Who are you? (The self-introduction thread)
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Welcome @trouv!
With a list of influences like that, I definitely must recommend that you check out Glorious Trainwrecks, the community I started ten years ago that is home to a huge variety of experimental, personal, non-profit game creation. Stephen Lavelle and Anna Anthropy used to post games there regularly; I don't think Jason Roher ever did but there sure are a lot of Passage parodies.
This community is still pretty small and quiet and trying to figure itself out. My focus for the podcast is really on diving into older tools, games, and ways of thinking, but obviously it's important and interesting to talk about what's happening today as well, to connect that history and those ideas with what we can do now, and I think the community that's gathered here so far is at least as interested in figuring that out as digging into the past to see what's been left behind.
But enough rambling; welcome again, and I hope you dig the podcast :)
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@spindleyq Thanks! I took your recommendation and signed up at Glorious Trainwrecks, and submitted a game there.
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Oh hey @trouv, I'm Blueberry (or something like that) on the ALT G's Discord. The illustrator for Braid was from some forums kinda tangential to this place :) Dunno what he's doing now, but their comic A Lesson is Learned was something I liked a lot back then.
... I wonder if there's a Fringe Boardgames History Podcast
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I am a little mouse on the computer...i am easily scared... Dont scare me please.
My website
My glorious trainwrecks
My art blog
I guess I'm young compared to some people here...but still I have been on glorious trainwrecks for like 8 years 0__0I am the mouse. I'm trapped!
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I make little games, help organize game dev stuff in Michigan, and have a monthly adventure game discussion group called the Adventure Game Club. You can read all about them here:
https://virtualmoose.org/about/ -
Hi @mariken_muis and @Michael , it's nice to see people and mice posting here again.
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I'm Ryan, better known in some circles of the internet as Dirigitive. I was a obscure/alt games streamer for six years, but now I'm pivoting to recorded content over on https://www.youtube.com/@dirigitive, as well as curation and archiving.
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Hi, I'm Bogus! I am an excavator and explorer of games obscure and barely known! I have a massive love for digging deep into the history of often forgotten titles that are odd, unusual, but also very forward thinking.
Some of my main passions involve exploring long dead MMORPGs and the various stages those titles were in during their lifetime. I also have a deep rooted passion for FMV games, adventure games, fighting games and most important, communities that spring up around game titles/genres in general. Watching communities and how they effect the industry as a whole is a really fascinating aspect of video games that we rarely dive into.
Anywho! It's a pleasure to be here and I hope enthuse with all of you about everything here!
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Hello! I'm Funbil. I notice a lot of these posts are from within the last 24 hours – I reckon whatever ploy brought you all here must have worked on me as well, lol. I'm a musician who writes music for indie games and a hobbyist writer (for my own indie games), and I'm of course interested in quiet, weird, unloved games just like everyone else. My favorite games are usually JRPGs or shoot-em-ups, and my favorite year in video games is 1994 (with a couple noteworthy runners-up... Maybe we can talk about those another day).
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I don't know if there's a ploy other than I got waaaaaay too excited about posting about obscure indie games on a forum (for a temporarily inactive podcast I really like) instead of on Discord, which is starting to annoy me more each month.
But welcome! It's nice that other people like talking about indie games too
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@michael Your excitement was infectious, because if there's one format I love for raving about weird games, it's an internet forum!!!!
Hey, I'm Amy and I love old first person shooters the most and would, ironically, die for Clive Barker's Undying. I have a still-active occasional Unreal Tournament 2004 pickup game crew, for which I wrote an autoinstaller for the widescreen/FOV fix patch that normally requires a manual INI file edit, to save my friends time. (I haven't uploaded it anywhere but for them.) Does UT2004 count as fringe now that you can't buy it anymore? IDK.
I also enjoy a wide variety of other non first-person non shooter games, including recent Itch metroidvania Tres-bashers, the original gold box Pool of Radiance, Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh (that flesh really was puzzling), and I recently got Need for Speed Underground 2 working on win10 in widescreen with my xbone controller.
Is there a canonical definition of what makes a game fringe for this forum's purposes, or is it more impressionistic like "what does your heart tell you?" UT2004 and Need for Speed were big at the time, but it's been quite a time since. Time blows a bunch of sand that buries things, like a poignant shot in an old movie.
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Is there a canonical definition of what makes a game fringe for this forum's purposes
My main focus has generally been digging into the stories around games that are outside the normal scope of a "games industry" history. Freeware, homebrew, and fangame stuff most obviously, but with enough vague wiggle room to dig into basically anything that doesn't get written about enough. (For example, I have a strong desire to really dig into the guts of how the shareware industry actually worked, despite, you know, Doom being among the most well-documented games of all time. But most shareware games weren't Doom!)
Above all my interest is in the people whose stories get ignored, and the communities that supported them in their work. I wouldn't be interested in making a podcast episode that was a deep dive into the development history of UT2004, and the hype cycle surrounding it on release, but I'd definitely consider talking about the fan community that surrounds it now, keeping it alive long after the industry has moved on, well within the scope of my project.
That said, that's just how I think of it. It's not like anyone else was using this forum for anything, so if you're excited to talk about a thing with the folks here, I'm sure not gonna stop you.
