It’s Boxing Day where I’m at. I hope anyone reading this had, or is having, a great holiday. See you next week.

This past week, I sold one story and received a request for edits on another. While that is pretty cool, I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk vaguely about editing.

Let’s talk about stealing. Stealing ideas. It’s what I do. If you write or code or make art or create anything, you probably steal too. I have written here several times about stealing game ideas from past games I have played. Writing is no different.

Best Games - Pitfall II : Lost Caverns 1984 was a weird year for video games in North America. Atari was the dominant player in the industry by an extremely wide margin, and they were absolutely failing. Arcades were still popular, but some of the shine was coming off. Games were changing, becoming more complex. The hobby wasn’t for everyone anymore. It was less accessible. Less inviting. Pong was a distant memory, and even Pac-Man had fallen out of fashion. Nintendo had already sold millions of Famicom consoles, and they hadn’t even released outside of Japan. Home computers had never been more popular. The industry was simultaneously dead, dying, or poised to become the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, depending on who you asked.

It won’t happen right away, but sometime soon, this blog will change. I’ve been undertaking the slow process of moving it to a new home for a while. It will look different, because, well, everything needs a change sometime. It will work in a slightly different way. If anyone is subscribed through rss I will try to make it seamless, or at least provide some forewarning before everything changes. There is one other change that will be the biggest one, at least for me. This blog may not post every Monday like it has in the past. Usually it will. I am moving from a web based hosting wysiwyg editor to a markdown based system. That in itself isn’t a big problem. I can deal with writing a few markdown tags. The problem might be that if I happen to not have a usable dev environment available on any given Monday, or I haven’t managed to schedule my post beforehand, they might not get posted up until I get back to my pc. I know that not many people read this blog. Most likely, no one will notice if a post goes up on a Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m not too worried about it. I think I like the idea that I will have more freedom with how I create posts. Sometimes I might have to be okay with them not getting posted at the same time every week. Regardless of when posts go up, I still plan on posting once a week until further notice. This post marks 526 weeks. That’s over 10 years. If I was going to quit writing, I would have done it a long time ago.

One of the benefits of having a massive library of classic arcade roms literally at my fingertips, is the art. Each of these games, thanks to all the people who preserve these sorts of things, has associated screenshots, flyers, cabinet art, and marques.

Best Games - Warlords Do you like pong? Yeah, that two player tennis type game that you play by twisting a knob. Do you like Breakout? Yeah, that single player pong type game where you systematically smash a wall using a paddle and ball.

I’ve got a few stories out for consideration at different outlets right now. They keep getting to the second or even third read stage before getting rejected. Most of the story review process is pretty opaque to writers submitting stories, and I think that is something that could definitely change with better metrics and tools, but the Submission Grinder gives you a pretty good idea of how far along in the review process a particular outlet is.

Best Games - Pang (or Pomping World or Buster Bros.) The early 80s were a time of wild experimentation for computer and arcade games. Game ideas would come from clever bits of code that someone managed to write in their bedroom more often than any sort of high level concept. If someone figured out how to create a smooth scrolling background, they turned that into a game. Figured out how to make it look like you are travelling down a road or tunnel by cycling colors or scaling sprites? That’s a game idea. You can make a block or character jump when you press a button? Gotta make a game out of it.

I had planned to write about a fun old game this week. Or maybe I would have called an audible and wrote something about writing or submitting or art or how inspiration can come from anywhere and it’s great to use your diverse interests to feed your art.

I finished the first draft of a new story. The first draft of anything is going to be lacking. It’s going to have typos, and missing words, and rough edges where the prose doesn’t flow. There are pacing issues and maybe even missing details, details that, were they there, would bring the story to life in the mind of the reader. I know this, and still I want it to be great right away. I want it to work the first time.

When I started writing this blog, it was a sort of dev diary. I didn’t post once a week and I titled, rather than numbered, each post. While I thought that no one would likely read what I wrote here, on the off chance that they might, I tried to make it a somewhat pleasant experience. Somewhere along the line, I decided to both switch to one post a week and stop worrying that people might read it. That’s why the posts are numbered rather than titled, and I sometimes repeat myself. Like right now. I have written a very similar thing in an earlier post, but I don’t think that anyone has read all of them, so I can probably slip it by without anyone catching on.

Best Games - Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo The time between the creation of Tetris and someone wanting to play Tetris competitively, in head-to-head fashion, is probably nanoseconds. At first, players would have been able to play against each other’s scores. Who got the most lines, or who could reach a certain score in the shortest amount of time, or who could beat Alexey at his own game. When you are working with soviet era computers, I’m sure you took what you could get.

Whenever I start a new story, I open two documents. The first one is the story I’m trying to write, and the second is all the bits that I want to keep, but cut from the story for one reason or another. I usually call this document “cut bits” because I am extremely inventive like that.

Best Games - Lode Runner The first version of Lode Runner I ever played was on the Atari 800. Then I played it on a Commodore 64. And then on an Apple II. And then on a PC. I just played the Arcade version on a Steam Deck. And then again in a browser.