For the 20th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D, it got released for free in a browser!

So if you’ve ever wanted to play but had trouble easily getting it, well, it doesn’t get any easier than this!

Click here for free Wolfy!

YES!  Anachronox is back, it works on Windows 7 (build 1.02v), and it’s like six bucks!

It was made with a lot of love, so hope people can enjoy playing it again, or for the first time.

Get it!

I say some bits in it, check out the article on Gamasutra!

THE ARTICLE!

Hey, if ya ever run out of deodorant, I never mentioned that. Ya can, ya do, even in the nicest home. You get one pit done, y’know, and (moan, groan). Ya gotta go like that..(transfers from one pit to other manually). If you run out of deodorant, go into the kitchen and put a bay leaf under each arm. It doesn’t stop you from perspiring, but you smell like soup! Keeps your friends alert, y’know. “Hey, who’s wearing Chicken Vegetable?” “Not me, I have Bean With Bacon.”

–George Carlin

And that’s where the “Bean-with-Bacon” in the Megarocket’s name came from.

Wow, 21 years since Keen was released!  I loved making those games. The first games we made for a pure love of gaming.

One tidbit on this anniversary: the “swear word” in the one level of Keen was actually deliberately misspelled!  Just a dumb joke that people who found it would assume what it was, then be wrong at the last letter.  Sort of like the tiles drawn out of the Scrabble bag in Hitchhikers.   Always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.

Anyway, happy birthday, dude!

My wife Terri and I hung out with John Romero and Brenda Garno Brathwaite for lunch, quick visit in Mill Valley, and dinner. Fun time!

For the second pic, Terri said, “Make a funny face!” Apparently John heard her!

A fun day.

If you have seen the pic below, or read me on Twitter (@ThatTomHall), you know I love Minecraft.  I restarted a character to change my handle to ThatTomHall, so leveling up slowly….we restarted our server at 1.8, so building up again.

Here’s a lighthouse-ish tower I built with a glowstone beacon and netherrack fires on all side.  I need landmarks or I get horribly lost!

Swamp in the background turned all ugly in 1.0…. have to re-choose my Dokucraft choices to get less brown swamp!

Little tower to left is top of Enchant-O-Tron 5000.

“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something – chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.”

– Steve Jobs

Bye, Steve. Thanks for all the amazing, life changing innovation.

But Markus is brilliant and super nice, a great combo. I can’t wait for the Adventure Update (though I have qualms about hunger, and a bit about skill points….)  But it will be amazing nonetheless!  It’s instantly in my top 10 games of all time.

Anyway, here’s me, Notch, and Elin (his beautiful wife) at a GDC Party! (Photo by Hal Bergman)