer, better pathfinders, improved TTDPatch compatibility, and of course, ports to a great many different operating systems, such as Mac OS X, BeOS, MorphOS and OS/2. It was a very exciting time to be a TTD fan!

Within six years, ambitious projects to create free replacements for the original TTD graphics, sounds and music sets were complete, and OpenTTD finally had its 1.0 release. And while we may not have the same frantic addition of new features we had in 2004, there have still been massive improvements to the code, with plenty of exciting new features over the years, with major releases every year since 2008. he move to GitHub in 2018 and the release of OpenTTD on Steam in 2021 have also re-energised development efforts, with thousands of people now enjoying playing the game regularly. And development shows no signs of slowing down, with the upcoming OpenTTD 14.0 release including over 40 new features!
"Personally, I would like to say thank you to everyone who has supported OpenTTD development over the past two decades..." they write, adding "Finally, of course, I'd like to thank you, the players! None of us would be here if people weren't still playing the game.

"Seeing how the first twenty years have gone, I can't wait to see what the next twenty years have in store. :)"

Michael McWhertor reports via Polygon: Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start "retiring" games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim unclear. The media conglomerate's planned removal of those games echoes cuts from its film and television business; Warner Bros. Discovery infamously scrapped plans to release nearly complete movies Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, and removed multiple series from its streaming services. If Warner Bros. does go through with plans to delist Adult Swim's games from Steam and digital console stores, 18 or more games could be affected.

News of the Warner Bros. plan to potentially pull Adult Swim's games from Steam and the PlayStation Store was first reported by developer Owen Reedy, who released puzzle-adventure game Small Radios Big Televisions through the label in 2016. Reedy said on X Tuesday the game was being "retired" by Adult Swim Games' owner. He responded to the company's decision by making the Windows PC version of Small Radios Big Televisions available to download for free from his studio's website. Polygon reached out to other developers who had worked with Adult Swim Games as a publisher. Two studios responded to say that they'd received a similar warning from Warner Bros. Discovery, but they are still in the dark about what it means for their games. [...]

Polygon reached out to 10 studios and solo developers who had their games published by Adult Swim Games to see what they've heard. Some say they haven't been contacted by WB Discovery, but they expect to. "From what I've heard from others, I will probably be hearing from them soon," developer Andrew Morrish, who published Kingsway and Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe through Adult Swim, told Polygon. "It's not looking good." Molinari said that if and when his game Soundodger+ is pulled from Steam, he'll republish it there "with as little downtime as possible between the two versions." The game is also available from Molinari's itch page.

As reported by 404 Media, the New York Times has issued hundreds of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones "in which it asserts not just ownership over the Wordle name but over the broad concepts and mechanics of the word game, which includes its '5x6 grid' and 'green tiles to indicate correct guesses.'" From the report: The Times filed at least three DMCA takedown requests with coders who have made clones of Wordle on GitHub. These include two in January and, crucially, a new DMCA filed this week against Chase Wackerfuss, the coder of a repository called âoeReactle,â which cloned Wordle in React JS (JavaScript). The most recent takedown request is critical because it not only goes after Reactle but anyone who has forked Reactle to create a different spinoff game; an archive of the Reactle code repository shows that it was forked 1,900 times to create a diverse set of games and spinoffs. These include Wordle clones in dozens of languages, crossword versions of Wordle, emoji and bird versions of world, poker and AI spinoffs, etc.

"I write to submit a revised DMCA Notice regarding an infringing repository (and hundreds of forked repositories) hosted by Github that instruct users how to infringe The New York Times Co.'s ('The Times') copyright in its immensely popular Wordle game and create knock-off copies of the same. Unfortunately, hundreds of individuals have followed these instructions and published infringing Wordle knock-off games that The Times has spent the past month removing, including off of Github's websites," the DMCA takedown request against Reactle reads. "The Times's Wordle copyright includes the unique elements of its immensely popular game, such as the 5x6 grid, green tiles to indicate correct guesses, yellow tiles to indicate the correct letter but the wrong place within the word, and the keyboard directly beneath the grid. This gameplay is copied exactly in the repository, and the owner instructs others how to knock off the game and create an identical word game," it adds.

