Epic's Sweeney On the PC Shareware Revolution 111
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.'"
Re:Epic Rocks (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Page 1: Find the programming language in Window (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ZZT (and other games!) (Score:3, Informative)
ZZT was a great intro not only to game design and programming, but also hex editing! You could find the byte which disabled level editing, by comparing your levels to the ones that came with the game. (And of course, being teenagers, we then made obscene parodies of every edit-protected level we could find. Ah, memories.)
Re:ZZT (and other games!) (Score:1, Informative)
Do you remember ZZT STK? It was a world with nothing but boards of new things (walls, blinkers, objects, etc) in it. Most of the boards were just new coloured things (introducing background colours and some blended colours!), but there were some cool custom objects on the end there. It's a shame SuperZZT flopped, because I think that included a lot of that stuff out-of-the-box. I also remember coding super-ammo/super-health, either by making a custom object (which wasn't good, because they didn't dissapear as they should have) or by using torches and an object to count your torches (but you lost out the ability to use torches). Good times.
Re:Page 1: Find the programming language in Window (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf [microsoft.com]
There's a separate download for x64, but express won't usually target that.
Re:Page 1: Find the programming language in Window (Score:3, Informative)
Or, if you're doing games on Windows, you might want Microsoft's XNA [microsoft.com] instead, a game development environment, with the advantage that if you pay a little bit of money, you can play them on your Xbox360. It's effectively a sanctioned way to do homebrew on the 360.
Single page article link (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Page 1: Find the programming language in Window (Score:3, Informative)
You wouldn't happen to have a link to instructions for taking a pre-existing cross platform code base and getting the current version of Visual C++ Express to produce a binary that actually works, would you?
Find your c++ settings and change the runtime library option to be something without DLL's. That way the C++ runtime gets linked into the application.
Re:ZZT (and other games!) (Score:2, Informative)
They are *not* closing down the page (I know this for a fact, as I am the current site owner). This is just part of a running joke that ZZT is dying.