The DMCA request then says that GitHub must delete forks of the repository, which it writes were "infringing to the same extent as the parent repository" and which it says were made in what was "clearly bad faith." [...] The DMCA takedown requests are particularly notable because they come at a time when the New York Times is financially thriving, while many of its competitors are losing money, laying people off, and shutting down. The Times is thriving in part because Wordle, the crossword puzzle, and its recipe apps are juggernauts. The company has been aggressively expanding its "Games" business with Wordle, Connections, and a brand new word search game called Strands. The New York Times issued a statement in response: "The Times has no issue with individuals creating similar word games that do not infringe The Times's 'Wordle' trademarks or copyrighted gameplay. The Times took action against a GitHub user and others who shared his code to defend its intellectual property rights in Wordle. The user created a 'Wordle clone' project that instructed others how to create a knock-off version of The Times's Wordle game featuring many of the same copyrighted elements. As a result, hundreds of websites began popping up with knock-off 'Wordle' games that used The Times's 'Wordle' trademark and copyrighted gameplay without authorization or permission."

EA CEO Andrew Wilson believes generative AI will "revolutionize" the gaming industry over the next five years. He predicts that the technology will allow for more efficient content creation, reducing development time from months to days. From a report: Greater efficiency coupled with "deeper, more immersive experiences" will lead to significant audience expansion over the next few years and provide a "multi-billion dollar" growth opportunity, he said. Wilson said that in the past it might take six months to build an in-game sports stadium. Over the last 12 months, that time has shrunk to six weeks, and over the coming years it could maybe be cut to six days.

And while FIFA 23 has 12 run cycles for how the players move in the game, EA Sports FC 24 has 1,200 created with generative AI. Over the next five years, Wilson hopes that generative AI will make EA's development 30% more efficient, help grow its 700 million-strong player base by "at least" 50%, and lead to players spending 10-20% more money on its games. "What we've seen every time there's been a meaningful technological advancement in media and in technology, where you are able to democratise an industry and hand it over to the population at large, incredible things happen," he said.

During a recent Morgan Stanley conference, Warner Bros. Discovery gaming boss J.B. Perrette discussed some of the company's strategy for gaming going forward, and it includes more live-service, mobile, and free-to-play games. From a report: He said, "We're doubling down on games as an area where we think there is a lot more growth opportunity that we can tap into with the IP that we have and some of the capabilities we have on the studio where we're uniquely positioned as both a publisher and a developer of games."

Perrette said WBD's recent gaming output has focused on AAA games for console, and that's great when a game like Hogwarts Legacy sells 22 million copies and becomes the best-selling game of the year, but this kind of success is never guaranteed in what Perrette said was a "volatile" market. He pointed out that one of WBD's latest big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company.

So the plan going forward, he said, is to help reduce volatility by focusing on core franchises and bringing at least some of them to the mobile and free-to-play space, as well as continuing to invest in live-service games that people play--and spend money on--over a long period of time. This will help WBD generate more consistent revenue, he said, going on to tease that WBD had some new mobile free-to-play games coming this year. Also worth noting is that just because WBD may push into new places, that doesn't necessarily mean it will stop making big single-player AAA games.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: Yuzu is a free and open source emulator that makes it possible to run Nintendo Switch games on Windows, Linux, and Android devices. First released in 2018, the software has been under constant development since then (the Android port was released less than a year ago). But last week Nintendo sued the developers, claiming that the primary purpose of the software is to circumvent Nintendo Switch encryption and allow users to play pirated games. Rather than fight the case in court, Tropic Haze (the developers behind Yuzu) have agreed to a settlement which involves paying $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo and basically shutting down Yuzu.

As part of a permanent injunction, Tropic Haze has agreed to stop distributing, advertising, or promoting Yuzu or any of its source code or features or any other "software or devices that circumvent Nintendo's technical protection measures." The court is also ordering the developers to turn over the yuzu-emu.org website to Nintendo and bars them "from supporting or facilitating access" to any other related websites, social media, chatrooms, or apps. In one of the more bizarre parts of the court order, the Yuzu team is told to delete all "circumvention devices," which includes any tools used for development of Yuzu and "all copies of Yuzu."